The Internet here was so slow I couldn't post this last night.

Molasses in February

I think the expression is "slow as molasses in January" but it can also apply to February. It came to mind as I try to use the Internet - it's s-l-o-w-w-w tonight. I re-set my modem and router several times, but that didn't seem to help, and a neighbor emailed me that her Internet was also erratic.

An arctic front dipped down here from Canada and we had a few days and nights of 11 below zero. I was worried that my truck wouldn't start, but it did. There is about 6 inches of snow on the ground, and I wear hand-knitted gaiters over the tops of my boots to keep the snow out.

I was down on the plains Thursday and it was minus 10 all day in town, but then I drove up to Estes Park in the mountains, 8000 feet above sea level, and the temperature was 24 degrees - heat rises.

But weather is so fickle because overnight the front snuck out, and it warmed up yesterday to almost 35 degrees. The weather man on TV says that a big moisture-laden storm is coming from Hawaii - the Pineapple Express, but the forecast I see for my specific area doesn't look all that snowy.

Although I have been in my home with electricity since October, there are people downstream from me who still don't have power or have just gotten it back. Naturally, they are excited to be moving back home, but the newly restored infrastructure has not proved to be very robust: the day/night it was 14 below zero, their power was out for 30 hours. These people aren't on town water so they couldn't run their pumps to trickle water through the pipes, and their pipes froze. Frozen pipes don't automatically burst, but I've seen cases where someone trying to thaw them caught the house on fire and burned it to the ground.