Hello there. I am Miss Janice, an educator and lover of life! I enjoyed my 21 years in China, my 38 years as an educator, and I am back in the US now sharing my US experiences with you. I would like to share with you my recent experience with a snow storm! On Thursday I awoke to a sky full of clouds and snow. Pretty snowflakes began to fall round 8:00 am. Throughout the day the snow became heavier, so that around 4:00 pm we had over 6 inches of snow, and by the time I went to bed there was around 8 to 9 inches of snow on the ground. The next morning everything looked white and beautiful. On Friday mornings there is a group of 12 friends who meet regularly for breakfast. They have made me their 13th member. They range in age from mid 50’s to mid 80’s, and they share a common bond of loving to swim. That is how they united back in the late 80’s, with my cousin beginning a breakfast group for the friends. What surprised me after the huge snowfall Thursday, the treacherous icy and snow packed roads the next morning, is that nine of us showed up for breakfast at 8:00 am Friday morning in our usual restaurant. One of the friends is in a wheelchair, and stayed home; another lives 40 miles outside of town and the roads were closed, one was sick and the other away for the holidays. The group explained that if they shut down their lives every time it snowed here, they wouldn’t have any lives left. The philosophy is that nature doesn’t change, so people need to adapt, accept, and go on. Friday we had an extra three to four more inches of snow. I shoveled my sidewalks for the second time in the morning, around 7:00 am; however, Saturday was a very different story. Due to the wind gusts, I had too many snow drifts of heavy snow to shovel everything, so I just shoveled enough to get out. Saturday was the second day that the interstate leading into Rawlins was shut down. It didn’t open until Monday mid morning. Although we had just a few new snowflakes fall, we had a blizzard condition. The winds picked up, so that it was blowing between 50 to 70 miles per hour outside. That is 80 to 112 kilometers per hour. One gust measured 91 miles per hour, or 146 kilometers per hour, the same as a category 1 typhoon!!! A blizzard is when the winds pick up the snow and blow it so that a whiteout occurs. A whiteout is when there is so much snow blowing that you can’t see in front of you. That is what we experienced Saturday. At times I wasn’t able to see the house across the street due to the snowy winds. In October I arranged for a local to shovel my long driveway this winter. He and his family came and shoveled Thursday afternoon, Friday morning, and finally Saturday afternoon. Saturday there were two people with shovels and one using a snowblower. Patty, my cousin, picked me up around 9:00 am Saturday, along with Ellie, an 80-something year old friend, who needed to go to the bank and to the grocery store. We ran our errands and stopped for a coffee and donut afterwards to celebrate being out and about. Fortunately, my cousin Patty is an excellent driver. We had many moments on the road where we drove through snow drifts due to the winds, where we drove through icy patches, and where we had white outs. And yet we continued to drive, we appreciated how beautiful and clean everything looked with the white snow, and we laughed. Our lives went on. By Saturday evening ended up with around a foot of snow, or around 30 centimeters. We are expecting more snow on Wednesday. We have experienced moments of a blizzard, and Saturday I finished putting up my Christmas tree and baking loaves of bread and cookies for a bake sale at church on Sunday. While the wind continues to blow, I have accepted that we are not in charge of the weather, but we can certainly enjoy the process. Throughout the snowstorm I continued to count my many blessings. I wish you all a beautiful week, full of all sorts of new adventures. Please come join me next week as I share more of my US experiences with you. Have a super week, and see you again soon! 本专栏音频同步更新至喜马拉雅APP。使用喜马拉雅APP聆听的用户，每一个故事可以重复播放。
