Snow!
posted in Alaska, NaBloPoMo, Reader Input, Weather, Winter |In 2008, our first real snow was October 7.
In 2007, our first real snow was sometime in early October.
This year has been warm. The lakes froze over only a week or two ago. What precipitation we’ve had has been rain. But mostly, it’s been grey and chill, but neither cold nor snowy.
Tonight, after putting the dotter to bed, I peered out a window, and noticed…was it? Could it be?
Yes! It’s snowing!
In a comment to yesterday’s post, Meri asked:
Since you are originally from the SW, how hard was it to adjust to the dark winters? and driving in snow!
The dark winters have been a real problem for me. The past two years, I have made sure to visit my mom, GrannyJ, in mid-December so that I can get a dose of sunshine right around the winter solstice, when the days are shortest. Our first winter here, I was utterly miserable. GrannyJ sent me a variety of sculpted suns to cheer me up. Bless her! I had allowed my prescription for little blue happy pills (Zoloft) to expire, which made everything worse.
So, in January 2008 I trekked off to the local Doc-in-a-Box and got a new prescription. That, plus the rapidly lengthening days, helped pull me back into a more sanguine state of mind.
Last year, OmegaDad bought me a Magic Light for Christmas, and it seemed to help some, too. But I may be simply adjusting to the (horrible, awful, miserable) darkness, where the noonday sun is about as high as a late spring afternoon back in the Lower 48.
As for driving in the snow. Girl. I may have been in the southwest, but it was the mountains of the southwest. We regularly got more snow in Small Mountain University Town each winter than we have gotten here. The main difference is that in Small Mountain University Town, the snow came down in Great Huge Heaps, all at once, then melt. We would end up with 24 to 36 inches per storm. Here, a ten-incher is a big snow–however, once it starts snowing, the snow doesn’t melt until, oh, April.
Then, of course, there’s the fact that I grew up in Chicago. Even though I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was about 23 or 24, I had plenty of experience driving in snow after that before I moved west.
In sum, the snow and driving in the snow is no problem, but the lack of light is a killer.
