Ralph's dance of joy!

It is the little things in life and this morning, before it got daylight, Ralph was up doing his dance of joy! Why you ask? Because he heard the garbage truck coming down the road! Our first garbage pickup in three weeks will cause my beloved husband to do his dance of joy. Could the recycling truck be far behind? He was so thrilled to see it come down the road about three hours later.

Now, for this to all happen we had to have about three days of really heavy rainfall to melt the snow off the street enough to have the trucks come down. Overnight last night we had a bit more snow, but just a skiff, so the trucks were still able to come. Yippee!

The heavy snow has damaged a lot of stuff around here besides our roads, which are now filled with potholes. City/county/state budgets that were already strained by the economic problems now have the added burden of snow removal (such as it was) and now filling zillions of potholes.

Plus all three of the state's major east/west highways were closed over the mountains due to heavy snow conditions, including avalanche danger. This last part is a deja vu to last winter. Our passes were closed many days for these reasons last year and they termed it a rare even then. Have to see how the rest of the winter turns out. So far, it's been pretty bad.

As for the other damaged stuff, we are not among the damagees thankfully, our awning roof over our covered patio did fine with the extreme snow load, but many roofs here in our community and around the area didn't fare so well. One of our high schools had a big section of its roof cave in, resulting in an extra week of Christmas break for them. Our neighbor across the street had her patio awning come down. The roof of our clubhouse has damage from the snow and ice (remember the pictures of the icicles??) when it finally did come down it took the rain gutters with it. There is a large stable here that collapsed (no critter injuries) and many others.

It should be cold and another chance of snow overnight tonight and then rain and much warmer temperatures for the next 10 days, maybe even reaching 50 degrees a day or two. While I'll welcome it I have to also remember that with all that rain and warmth comes flooding on all our major rivers.

Winter in Mexico and/or Arizona is looking better and better all the time...