Snow

I love the snow so much, I trained my cats to be snow creatures. This is Sativa, obviously, not in Samoa.


Shoveling party with my neighbors in Colorado.



My sister and I walked to the hill after the blizzard in '06 to learn how to snowboard.




I stayed up for at least a little while on the board....





Until I fell...





Snow
I was sitting in the office, and knew I had access to internet. There was no one waiting for the computer, so I decided to enjoy the internet. I ran into the same problem I encountered last time I had so much access to internet. What is there to do online?
After checking my email, putting up several blogs, and playing on Face book, what was left? I thought about checking the news to see what was going on in the world outside of my village. I tried a few sites that I thought had news, and there was so much multimedia on them, that it was impossible to view on dial up internet (especially since dial up internet here seems much slower than it is in the US). I finally settled on Yahoo News, and was shocked when I saw the number one news story in the United States.
The United States is such a big country with so much going on at all times, and I know that there is sometimes ridiculous news out there, and sometimes the real news doesn’t get shown because it is overshadowed by something else. The top news story was out of New York, as many news stories are, which is something I have gotten used to growing up in such a metropolis. And the story was ….drum roll please…
About the clean up following the Christmas blizzard. I had heard a bit about the blizzard, from emails from friends and family, but it didn’t think it was worse than some of the storms we have gotten in the past. Apparently the sanitation workers spent their time in coffee shops, or slept in trucks instead of cleaning the roads. I remember growing frustrated in New York when we did have snow storms, and it would take a while for it to be removed.
I guess I am so far removed from my life there, that I now find it comical. I haven’t lived in New York in over 9 years (wow, that’s a long time!), and have spent my college years and the beginning of my career years in Colorado and Wyoming, the heart of the Rocky Mountains, where we learned we can get snow from September to June. (I know it does happen in other months, but those are the only times I was there to experience it.)
I got my driver’s license a week before going to university, and was therefore given a crash course on winter driving. The roads were not always plowed, and even though I lived for two years on the same road as the hospital, I learned that it does not mean that the road will ever be clear of snow.
After my four years in Wyoming, I moved south, to one of the many suburbs of Denver, where the weather is comparable to Wyoming (minus the wind). Even though I was living in a bigger city, I learned that still roads wouldn’t be plowed. I lived a block and a half away from an elementary school and still the roads would not be plowed for days. By the time the city had sent out trucks to plow, people in the neighborhood solved their own problems by creating small paths for their vehicles, or learning to get by on skis.
Having only a small car, I learned to enjoy the big storms as a time to sit at home with hot chocolate while having shoveling parties with my neighbors. I had become far less demanding when it came to getting places as I had in New York.
Now living in Samoa, I have really learned the art of patience, knowing that if the weather is bad, or there is a holiday I will be stuck where I live for days, and I am okay with it.
I don’t mean to offend anyone who is reading this that was frustrated by the storm and not being able to get anywhere, because I knew I was like that ten years ago, but from an outsiders prospective, it gives me a chuckle.