Telling it like it is

I dropped Paula off at the shop this afternoon and turned up the next street to loop around and go back home. I was barely touching 20mph when this doddering old coot who was cleaning the snow off his car threw a snowball at me, mouthing off about something. I stopped, wound my window down and backed up the two car lengths that I'd gone past him, and asked him what his problem was. Old coot : "You need to slow down!" Me : "From 20? The speed limit up here is 25!" Old coot : "You were doing at least 45, maybe 50" Me : "You know that's funny, because my speedometer said 20. Would you like to step into my car and I'll show you what 50 looks like up this road?" Old coot : "You were doing 50. I watched you!" Me : "You measured that with a radar gun did you?" Old coot : "No. I just know." Me : "And that gives you the right to throw a snowball at a moving car, almost causing an accident does it?" Old ...

We had probably 6 to 8 inches of snow at our place overnight, and the ski resorts were reporting 2 feet of the stuff at 21:30 last night. Solitude had 22" by last night and a further 13" this morning. Methinks next weekend will be my first ski weekend. If I can't fight off the urge, I might go tomorrow....

It's been raining all night and it looks like we're setting up for another huge snowmaker this weekend. The resorts are already getting dumped on but the weatherguesser said it was going to turn to all snow by tonight down here in the valley, and to expect up to 12 inches on the valley floor. Batten down the hatches :-)

I'm still alive! I swear I was waiting at Subway so long tonight I could actually see my hair growing. The two kids behind the counter couldn't have had less interest in their jobs if they'd been dead. I gave up in the end and drove to another one. The funny thing is that when I drove back past the original one I'd been waiting at, the guy who'd been in front of me was still in line waiting. So I managed to drive a 5 mile round-trip and get served in less time than it would have taken me to keep waiting there. Eesh.

On the news tonight there was a story about a 15 year old girl who was killed last night when she tried to cross I-15, at night, in the snow, on foot. That's a classic Darwin trifecta if ever I heard of one, and the outcome was exactly what you'd expect. Here's where it got weird though : in the press conference, the distraught mother said she wanted the driver to own up to his or her responsibility in the accident and come forward. Wait - what? No. I'm sorry. The driver in this accident is in now way, shape or form responsible for anything. You walk across 4 lanes of 75mph traffic at night, you die. Simple. I have sympathy for the family of the dead girl, but I have no sympathy for anyone trying to blame the driver for this death. This was 100% the responsibility of the girl who dies. Shit - if it was an 18-wheeler that hit her, the driver probably doesn't even know it happened.