Category Archives: blizzard

blizzard, cold, weather

The Week From Hell

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Last week was one of those weeks I’m really happy only rarely occur. A week ago Thursday we got our first real snow of the season – with blizzard and white out conditions. Of course, that also happened to be the day I started to come down with the creeping crud that is circulating here abouts. It turned out to be a dud of a blizzard, mainly wind and cold with only a half foot of snow.

Friday more than made up for the dud blizzard of Thursday with more snow and wind and real blizzard conditions. The temperature stayed in the single digits, the wind blew at 35 mph with gusts to 50 mph and the snow dropped out of the sky with a vengeance. When it finally stopped snowing around 3pm on New Years Eve, the wind continued to howl at 40 mph and wind chills were in the -25 to -35 range. The snow was drifting into drifts as deep as 7 feet in places.

(Photo swiped from Google – not one of mine.)

Remember that crud I mentioned? It came on strong and my nose would not quit running. I was supposed to go to a New Years Eve dinner, but I had to call and beg off. I was in bed and trying to sleep by 6pm that night. New Years day I got my snow shoveled and the MIL’s snow shoveled (it was challenging to travel the 5 blocks or so to her house just to shovel) and then crawled back into bed. By now my throat was raw and I was hacking along my merry way.

On Sunday, my throat was so raw I couldn’t swallow, my ears ached, my nose and lips were cracked and bleeding – I felt and looked just wonderful. Couple that with the fact that the infection was throwing my diabetes control off and causing my blood sugar to spike and drop in spite of the insulin, etc. and it was beginning to look like it might be time to visit the emergency room. Fortunately, I finally started to stabilize by evening.

On Monday I still felt like crap, but no worse. Of course it was then that my voice completely disappeared. I slowly got better over then next few days and actually began to feel human by Thursday – just couldn’t talk and had no energy. Today I am pretty close to recovered modulo tiredness and an episodic hacking cough. I could do without another week like the last one. Ever!

Here’s hoping your week was much better.

blizzard, representative, senator, weather

Monday Politics Redux

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I just got back from supper with Representative Markey. She was doing her meet and greet sweep of the area while Congress was out of session and invited local officials to join her for supper. So the county commissioners, representatives of the city council, the city manager and myself sat down to talk and eat with Ms. Markey and some of her staff. She is a real change from her predecessor and seems to be on the right track. Time will tell.

The most amusing part of the evening was at the end when it came time to pay the tab. The poor waitress had to give separate tabs to each of us. It is one of those written and unwritten rules that elected officials cannot pay for another elected officials meal at such events. The rule is another one of those odd rules that have a point in preventing some old time abuses and accusations of influence buying and selling, but which make less sense in practice than might be expected. It took longer than one might have expected to handle paying all the tabs once the dinner was over just for that reason. What is amusing is that every stake holder at the table would have been willing to foot the bill just for the crucial conversations and contacts at the meal. The city and the county since it gave us a chance to lobby for our needs versus the metropolitan areas of the front range, the Markey organization since she sits on the Agriculture committee and needs the input from the area farms, and the the city to lobby for help with the EPA and water treatment issues that Congress could be of immense help on.

On the senatorial side, our new Senator Bennett has already made one stop out here a few weeks ago. He started off on a good foot by retaining former Sen. Salazar’s staff in the area. The area out here really misses Ken Salazaar. He understood agriculture and farming and was involved in the issues of the plains at a grass roots level. When he moved on to Secretary of the Interior for Obama, it left a real gap. Mr Bennett was a highly capable administrator in the Denver Public Schools, but the jury is still out on his effectiveness at representing rural issues with the efficiacy that Ken Salazaar exhibited. So once again we will have to see what the fullness of time unfolds.

(An aside on the effectiveness of Salazar and his staff. After spending months getting the run around from the EPA about the granite decay products in the water here, I briefly spoke to Ken at a meeting on a different subject. The next day I had calls and emails from his staff. Within three days I had the missing answers from the EPA. That is why having effective representatives and senators for an area is critical. It is one of the aspects of the office that many people overlook or just plain don’t understand.)

Enough politcal hot air!

The weekend blizzard is now mostly a thing of the past. It warmed up today and the snows began to melt fast. The weather people are forecasting highs near 70 tomorrow, so most of the rest should melt in short order. The interstate and other highways finally re-opened on Sunday, so L could return to the mountains for work. The Denver Sunday paper got delivered this afternoon since they couldn’t get the paper out here over the closed roads on Saturday/Sunday.. The parts of town without electrical power on Saturday were all back up and running by late Saturday night or early Sunday morning. Sunday was also the day that the county started sending crews out to clear the rural roads. Reports were that there were 9-12 foot high drifts in places that made road clearing a bit of challenge. Overall we only got about 8″ of snow, but with the winds scouring the open fields, it wasn’t deposited uniformly. Some fields were left bare of snow to contribute to the drifts where the wind eddied.

Well, I’m off to read the Sunday paper. Gotta get that funnies fix! (BTW, I have been reading your blogs, I just haven’t had time to comment. Hopefully that will get better soon.)

blizzard, weather

Late Friday

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L and I went over to the house of some friends for an evening of good food and conversation, so I am a bit late with this. Oh well. It was totally worth it to participate in the spur of the moment gathering. We don’t get a chance to see these friends that often, so when we do it is an opportunity to be enjoyed.

This afternoon/evening L and I went to the store and it was amazing to see all the people scurrying about in the 65 degree weather getting ready to batten down the hatches. (It was at the store that we ran into the above mentioned friends and the impromptu get together was hatched.) Why were the crowds frenziedly shopping on Friday afternoon? The prime impetus came from this little note and its predecessors:

Issued by The National Weather Service
Denver/Boulder, CO
9:34 pm MDT, Fri., Apr. 3, 2009

… BLIZZARD WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 6 AM SATURDAY TO 6 AM MDT SUNDAY…

SCATTERED RAIN AND SNOW SHOWERS WILL CHANGE OVER TO ALL SNOW BY DAYBREAK SATURDAY. THE SNOW AND WIND ARE EXPECTED TO INTENSIFY THROUGH THE EARLY MORNING HOURS SATURDAY. NORTH WINDS OF 20 TO 35 MPH WITH GUSTS IN EXCESS OF 50 MPH WILL PRODUCE BLIZZARD CONDITIONS AND NEAR ZERO VISIBILITIES… ESPECIALLY IN OPEN AREAS. TOTAL SNOW ACCUMULATIONS BY LATE SATURDAY EVENING ARE EXPECTED TO RANGE BETWEEN 4 AND 8 INCHES.

So now you know – the weather people are predicting yet another spring blizzard for the plains. Right now as I write this at about 12:45am, it is still in the 40s and raining a tiny bit. So they have a few hours to get the snow and blow going or they will miss yet another forecast. At least we have gotten .02 inches of precipitation thus far. That is better than many of the forecast accuracies out here! It was amusing – L likened the crowds to the Christmas shopping crowds in a really good year. It’s been a long time since I have seen the parking lot that full, let alone on a Friday evening.

Time to mosey off into the land of nod. Take care.

blizzard, Boy scouts, meeting, mom

Catching Up

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As you may have noted, I have been remiss in writing much for the last few days. It has been an interesting week here abouts. Some of the things keeping me occupied include a spring blizzard, judging a contest, getting the notes for a committee to form an ambulance district done and …

Tuesday was my last post and I was still a bit rushed. So here is where the time for the rest of the week went.

On Wednesday I did the radio show in the morning and then took care of some things between meetings. I still had the meeting notes from the preliminary meeting Monday of the EMS ambulance district campaign and finance group to put together and get distributed. (We are looking at forming a county wide EMS district. That effects us all and it in particular is something I can’t be too involved with. The problem is that ambulance service is a responsibility of the county under the IGA’s (Inter Governmental Agreements) between the city and the county. The county has been subsidizing a private ambulance service for years. The private service cannot survive on what the county can/will subsidize, so we need to form a county wide district that is a taxing entity to make sure we have the service.) The problem is that the county commissioners cannot be involved since they have to approve the operational plan before the ballot issue can even be considered for inclusion. Since the county would no longer be fulfilling a part of the IGAs, that drags the city in since we will have to set up new terms in the IGAs. Thus I have a secondary conflict of interest and cannot be heavily involved in the effort. So I agreed to chair the introductory meeting and then turn it over to whom ever was selected as chairperson.. That meeting was Monday night and I just today finally got through putting out the meeting notes and turning it all over to the new chairperson. (One item off the must do list.) And I also had to do some grocery shopping for Mom as well.

It turned cold and blowy here late Wednesday, and then went on to be a full scale blizzard Thursday. In fact it was a full scale spring blizzard that closed schools and roads throughout the region.  It snowed and blew for most of the day, so i didn’t have to go out and shovel snow until Friday morning. It looked like this in the middle of the day (around noon) during the storm:

 

Needless to say, the days of 80 degrees we enjoyed less than a week prior were but a memory. It continued all day. Mom called and said don’t bother coming over to bring in her paper and mail, just stay in out of he wind and snow. Another view out onto the back patio before we go:

At least it meant we got some much needed moisture at long last.

Friday I got up early and started shovelling the snow. I did our house, MIL’s house, and Mom’s house, then hurried home an got cleaned up for some more meetings. One meeting was with the parson from Prison Ministries because I am a panelist and speaker at their fund raising diner in April. He wanted to go over the questions that will be posed to the panelists so we can have our acts together. It should be an interesting panel since it will have the sheriff, the chief of police, the associate warden of the prison, myself, and a couple of ex-offenders. Maybe I’ll post the questions here after the event. Then I had a meeting with our tax accountant to get our information turned over so it can be totalled. Along the way, I ran into the auditor doing the annual city audit and that took up a bit of time since the audit report is almost done and will be presented at a ouncil meeting in the next month. (I also had to tell him how cute his daughter was at the Girl Scout proclamation presentation from here. He reported that his daughter wanted to stay for the whole meeting and that they had come to the areement that his daughter could attend with him when he presents the audit report. We’ll see if she finds it as interesting after sitting through the whole shebang. {*grin*})

In the mean time, I have been trying to get all the essays for the “If I Were Mayor” essay contest read. The Colorado Municipal League sponsors a statewide contest and we sponsor a local one with the winners going on to the state contest. Last year one of our students was a winner. We select the winner by panel. The panel consists of me, the city manager, and my writer friend. It is going slower for me this year since I don’t perceive the same quality of writing that I saw last year. (You can read a bit more about our local version here.) Only about ten more essays  to go before we start comparing notes to home in on the winners. (BTW, the topic this year is:

Many youth are not aware of the valuable services that their municipalities (cities and towns) provide: bike paths, recreation centers, police officers, street lights,and crosswalks are all provided by municipal governement. If you were mayor, how would you explain the importance of municipal government to kids in your community?

The contest is for 7th graders and we have great participation here.)

So today I have been reading and pondering. I had to be tracked down by the Boy Scout Troop so I could issue the re-charter check. (I am on the committee and the treasurer.) Once that was handled, it was time to get cleaned up and head over to Mom’s for supper and a round of “Can you get …?” and “Can you move …?” and … Mom is feeling good and doing well – I have my doubts about how cantankerous she might be by the time she gets to go out in the world, but for right now it is going pretty well.

I promise to try to be more regular in the coming days. Thank you all for your emails and calls of concern. It’s OK, I just had a bit too many things to do for a span there. I haven’t even had time to do the Sunday New York Times Crossword Puzzle yet!