This is Spring?

What a crazy spring we’re having. A high pressure area swept down from Alaska late Friday and yesterday the temperature didn’t get over the mid-forties. It was/is very cold for late April. It rained some last night and the car is covered with ice this morning. The fruit farmers in the area are scrambling to keep their orchards from freezing the blossoms. Yesterday morning I was just sitting down at the computer, P was starting on her breakfast when the power went out! I called the electric company - thank goodness for cell phones (VOIP – voice over internet phone – technology doesn’t work very well when the electricity to your internet router is cut off) They were aware of the problem, but didn’t know what caused the outage to some 5000+ customers. P and I sat around looking at each other for a while before the dogs talked me into taking them for a walk. I got dressed, bundled up with gloves and scarf, grabbed my ipod and off we went. When we got out of the cul-de-sac I could see that the traffic light a block up was out. We meandered through the neighborhood for about an hour. The traffic light was back up and running when we got back home. P reported that the power came back on about 10 minutes after we left. She got a call from DJ, who lives at the coast who reported that she woke up to snow and it started mixing hail in with the snow as she was talking to P! Early yesterday afternoon, as we were heading home after our Saturday running around, it started to hail and then changed to rain and that changed to snow by the time we actually go home. It wasn’t sticking to the ground but we were in a real snow flurry for about 10 minutes. It looked pretty neat, all that snow swirling around. Shakespeare loved it, running and jumping around, trying to catch the snow. It eased up, changed to light rain and moved on. About an hour and a half later we heard from R, P’s brother, who lives on the east side of town. He was experiencing the same hail – snow – rain mix sequence. Like I said, crazy weather. This cold air mass is suppose to move on to the east, out of our area, some time late to day and we will warm back up to the 50’s or so. Still below normal for this time of year, but at least warmer than this weekend! I read in the newspaper that a track meet at the state university got hailed on before it was over. It reminded me of running cross country when I was in high school back in Wisconsin. One year it snowed during the conference championship races. We were running the course around a golf course in our little 2 oz nylon track shorts and top. We were running around naked for all intents and purposes in that weather. I didn’t really care how I did, I just wanted to finish and get my sweats back on!

We packed and shipped a tool last week at work. Just in time, this is the last week of the quarter coming up. We have a few other items to take care of to wrap up, and then it’s on to the next one. The bar always gets move up each time: more, new, greater accomplishments are expected. It’s the corporate way, isn’t it - insatiable.