God Dang is it Cold

Our main IT office is in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. On average I spend about a week a month up here. It is a nice little town that is right on the coast - as you can guess from the name - Portsmouth - it has always been a working port kinda town. A lot of ships captains lived up this way back when being a Merchant Captain meant you got to wear incredibly fancy coats and were forced to eat the occasional cabin boy when supplies ran low.

Of course, being New England it also snows up here. And we are not talking the paltry "you can sort of ski on it" snow that you get in the Australian ski fields. We are talking serious, "my god won't it just plain go the hell away" kinda snow. The average snowfall according to the Internet - which as we know never lies - is 16inches. Sure, that is not in line with the astounding 70+ inches in Colorado (or 6 feet). But c'mon - 18 inches on average is just shy of 2 feet of incredibly cold, picturesque white stuff!

Something I have learnt about places that get a lot of snow - local residents never appreciate it when you tell them with a shit-eating grin that you love it when it snows because as an Australian, if you can survive the various life threatening creatures doing their best to shred muscles, inject venom or beat the living bejesus out of you, the Aussie climate is bloody bewdy mate - snow is just such a novelty! I strongly recommend against following up by saying that as an apartment dweller in New York you don't have to shovel anything when the snow hits. I especially don't recommend saying that to a colleague that just spent 2 hours digging themselves out of their house with a Snow Blower. As an aside, a Snow Blower bears no resemblance to a leaf blower - oh no, it is a vastly different creature. Imagine a 4 foot tall lawnmower that has caterpillar tracks instead of wheels and a truly vicious combination of spinning blades in a wide mouth at the front of this infernal device. Actually - for those of us descended from farming stock, imagine a self-propelled-personal-harvesting-device and you are getting there. As far as I can tell, the basic mode of operation entails starting the device, staying as far away as you possibly can from the gnashing-bone-crunching-end and manhandling it down the driveway so it can eat large quantities of snow and blow it out a side chimney thingie - hence the "blower" name. Personally I would have called it the snow-eater/body-disposal-device. The point being that I am given to understand that this is a particularly cold and limb jarring process - the sort of process that has you envisaging excruciating dinners at the in-laws as a nice reprieve - and engenders a near homicidal rage towards any idiotic Aussie in the office proclaiming how he loves snow.

Oh, whilst I remember - god dang is it cold out there. I have caught myself giving serious thought to taking a little nip of vodka post breakfast in order to brave the cold between the hotel door and the nice heated car - which is an absolutely ginormous truck with the ever important heated car seats courtesy of the lovely Karen Collins who is kind enough to pick me up in the mornings! Btw - I challenge any of you to laugh at the idea of heated seats... I tells ya - in this environment they are an essential. I am sure that I have been millimetres away from hypothermia before they kick in!


So, all in all, I love the snow! But my lord am I keeping it to myself from now on!