Telling it like it is

I went downtown today to find our new Fiat dealer, and holy crap! They have all the Fiat500 variants in all the colours. It was lovely to see rows of these little beauties sitting there waiting for new owners. I spoke to the manager and he said they've been open for two weeks and have sold twelve cars with four others on special order already. Ok twelve doesn't sound like a lot but for a new dealership selling European cars in the US, that's a fantastic start. Interestingly it looks like the Abarth version is coming to the US in Q4 this year with a new 170hp engine - more powerful than the Euro Abarth. Nice. I sat in the Sport version and these things are loaded from the factory. Bluetooth, satellite radio, heated everything, seven airbags, leather. The list goes on. Even the most basic model will embarrass most US cars now. I can see this competing directly with the new Ford Fiesta over here which is similarly priced and loaded. Mmmmmm. Dammit. We don't need (and can...

I love snow because I love the winter time. But this early spring snow we've been having over the last few weeks concerns me now because of the trees in our garden. Most of them are starting to bud and leaf and heavy wet snow isn't doing them any good at all. We've lost three big limbs on our cherry tree so far and I'm hoping it will survive after that mauling. Rain at this time of year is fine and light, fluffy Utah snow would be awesome but it's too warm for that now. I'm hoping this weekend will be the last of this and that we transition to spring showers now. It's one of the oddities of living here - one day it's 20 degrees, the next day we have snow on the ground.

I really love Utah in the springtime. This spring in particular because the winter has really lasted. Technically it's been spring for a couple of weeks and earlier this weekend it was nearly 20 degrees. This morning we awoke to below zero temps and about 10cm of fresh snow on the ground. By this afternoon a lot of it had melted and by tomorrow it will all be gone again. It's nice because it's delaying the onset of the insufferably hot weather. It's bad because late snow like this is terribly destructive to the trees. There were lots of branches down this morning but I think we got lucky this time. All our trees seemed to hold up. The other reason we sort of need a long cool spring is because this year we have the highest snowpack in recorded history. If it warms up quick, we are going to see really bad flooding. In the early 80s when they had the previous highest snowpack, downtown flooded and the great salt lake came up so high that they built pumps in the west desert...