Go ahead and freak

Everybody else is. "OMG snow's coming!"

The weather jockeys are all out of breath about it. Predicting this and that. Of course there's the complication that they really don't know for sure what's going to happen. Maybe that's why they're covering their bets in vagueness. But for a change they have something to talk about.

My mom's out of breath because she lives in the country where electricity and phones get knocked fairly frequently. (Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't want to be an SPS guy messing with electricity in a blizzard.) So my wife and I took her a giant cooler of water, an extra lantern and some reading material.

My wife's out of breath to the extent we'll be staying in town at her mom's so we don't get trapped away from work. What a drag that would be.

One sister wants to know "Are we going to die?" Okay, the other one is happy she can stay in her cave in front of a fire and eat candy with her dogs. Maybe that balance out.

And there's a general buzz of out of breathness in the newsroom because who knows what could happen.

Are we going to die?

Probably not. This 12 inches, maybe, forecast sounds like a cakewalk compared to other snows we've gotten. I've been snowed into Amarillo for almost a week before I could crawl home back to Wildorado on I-40. It really did look like a parking lot. People were getting out of their cars and visiting in the bright sun after the storm. I could have walked home faster.

So we'll see. All we can do is wait. And no, I'm not making fun of the people and animals who will really suffer. I love a snow, but I hate that. It's just that the air seems to be vibrating. What's the big deal? We live on the tundra so just be careful out there, and after all, we need the moisture.