Perpetual Ruminations

Saturday

It's time to write this entry and then go to bed. I'm still trying to recover from yesterday, working opening shift, then having to go back in and close -- come home and sleep for almost three hours and then go back in and open again.

I did come home and take an hour and a half nap, but I'm still beat. Tomorrow, I don't have to be there until eight, so I'm doing fine for time yet. It should be a little better with a full night sleep, too. But, it's going to be forty below zero wind chill factor tomorrow morning, and that really seems to zap the energy out of a person. Hopefully it's a very slow day and I can spend most of my time inside.

We will be in the danger level until Tuesday, then move up to just cold again. Wind chill advisories straight through tomorrow, Monday, and most of Tuesday before our thermometer's will rise above the zero mark. I see other's are also caught in this deep freeze, too. It's hard to believe this is South Dakota.

As a child we would come visiting relatives here, in this very area, and I always felt a little envious of the warmer winters. Living in northern Minnesota I was accustom to cold winters, with weeks at a time staying below zero. It was nothing to see temperatures drop below a negative twenty at night, and sometimes not rise above them during the day.

But here, in this part of South Dakota, it was always warmer. about twenty degrees or more, warmer. When we first moved, the winters were very mild, but over the last few years, they have been cold and lots of snow. Well except a few years back now, we had one very temperate winter, with temperatures seldom dropping below freezing. We did get a little snow, but that was late fall, and was gone by December. I did not mind going outside in January, in a light jacket, and enjoying a sunny day in the fifties.

Of course, we can also get a lot of snow, and have seen a year like that, too. In fact, last year we got a lot of snow. It would have really been deep, if the temperatures had stayed below freezing, but it seemed like we would get about a foot of snow, have a day or two of drifting, then it would warm up enough for it to melt most of it, only to snow again. This repeated, over and over.

Well, enough looking back, I need to look forward, and that means getting to bed so I can get caught up on my sleep. Then getting up a little earlier than I usually do so I can prepare to go to work in the frigid weather.