This Weather Blows !

Politics, shmalitics, the big news today is Winter Storm Selene. A couple years ago, the Weather Channel started naming winter storms like they do hurricanes. I wish they wouldn't do that, it just encourages them. Call me "paranoid", but I think the storms have gotten more severe since they began naming them. Before that people would just say, "Oh we got some snow, and I hear they got some rain Down Below." but now, every time some butterfly flaps it's wings in Montana, the whole country is engulfed in a winter storm. This one actually started in Colorado, and they were predicting it days before it started showing up on the radar. It makes me wonder if it would have made such a spectacle of itself if they hadn't given it so much attention.

I went out in the teeth of the storm today and broke a track out to the road in case we needed to get out or somebody needed to get in, but I'm going to have to do the whole thing again tomorrow. We had a foot on the ground by this afternoon, and it ain't done yet. I wouldn't be surprised if we got another foot on top of that before it's done. Before this, almost all of our snow was gone and the swamp was dry enough for me to skid logs over bare ground. I was beginning to worry if the frogs were going to have enough water to raise a crop of tadpoles this year. A few frogs had been singing out there, but now they will be shut down for at least a couple weeks until all the snow melts and the water warms up a bit. The good news is that the little tadpoles won't need to worry about the marsh drying up before they turn into grown up froggies. Good for them!

Why do the Republicans have to come up with an alternate plan before repealing Obamacare? What was wrong with the way things were before? Nobody was ever left to die in the street because they didn't have the money to pay for health care. If you are in serious trouble, they have to take care of you, whether you have insurance or not. If you are not in serious trouble, you don't need to go to the doctor in the first place. All those tests and preventative care is just a scam to make you think you are sick when you are not. Almost all the people I have known who have died went to a doctor first, if they hadn't gone they might still be alive today. No doctor in history ever permanently saved the life of one of their patients, they all die sooner or later. Even after you're dead, they will hound your relatives for any unpaid bills. If you're dead, it means they didn't do their job, so why should they get paid?

As I remember it, the Catholic Church was in a big uproar at the time we got married. They had recently started doing their services in English instead of Latin, and changed some other stuff too. We both wanted to be married in a church, and we didn't care which one. My hypothetical wife hadn't been to church in awhile, and she didn't know if they had changed the part about promising to raise the kids Catholic, so we went to the local priest to find out. This priest was not very friendly, which is one reason my hypothetical wife hadn't been to church in awhile. He said that I should find a nice Protestant girl to marry, and she should find a nice Catholic boy to marry. She replied, "I don't know any nice Catholics." End of meeting. Then we went to a Protestant church that I had sometimes attended when it wasn't hunting season, and the minister was very friendly and helpful. We didn't want a big fancy wedding so we asked him to just marry us with a simple private ceremony. He suggested that we do it on Sunday morning right after church let out, which we did. The congregation must have gotten wind of it because they all stayed after church and watched us get married. Then we went down into the church basement, where the church ladies served coffee and doughnuts after the service. In addition to the usual doughnuts, they had made a flat cake with our names on it. We hadn't asked them to do that, they just did it out of the goodness of their hearts. After that, we went and picked up my hypothetical wife's parents and took them out to dinner at a local restaurant. It wasn't a traditional wedding, but we didn't care. We used the money we saved for a down payment on our first house.