Snow Kidding!

On most days, I think I could have made quite a living as a copywriter for Hallmark cards. (Then again, I've got genetics on my side, since my mom had a stint as a card artist for the company back in her Kansas City days). Give me a challenge or a setback, a computer crash or a tough crossword and my typical response is "No problem!"

Give me a bleak meteorological scenario, though, and I become both Brothers Grimm all rolled up into one. Albeit, a really happy brother.

Like Lee Atwater on steroids, I can take a weather forecast and spin it into a bleak, post-apocalyptic scenario with my eyes closed and both hands tied behind my back. And I'll do it downright giddily, too. Although, unlike Atwater, I won't blame the Democrats for the impending doom. . . .

That's why waking up this morning was such a glorious thing for me.

Lifting a dusty slat from our bathroom blinds, I was greeted by a scene straight out of an Ansel Adams calendar, the limbs of trees donning newly-purchased goose-down winter coats as they waved to one another in the windy climes of my backyard.

And I am no seasonal Grimm. Whatever the month, given even the slimmest of chances for interesting weather, I will always make the most extreme prediction available. Lunchtime thunderheads in Grand Island? I'll predict lusty, post-storm mammatus clouds in Lincoln by dinner time.

Already this morning, while talking to my friend Jill (who, God bless her, also wakes long before any proverbial rooster even ponders a throaty crow), eyes peeled on the outdoors during the entire phone conversation, I gasped briefly, certain I'd witness a flash of lightning.

...like I said, a lighter, happier version of the Brothers Grimm.

So, while Jill takes the more mature angle on this wintry day, worrying about future downed limbs or interruptions in power, I see no reason whatsoever to fret these things, the slightly inconvenient prices paid for a really great--and long overdue--storm.

...one might even describe it as a hallmark storm of an otherwise blase' winter season. Downright cardworthy, I'd say.