I woke up today in my warm house while outside it is a chilly 7 degrees. Thinking about this I realized that it’s completely normal for me. I live in a place where if you didn’t have shelter, you could quite possibly die. It’s always amazing to me that people selected this as a place to live. Sure in the summer it’s nice and warm day and night, but what kind of marketing did they have to use to get us here?
I figured I’d go for a walk and I snapped a few pictures to share.
We Carve Paths thru the Snow and Ice
I suppose for some people that haven’t ever lived or visted a winter wonderland stuff like this would be pretty fascinating. It will be fun to make Puerto Rican friends that haven’t ever seen snow!
The Frost Clings to Surfaces in the Night
We have a pond in the center of our subdivision. It’s got a lot of ice over most of it, but this end must be a bit warmer. I thought the vapor dancing on the surface was cool and took a short video.
t looks like we will have a white Christmas. This snow is going to stick around for a few days at least! This is all so normal to me, much like the Rocky Mountains. Heck we live right up against them and I hardly ever go, I’ve been so many times and it’s so “normal” that I haven’t taken time to blog about them. This is a reason why Puerto Rico fascinates me, it’s a whole new world. A world where they don’t bury water lines for fear of freezing pipes and houses aren’t built with pitched roofs to keep the weight of snow from crushing them. Seems absurd to me. LOL
We were watching South Park (the TV show) the other night. It’s a pretty famous show and we were kind of surprised to see that Greeley had made it into one of the episodes! It wasn’t in the best light, but nothing on that show is. So just being included is an honor of sorts. Here is a clip:
Being the opposite isn’t all bad, in fact it is very pretty here when it snows and both Cassie and I have very fond memories of growing up here during the winter. When it snows I get flooded with those memories like playing tackle football in the street after a good snow with neighborhood friends, sledding, building snow forts and having snow ball fights,etc. It’s not all bad to be the opposite of Hawaii or Puerto Rico. But it is a lot colder!!
When I got up for work on Friday I was met with a sign from the universe. On the back of my car I have one of those Rincon 413 Road to Happiness window stickers on my rear windshield (you see them often in Rincon). It reminds me of our goals from time to time and has given me mental energy when I need it most. Like when I am working on a rental after work and on weekends, it’s a reminder that I am doing all this extra work for a reason. Well I think the universe gave me a sign that I am on the right path. It was around 0 degrees Fahrenheit on this day.
Scraping Windows Occurs EVERY Morning These Days
Ahhh yes, the daily routine of getting out of a warm bed taking a HOT shower then getting into a freezing cold car. Scrape the windows so you can see out, start it up and get it warmed up. Once warm you can defrost the rest of the windows with the heater and the rear defroster. Sometimes when you pull away from it’s parking spot you can feel the tires breaking their ice bond to the pavement. At highway speeds sometimes the frost is hard to keep off even with the heater on high! You always want to have a big coat, hat and gloves in your car too in case you break down. Wouldn’t want to freeze to death.
Me and a 3ft long Icicle I found
I can’t imagine a lot of people scraping windows in Puerto Rico or Hawaii..lol. Although the humidity when it rains might be considered the closest in comparison. I’ve had the windows fog up in PR when it’s raining.
Speaking of heaters every house here has a large one, the furnace. It’s most likely the most essential thing a house needs here. Without it, you could freeze to death but your plumbing would definitely freeze and break. In Puerto Rico it’s not uncommon to have un-buried water lines sitting right on top of the ground. You’d NEVER do that here!
There are lots of things that make Greeley the exact opposite of tropical locations and that’s ok. It’s just different and we want to try out the tropics for a while.
We thought it would be funny to take a picture by one of Greeley’s welcome signs. It looks a lot like the one they put in the show, except it doesn’t actually say, Greeley: The exact opposite of Hawaii.
This Thanksgiving was pretty low-key. We went to my grandma’s new house here in Greeley.
Thanksgiving 2011 at Grandma’s house
Then we went over to Britton’s family’s house for another meal. So we were highly stuffed.
While we are happy to have a four-day weekend, in some ways we are ready to get back to the normal work week for a few reasons. 1) My car broke down when I was out doing inspections on Wednesday. We had to get it towed from Fort Lupton back to Greeley. Because of the holiday they won’t even look at it until Monday. That makes me a little anxious. And 2) Britton is on-call this whole weekend, so on Monday he’ll get to turn the pager over to someone else.
Other than that, we’ve been enjoying the time off and the opportunity to think about our lives and be thankful for all we have. We’ve accomplished so much this year! It’s amazing. We are so thankful. Since the holidays are about bringing family together, it also made me remember how much I miss my dad. Holidays are hard like that. Sometimes in a weird way, I am happy I still have such strong feelings about my dad inside me though. It makes me feel like he is still here, somehow.
We’ve taken a couple of walks and even walked down inside the Greeley ditch (since it is empty this time of year) to stay out of the crazy wind. It’s like finding a new world to explore down there. Old ditched (literally) rusted bicycles, tree branches and crawdads line the bottom. We avoided Black Friday like the Black Plague and stayed inside and made turkey sandwiches, tea and brownies. We played Wii Frisbee golf, bowling, and the airplane game on Wii Sports Resort.
This week we also got our medical student who moved into the basement bedroom, but she is with her family this holiday weekend, so we have the house to ourselves. We also got our vacation time approved and are planning on going back to Rincon toward the end of January! We are already making a list of all the things we want to do when we are there!
Anyhow, that’s what we’ve been up to lately -the highs and the lows. Happy Thanksgiving!
We have been having what we call “vacation weekends” for the last few weeks. This is where we do things we’d normally just do on vacation. Like going to movies and visiting coffee shops. That’s what we do when we are in Rincon and Puerto Rico anyway.
Cassie Using the Computer at the new coffee shop Blue Mug in Greeley
Last weekend we went out to see the Rum Diary in the theater. It is based on a Hunter Thompson creation and takes place in Puerto Rico in the early 60’s. It stars Johnny Depp too so we figured it was worth checking out. Cassie had read the book a few years ago and even then they were planning on making a movie. It turned out pretty good.
But of course we are biased since it is a PR story! A lot of the scenes we knew exactly where they were filmed! I thought it did a good job of showing both the poverty and wealth of the island through the eyes of an outsider who attempts to uncover some of the news stories on the island in between Depp’s character’s drunken romps. It even went a little into the history of the US military bombing ranges on Vieques and Culebra and rampant corruption.
Depp’s character gets to drive a sweet 53 Corvette.
I’ve always thought it would be fun to take my Corvette down to PR but it’s not as cool as this 53 and it would be pretty expensive to ship it. That and the sea air would most likely destroy the frame!
In other sort of related news, the offer we put in on the other house didn’t go thru otherwise we would most likely be working on weekends and nights. It’s nice to have some downtime although it’s going to get really boring over the next few winter months until we get down to our place in Rincon. We are thinking January or early February depending on my work on-call schedule. With all of these ‘vacation weekends’ we are really geared up to get down there and get some work done on our house and property. But we’ll probably still take a few breaks at the Banana Dang and see a movie or two at Caribe Cinema for good measure. 🙂
