This week the weather has been very unpleasant. For those of you who don't know I am deathly afraid of snow. Not the fun stuff on the mountains that you ski/snowboard in, but the stuff that sticks to the roads and eventually turns into ice that causes my car to slide on the road, and me to overcorrect because I don't know what I am doing.
Being a Californian we tend to not know what to do in the snow. It has only snowed once in my 20 plus year existence in Bakersfield, California, and it was supercool! That year we had an Italian foreign exchange student, and I told her that it would never snow, but it did, and we didn't have to go to school, but . . . . there's more to the story. The day that it snowed was a teacher inservice day, and there was already no school! What a waste of a perfectly snow day. The storm was kinda freakish in that it snowed in other places in the Central Valley. The state only had one snow plow, and it started from Fresno and worked its way south. It never made it to Bakersfield.
People still felt obligated to go to work (why?), and so there attempts were futile. Big SUVs were slipping and sliding when they turned. I have a friend that says "there is no such thing as 4 wheel drive breaks," or something like that. The Bakersfieldians did not know how to act in the snow, that wasn't on the mountains.
Another reason I am afraid of the snow has to do with avalanches, and the dangerous speeds at which one goes down a hill, or mountain, doing an intentionally fun activity. At church activities where we went to the snow to go sledding/tubing people have been seriously injured and died. I will never go down a hill on a sled by myself. I always have to ride in the back with my eyes closed the whole way down.
I was once told that when you get stuck in an avalanche to just start digging up, but how do you know which way is up after being rolled over so many times. Are you s'pose to count how many turns you did, or try to look for the light?
Yep snow is dangerous--ly tempting. The fun stuff you can do like build snowmen, and throw snowballs, and make snowcaves. Those are all fun and safe activities to do in the snow. Why don't people like to do them as much anymore?!
1 comment:
So "chionophobia" is the official name for it, huh? Very interesting. You have lived in Utah long enough now, you should have learned the trick on how to drive in the stuff! I agree though...it is much more fun to look at the stuff, than to drive in it!
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