Hot Potato

A shift of a few degrees can mean the difference between winter wonderland and depressing slog.

I awoke at the ungodly hour of 9:45 a.m. to my roommate singing loudly in Hindi (he usually confines it to the shower but his chirpiness made it past the bathroom door today).

Taking this as an opportunity to avoid my daily morning guilt for sleeping in until 11 a.m., I got up and peeked outside to see fat flakes falling on a two inch blanket of snow in my front yard and heard an unfamiliar metal on concrete scrape as my neighbor shoveled his front pathway (we rarely get this much snow in the valley). I felt invigorated and thought of heading up to the slopes for a second day in a row to poach the new powder.

Soon, though, the temperature rose to freezing and flakes started bouncing of my car as they turned to ice and later rain. The city went from sparkling and fluffy to a soupy brown muck and Boiseans ran for their happy lamps while I scrapped my mountain plans for a game of pool with Joeja and a boringly productive day of errands.