In the month before I went back home, I got asked a lot of questions about Omaha: "Do you have friends that still live there?" "Is it north of Oklahoma?" and most frequently, "Do you think you'll get any snow while you are home?" I would always respond to the last one with a resounding "Hopefully."

Of course while I was home it didn't snow at all and was relatively warm considering it was the end of December. I was seriously counting on visiting some snow, not dealing with it in anything other than an aesthetic way, and then going back to Portland. But God, being the eternal and sometimes frustrating yuk-ster, denied me the snow in Omaha and then dumped it on me in Portland.

Almost immediately upon my return to the west coast, Portland was hit with what has been called "the worst storm in 10 years" or what Midwesterners would call "Tuesday." It really wasn't that bad, but when the city is not at all prepared for anything resembling this, it becomes a disaster. See weather in Portland has only two moves: sunny and rainy, which alternate or sometimes occur at the same time. This unfortunate climatic dualism has dulled the "interesting thoughts about weather" section in the brains of many Portlandians, which is the reason a family member who lives here once told me, "The nice thing about Portland is that it is windy, except when it's not," and perhaps also the reason that one news weatherman referred to the storm as a "total cream-out."

Yes the television news crews were out in force making sure people who did not look out their windows got a good look at what was going on around town. Both poor young newbies and veteran reporters were flung to the far reaches of the city and its surrounding area to give us a first secondhand experience of the storm. This of course made for excellent television that included footage of cameramen falling down, footage of snow, and angry frostbitten reporters growling "Cry me a river Pat, we're in Troutdale!"

Some stations went so far as to provide almost 24 hour coverage of the snow. Sure there were a lot of things happening (road closures, people being forced to buy shovels) but I doubt the need for constant coverage when you're spending 5 minutes watching some guy walk up an icy hill. By the third day, some of the stations were running promos trumpeting "We were there reporting on the blizzard!" though it would have been more accurate to perhaps announce "We did the job we are paid to do!"

There are those that called the news coverage "self-indulgent," but I am not one of those people because I'm hoping to maybe get hired by one of these stations. Plus, me using that term on this website would be pretty dumb.

In direct contrast to the news teams' get up and go, the city had a hard time with the storm. When I say that they were ill-prepared for such an occasion, I mean it, which is why I said it in the first place, which makes this sentence explaining that unnecessary. The city had a few snow plows that kinda/sorta plowed some of the main thoroughfares but did not work on any residential streets. This made the rich people that live high up in the hills very angry and made my tiny inner Karl Marx bathe in a tub of glee.

That was pretty much as far as it went, though. Some people who don't live in Portland, and also have brains, asked "why aren't you using salt?" To which the DOT responded, "The environment." That's it. Not "it's bad for the environment," or "it's too good for the environment and would create such furtile soil as to upset the stability of the worldwide agriculture market" or "The environment has such a chemical composition that the salt would create a chemical reaction bringing life to the clay and soon we would be under the tyrranical rule of the Mudmen." So instead they dumped sand and gravel in the roads which caused the many needless deaths of confused children who thought the roads had become a school playground. Poor stupid kids, it's not their fault they are in a poorly thought-out joke.

The weather did kind of do a ninja spin kick to our already crappy economy. A lot of businesses closed for the whole week and the city spent a lot of money on the fairly ineffective snow plows. I'm not too worried though, as I am sure we will be saved by the booming "I survived the Blizzard of '04" t-shirt market.