10 posts tagged “weather”
Today has been a very weird day.
After getting very little sleep, I went to class, la la la, then finished and turned in my research paper (fucking YAY, by the way).....Since then I've just been hanging around, listening to music and chatting and the like. I've been listening to a lot of music that I listened to in high school, which is bringing up all sorts of weird memories. Some good, some bad. So now I'm in a weird mood :\ Some other shit's happened, and I'm sort of depressed, but I'm happy, in a sad way, that makes me laugh. D: I don't know what's going on with me anymore.
Oh, and did I mention that it's SNOWING? What. The. HELL. Someone forgot to tell Colorado that it's May. This crappy weather is doing nothing to improve my state of mind. You probably can't tell in the pic, but the snow is coming down thick enough to be sticking to the ground. Again, I ask: what the hell?
Not amused.
This morning it was a brisk and sunny 30ish degrees when I walked to class. When I got out of my last class around noon, it was up to a nice, warm 50ish, and was still sunny.
So what's it doing now? SNOWING. Thick, fat, horrible snow is falling from the sky, and sticking to the ground, and making me not happy. Oh, Colorado weather, how you love to play with my emotions. Tantalizing hints of spring will crop up as early as February, only to be dashed away by several more blizzards. Then, just when you think the warm weather is in full swing, a sudden cold front will whoosh in. The fall will be kicked off by a spectacular blizzard, which will then be completely melted away the next day by a sudden heat wave.
Color me depressed by this sudden change for the gloomier. :(
Ah, as much as I usually hate mornings, sometimes I get a morning that's just...nice. Like today! Class was cancelled so I slept in til 10, and now I'm just sipping coffee and eating scrambled eggs whilst listening to Michelle Branch and Alison Krauss.
Several weeks of good weather, and right when I'm planning on going home for the weekend...it starts to snow! Wtf! Hopefully by this time tomorrow it'll be melted, not like that's gonna stop me anyway.
Anyway...should probably finish this essay that's due at 3. Hopefully it won't dash my good mood away :(
Well, spring break is over, so I'm nestled back in my apartment in Gunnison. Some snow has melted since I left, and I can actually see some grass peeking out. Yay! The grass in Denver is starting to turn green, and soon some flowers will start popping up. Unfortunately that won't happen as soon here...oh well. It's getting up to the 40s during the day here, according to this weather widget anyway, so that's good. No more walking to class and having my nose hair freeze!
The drive down here today was as uneventful as it always is (it always takes me exactly three and a half hours, give or take a few minutes. At least, that's without any snow on the roads). Although, as I was nearing Gunnison, maybe 5 or so miles outside of town, I noticed they'd put big orange flags on the signs warning you for deer crossing the highway. Then I noticed a dead deer on the side of the road...and then another...and another....I counted seven dead deer on the side of the highway, just within that 5 mile stretch. A lot of them were sort of "propped" up on rocks, it was strange. I have never hit anything (other than a bird that hit my windshield) and would be absolutely terrified if I hit a deer. That would be so horrible. Yesterday, my parents and I went to the museum and we were on Colfax going to lunch afterwards, and a dog ran across like 6 lanes of traffic and got "bumped" by one of the cars that wasn't going very fast, rolled a few times and then got up again and bolted down a neighborhood street. But, jeez! First my dog almost gets eaten by a coyote (which I saw trotting through our side yard today), then I almost see this poor dog get hit, and then I see all these dead deer on the side of the road, all very close to one another. I'm usually not one for superstition, but I seriously hope this isn't some sort of weird omen or something.
Anyway....time to start on the pile of work that I should have done over break, but didn't. Oops!
Ugh it's been cloudy and snowing off and on for the better part of two weeks. My mood is always bizarrely in tune with the weather so this is not fun. Even if it were sunny and I could see something other than snow outside, I'm totally over winter. Summer, please. Where are you? I need you.
This semester's classes aren't quite what I'd call "enjoyable" but I'm getting by...just sort of drowning in reading at the moment, and I have to write some silly poem/pretty sentence/story thing in Spanish. I don't like that stuff in English, let alone Spanish. I'm getting kind of tired of Spanish classes to be honest, actually. Sigh.
I go home for a few days over President's Day weekend (at least I think it's President's Day...?) next weekend. Hopefully Denver won't have all that much snow and I'll be able to see, you know, grass and bushes and sidewalks and all that fun stuff that's completely buried here (there's a snow drift outside my window that's almost as tall as I am O.o)
Anyway no point to this entry...I was just trying to avoid homework for a few minutes.
I'm really not a fan of cold weather. I don't mind "cold" when it's hovering around freezing, even down in the 20s or teens. That's ok, I can do that. A jacket can handle that. A jacket can't, however, handle the -26 degrees that it is right now. More than a minute or two outside and the cold seeps in, though any more than about 5 minutes and you're too numb on most parts of your body to really notice. Nose hair freezes, the fug of your breath lingers in the air long enough to watch it waft 10 feet away from you. If it was even remotely possible that you'd be sweating, that would probably freeze too.
Even though I've lived in Colorado my entire life, every winter seems to spring up on me and surprise me with how very, very cold it is. Especially here in Gunnison. Denver isn't so bad, it gets up in the 40s and even the 50s some days in the middle of January, and the lows are around 10, 15 degrees usually. But in the mountains, and Gunnison especially.....It's the coldest part of the state, being at a kinda-high elevation (7703ft) but in a valley, and as we all learned in grade school, hot air rises! Cold air sinks! So Gunnison is basically a bowl where all the cold air sits. Crested Butte, 30 miles away and I believe about 2000 feet higher, is generally 10 to 20 degrees warmer than Gunnison. Apparently the other day Gunnison was the coldest place in the continental 48 states (shouldn't Alaska be considered "continental" since it's, well, on the continent?), and I've also been told that Gunnison has the coldest average annual temperature in the country, though I find that harder to believe.
BUT STILL. WHAT THE HECK. I'm very much a spring/early summer kinda girl. Anything between 70 and 90 is perfect.
Don't get me wrong though, I still love Gunnison. I suppose I take it for granted that I'm in a teensy little town tucked away in the middle of nowhere in the mountains. Most people go to college in bustling cities in big ugly concrete buildings and have to drive long distances to see something other than a highway and a mall. Gunnison is totally a little town straight out of a Christmas card. It's adorable. I love it but...I'd rather not have to go outside from December through the end of March, beginning of April.
Ok I'm done complaining. Time to brew some tea!
According to my weather Widget: the low today was/will be 23 degrees Fahrenheit. :o
Hello, fall. Welcome to Gunnison.
Halo 3 is waiting for me in my school mailbox. I'm worried that it's going to be scratched, after hearing all the horror stories about scratched Limited Editions floating around. We'll see. I'm not a huge Halo fan, they're fun games, but meh. I've been completely desensitized to any sort of hype and pre-release excitement for pretty much everything since Harry Potter...nothing can compare to that crazed funk I was in for months before July 21. I still squee with joy when I think about the book 7 launch.
I officially changed my advisor to one of the two professors in the Spanish department, and also declared myself as a philosophy minor. There are also, I think, two professors in the philosophy department, which means I'm going to get rather warm and cosy with my Spanish major and philosophy minor. Which is cool, since I like all of those people I've interacted with so far. I won't really get to chat with my advisor about just how all my credits from my year in Barcelona are going to transfer until I meet with said Spanish advisor shortly before the end of semester when I'm to decide on classes for next semester. But that's the only real issue I'm facing, and since I've cleared out all my General Education credits and am 10 credits ahead already, even if I'm horribly behind on my Spanish major I think I shouldn't have much of a problem working that out so that I can graduate on time in the spring of 2009 (ugh that seems so far away!)
Word around the campfire is that it's going to snow here soon. Omgsnow? Here? In the mountains of Colorado?!? Never! If my memory serves me correctly (which it probably doesn't since I was in a crazy drunken funk pretty much....well....all of my freshman year which was the last time I was here) it starts getting cold early- to mid-October. Snow usually hits Denver by the end of October, so it's pretty much guaranteed to hit here a few weeks before it hits Denver. So basically I have a couple weeks of tank tops and flip flops left. By spring, though, once it gets above freezing (it usually lingers around 20 or 10 below, cold enough to freeze your nose hair (no joke! it's really weird and "wtf?" the first time it happens) and to make your snuggly-warm snow jacket crinkle because it gets solidified from the cold) then it's TOTALLY tshirt weather. Right now I get all cold when it's 50, but talk to me in 6 months and 50 degrees will seem like summer.
On the happy end of that news, that means that SNOWBOARDING SEASON IS RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER. From what my sources tell me, the student price for a season pass at Crested Butte (aka Crusty Butt, aka the Best Ski Resort Ever) has dropped a nice $100 from two years ago when I last bought one, down from about $650 to $550. Which is still crazy expensive, but do some research into regularly-priced season passes to bigger and better-known places in CO like Vail, Aspen or Copper, and $550 is a steal. Considering that I'd say the average day of skiing at a decent resort will cost you at least $50 or $60, to get an entire unlimited season (November to April, usually) of amazingness for $550 is pretty damn good.
And despite having been home from Barcelona for four months (jesus christ has it really been that long?!) I still find myself on the good ol' Spanish schedule of eating. Lunch around 2ish, dinner around 9, 10 at night....it's a good deal.
Speaking of eating, I need to start working out. I've lost weight since I've been up here at school (funny how not having your mother's delicious cooking all the time makes you not eat nearly as much...) but I feel that I need to get some more physical activity and just....I dunno....tone myself? Get myself some rock-hard abs and buns. It shouldn't take too long, one perk of my short little pale body is that I can, if I try, lose fat and put on muscle relatively easily (the flipside of that is that I can put on fat and lose muscle just as easily...)
Anyway, I have to take a shower, do said eating and then I have a date with a fine young man named Aristotle. I've already read 3 of the assigned 8 pages, and I must say, even for a philosopher that dude is fucking hard to understand. Alas, this is what I've gotten myself into.
It's SUMMER! It's hot, and worse yet, it's HUMID. I hate humidity! My hair goes "poof" and I can't walk a block without sweating like a pig. Also, I find it disgusting how my leather watch band begins to smell funny when I wear it for a while and it gets sweaty. Ew...
Anyway, life's been good, mas o menos. I had a fabulously lazy weekend, I did absolutely nothing (I even went to bed early - midnight! - one night). I've started studying a tad here and there, after this week I have two weeks of class left and then a week of finals, so I gotta get crackin' on the studying. I finally registered for classes next fall after some issues. And oh, what issues. I'd been spending the past month or so trying to get two simple bits of information out of my advisor and a woman at the registrar's office who I'd been dealing with: my ARC code that would allow me to log in and register, and a time to do so. I finally got the date and time like a couple days before, but still no code, as it had to come directly from my advisor who didn't seem to know her ass from her elbow, so she wasn't helping. So how did I find my ARC number? My mom called and got it. Wtf? They can't tell me, but my mom just randomly decides to give them a call and they're like, "oh sure here's the number, we couldn't give it to your daughter, but we can give it to you!" Um, alright. So I go to register at like 9pm on the evening of the 12th (fuckin' 8 hour time difference), log in and put in my ARC number, and the computer kindly tells me that not only can I not register, but that I'm no longer officially admitted at the college! Great! So I gave them a call and was basically like, "yo bitches, fix this" (just like that, too) and they did, finally, after being put on hold for a while (I sooo don't want to see that phone bill...). But, anyway, it got fixed, so I'm registered for everything I wanted and am once again a student at Western State College of Colorado! Yay.
Anyway, enough about registration. As faithful readers of my sporadic Vox ramblings might recall, I deleted all 150+ pictures on my memory card whilst sitting in a park in Edinburgh (all the pics were from London and Edinburgh). I would also just like to add that the gods must have a sense of humor, as I almost just deleted this entire post just now, which obviously wouldn't be nearly as tragic as the pictures, but...ANYWAY, I seriously digress. A buddy of mine works in data recovery, and is doing me a GINORMOUS favor by recovering the pictures for me free of charge. As soon as I can I'm going to mosey down to the Correos office near here and send it. Expensive shipping be damned, I'm so happy about it you have no idea. :D
My señora outdid herself today in the cooking department. She usually makes tasty vittles, but sometimes she gets a bit too Spanish for my liking and serves some truly weird things. Like today: breaded hamburger. Ew? Her non-breaded "normal" hamburgers are gross enough (nothing against her, every hamburger I've had in Spain has been disgusting, except for Hard Rock, but hey, that's hardly Spanish...). Speaking of Spanish food, I saw a nutrition pyramid the other day that had the usual things like in the US: bread on the bottom, then fruits and protein and dairy and whatnot, but at the top instead of sugar was a little jar of olive oil. I found this highly amusing, because they LOVE their olive oil here. For serious, everything here is made with the damn stuff (probably why the hamburgers taste like poopy la la) and I can't imagine it's all that great for you in excess (and the 5 liter jug of it in the kitchen that's gone from full to half gone in about a month and a half is a tad to excess, I think).
I've gotten into Grey's Anatomy, which is horrible (as if I need something else to obsess over?) It's not quite to the point of obsession, but I can totally see myself camping out in front of my computer for days just watching Grey's. Ugh, nooo! Though I won't let it get in the way of my Battlestar Galactica, and it sure as hell ain't getting in the way of my Harry Potter.
25 days left til I go home! Kinda weird that the year is ending though, it's been such a blast...hopefully I'll have enough money to go out with a bang and not a whimper the next couple weeks. Adios!
So according to Weather.com it's still snowing a tad in Denver, but the news a couple hours ago had live footage and it didn't look TOO horrible, and they said it had let up a bit and should stop snowing tonight. Tomorrow it's supposed to be "sunny," and the airport is scheduled to open at noon. My flight is scheduled to get in at something crazy close to that, like 12:17, so we'll see. I don't care if it's delayed, but if it's cancelled I really might kill something.
I went to bed at like 9 last night and woke up around 9 this morning to my delicious roomservice breakfast. I've done absolutely nothing today except watch a lot of news to keep track of the Denver situation, and a lot of the History Channel. Anyway it went by pretty quickly, I just had dinner (delicious hamburgers and unlimited Diet Coke don't make eating alone a fun experience) and got online to bitch some more and to check Weather.com again because I'm obsessed.
It's very strange to be back in the US. Things are new and clean and shiny, there's English everywhere, I am fully capable of expressing myself exactly how I want to to people, and people are nice and service is spectacular. I've probably dealt with a bunch of assholes here since I arrived, but I haven't noticed because I got so used to it in Spain. Whenever anyone smiles at me, I smile back because I'm so amused by the fact that not only is someone paying me any attention, but they're happy to be doing so. And things are in DOLLARS. I still say "euros" though, and will probably get back in the swing of saying "dollars" right before I leave again.
