Winter

Winter is definitely here. There’s at least 12 inches of it on the ground and more in the air. It is colder than when I first arrived so I am adding layers to the layers. (If this keeps up I’ll soon be too fat to walk!) I am told that one of the Eskimo languages has 14 words for snow. Here we just use descriptive phrases since English has only one word so we add words like powdery, fluffy, wet, hard and dry. Sometimes it is sloppy to walk in, other times it is soft and quiets everything. But when it gets really cold it squeaks and can make the world pretty noisy.
 

Driving becomes interesting too and can be very much more time-consuming. Everyone slows down a little when it is snowing, and you would think that traffic would move along at a slightly slower speed, but for some reason when everybody’s “slowing down a little” is added up it becomes gridlock. I am sure there must be some obscure mathematical formula involved....