A Heavy Load

Flirtatious: "Can I shovel that walk for you maam?"

Real Mood: Sore (double entendre)

Prediction: Some one this week will do a story on what to do with your broken tree branches.

If there are two times of the year when you don't want lots of wet snow around here, they are Fall and
Spring. That's when all the lovely leaves are coming and going.  The problem is the leaves in combination with branches act as nice little baskets to collect that snow.  The baskets get heavy and down those branches come.  It doesn't happen that often, but when it does it's devastating to the flora.

But it does remind of me Catfish, a trim trimmer I've known for 30 years. He is also an entertainer who sings and plays anything with strings on it. He has  always been good at the entertaining bit, but never very ambitious. He occasionally sings at book stores these days, but mostly trims trees. I've been able to do stories with him a few times during these rare branch slaughter events. He makes good TV because he sings while he trims.

This is also a good time for someone who invested in a wood chipper but has been saving it to rent out for several years.

We got about a foot of snow here at the house, which brings back other memories. We had some real beauties here in the early 80s. A Christmas Eve storm in '82 (24 inches in 24 hours) just about shut the town down for several days.  I got to work at a radio station with they help of a cop friend who had borrowed his neighbors four wheel drive. It had very high wheel clearance or we wouldn't have made it.  And he'd already added chains for traction before he picked me up. I you had to work it was not fun.  My mother was visiting from Southern California and didn't have to work. She thought it was just wonderful. 

We had so much snow that year the City's mayor Bill McNichols is said to have lost the election because he couldn't handle getting rid of the snow. He was beaten by a guy named Federico Pena who went on to run energy and transportation in Washington.  A bit of irony here. Another key issue in the campaign was Pena's insistance that Denver didn't need a new airport.

Ironically  he gets elected, changes his mind, and gets the ball rolling building one. He leaves before the airport is finished, and then gets a highway connecting the city and the airport named after him. Bill Mc Nichols gets retirement. Another fun thing to know is that one of them (Paul'sHeimers set in) one of them (Mc Nichols or Pena) got a lot of bad media for using garbage trucks to pack down the snow on the unplowed streets. 

We use these snow storms, that are really quite rare, for population control. If you knew what the weather was really like, you'd all live here.

I gotta go pick up some more branches. See ya.