Is it snowing in Hell yet? It is in Las Vegas

ForrestGump

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Tue Dec-19-06 01:44 PM
Original message

Is it snowing in Hell yet? It is in Las Vegas

Just woke up a few minutes ago, courtesy of my work partner rousing me out of a half-sleep I was trying hard to get back to a full sleep so that I could accumulate more than four hours of slumber time. He asked if we were going to work today (it's been a phenomenally slow two weeks for us, income-wise, because someone apparently put a "closed" sign on the Las Vegas Strip) and informed me that it was something like 31°F (a balmy 273 K) outside and he was watching the news showing Las Vegans making snowpersons. He hadn't ventured outside, but I told him that it sounded like it was raining here. So I stumbled over to my window, eyes mostly closed, and witnessed this:

Now, I know what you Midwesterners are saying right now, complete with the Paul Hogan accent: "snow? that's not snow.." (and, of course, you Canadians: "take off, hoser, eh?")

But, really, to have any accumulation at all -- or even any fall -- this far in the center of the Las Vegas Valley is really, really unusual. Sure, it gets awfully cold here in winter, and at night will sometimes dip below freezing (hey, we may not have the depth of cold y'all got, but we do have a brutal 100°F-plus range in temperature over the seasons), but snow is rare. The first winter after I moved here, a couple of years ago, we had a dusting of snow on the (higher elevation slopes) west side of town, but I'm pretty much in the southern center of the Valley and I'm imagining that even an inch of snow sticking here is rare as finding a corporate casino manager in this town who's possessed with imagination and initiative.

It's as good a sign of the End Times as I'm ever going to see, anyway.

By the way, that's my car that's caught that snow. I just got it last week (after needing a car for a long time) and this could very well be the first snow it's experienced since it left the manufacturer's lot in Stuttgart.

I should have known it was especially cold outside when I first half-awoke, because the little oil-filled radiator I have in my room (a life-saver, it is) should have had me waking up sweating because I turned it on pretty high when I went to bed and yet it's fairly cool in here. Predictably, my f***wit live-in landlord hasn't turned the heat on. A**hole. I'm still in a room-renting situation as a hedge against my extreme personal economic uncertainty of the past three years since my marriage took a nosedive and my life, for a while, seemed to go with it. But my fiscal situation's improved (enough so that -- even after changing up the requisite dollar bills to buy my car -- I've got a year's worth of rent, in one dollar bills alone, stashed away in here...coming thiiiiissss close to not being able to pay rent a couple of times last year and earlier this year made me very, very cautious about ensuring I have reserves enough to cover several months worth of rent if my somewhat-more-uncertain-than-average vocation should again experience a pause) and I'm more than ready to get out of here. I'm tired of having my frozen and refrigerated food stolen, too, and of having a room-mate's alarm go off at 7 AM on mornings when he's not here, and of having a kitchen basically rendered non-functional by my living companions. And there's no way I'm going to suffer through a third summer here when my useless landlord's warped sense of false economy lets the temperature in my room routinely climb to 100°F. F***er.

Man...100°F in my room, every night: that seems like another lifetime. Maybe I'll trundle downstairs and make a little snowperson as tribute to this fleeting Winter Wonderland, now that I seem to be awake...