Freak snow storm

Friday the 13th lives up to its reputation for the poor folks in Buffalo, New York. Two feet of snow fell last night and this morning, knocking out power for a hundred thousand plus residents and closing the NYS thruway. School kids were probably ecstatic. That’s ridiculously early. If this is the beginning of winter for them, I feel realllly sorry. It’s going to be a long haul between now and April. I lived in Rochester (a couple of hours east of Buffalo) and Syracuse (even further east) for a number of years and both were also prone to Lake Effect snow that just never seemed to stop falling once it started. The last winter I spent there, we had 181 inches of snow. Typically, our first snow flurries arrived around the first of November, but real snowstorms rarely hit before Thanksgiving. And that made winter seem more than long enough. Wow. My sympathies, indeed.

As for us, here on the coast, no snow in our forecast, but it’s gonna be cold tonight—down in the mid-to-lower 30s. I wish my neighbors would remove their air conditioning units from their windows. I’m ready to fire up the wood stove, but I don’t want to smoke the neighbors out. On the other hand, if I fired it up, they’d probably take their air conditioning units out tomorrow. Decisions, decisions.