Roll Over and Hit the Snooze

Baseball season is over for Cubs fans like myself. It really has been since the August slide, but I have hung in there with hope until they were mathematically eliminated. The Miracle Mets of 1969 came to mind, and so I thought there was some possibility. How wrong can one man be?

Good things are beginning to happen, though. This morning, around 4AM, I was awakened to a sound which I had not heard in quite some time….rain on the roof! We had a downpour which lasted for about two hours. That may not be news where you live, but here in the desert, we cherish that sound like no other. It is amazing what a little thing like rain can be taken for granted.

People out here go crazy when it rains. One would think that 30 inches of snow was about to fall. The TV stations go crazy with weather and traffic updates, there are live reports as if this phenomenon occurs once in a blue moon. And, it does.

The rain this morning was the first we have had in our part of the valley for over a month. Imagine that, 30 days without rain falling from the sky. (We get rain, and the Dakotas and parts of Wyoming get snow already.) Many people out here were running around like Chicken Little. My neighbor was out in it washing his car! Our street floods sometimes, so some kids were readying their rafts to go floating down the street BEFORE SCHOOL!

Arizona has what is named, “The Stupid Motorists Law.” No joke, that is the name of the law. It goes something like this: If you drive your car into an area that is marked, “Do no enter when flooded” and you get caught and the police and fire departments have to rescue you, then you pay the bill for those services work, AND you get a big fine.

Imagine, my friends back in the Midwest, if the stupid motorists law applied to you during a snow storm. It certainly would cut down on people needing to be pulled out of snowdrifts on the Interstate, wouldn’t it? You pay for the tow, and you get a fine for being out when you were told travel was hazardous. “Boss, sorry, I can’t come in today. The risk of being caught in the storm is too great.”

A little advice, if you please. When trying to decide what the weather is going to be like in the Midwest during the winter, watch the Southwest. Our rain patterns eventually cross over into Colorado, Northern Texas and Oklahoma, then make a beeline for the Midwest. Where we have rain, you will soon have snow once the temperatures drop. And, according to the Almanac, we are in for the wettest winter. I guess you can see what that means for you.

On those cold, snowy mornings, you can do what I did today; roll over and hit the snooze.

Doughnut