A forecaster thought two to five inches may fall overnight. We awoke the next morning victims of this. They say it’s an inexact science, meteorology. Sure, but over 2X off? If I were feeling generous I’d acknowledge this was an outlier event; this much snow paired with below freezing temperatures supposedly is super rare here. To the contrary, my spirit was bereft of any generosity whatsoever, I was cussin’ the weatherperson with every shovelful.
That was last week. Today it’s near 50ยบ and most of the snow has melted. It feels like a forecaster’s apology.
Friends drove up yesterday to watch the Packer game with us. I smoked pork spareribs on the Traeger. HW made a green salad to go with it. If not for that ill-fated pass by Love late in the game, they might’ve won or at least tied the score. A missed field goal and near pick six earlier in the game didn’t help. But overall, a pretty impressive showing by a surprisingly talented team of newbies who played otherwise mostly mistake-free football to damn near beat the #1 seed (on their home turf) to advance to the conference title game. Not to mention the Packer’s astounding blowout of a veteran Cowboys team a week earlier in Dallas. Nobody, including me, saw that coming. The ribs were good, too.
Later this month we’re meeting up with friends in Portland, friends from Alaska who recently moved to Boise. They scored the tickets for the sporting event and I took care of the Airbnb. Out of necessity we bought a new car recently, so we’re both looking forward to the drive. See our driveway in the photo? It’s pretty steep. Around late September last year one of our cars was “parked” at the top, but not in park when it was turned off. Eventually, the gravitational attraction between it and a 75′ cedar tree in the neighbor’s front yard across the street proved too much to resist. Down the driveway the object rolled, gaining speed all the way until it slammed into its gravitational partner. I had to saw off the bent and twisted catalytic converter just to render the vehicle drive-able again. Even so, there was an impressive amount of damage. So much that State Farm eventually ruled it a total loss and sent us an eye-popping check for the remaining value. When they say Like a Good Neighbor, you can believe ’em.