Blog Machine City

This morning, my windshield looked like this:

More pictures of “spring” here.

Even the Winter Duelers were no use

Our next truck will have 4 wheel drive and our next house will be in the suburbs.

Those are the two main lessons of Snowpocalypse 2010, a storm that I suppose will go down in memory like the Halloween blizzard of 1991, except that it actually happened during winter, which means it may just be subsumed into the general misery of Minnesota’s famous season.

The first lesson may seem obvious, but it’s easy to forget that while we average 45.6″ of snow a year (source: Minnesota Climatology Working Group), it is usually spread out over five months (6-9″ per month, November through March). This makes for easy driving and quick clearing by the legions of plow trucks in the state’s employ.

Snow tires on the rear-wheel drive truck have been adequate (even good) for the last 3 seasons, but these conditions proved to be too much. It didn’t help that our street didn’t see a plow until about 6:30 PM Sunday, over 24 hours after the last snow fell.

So close and yet so far

Just north of our house (by one block) is another city (as pictured at right), and it was with great frustration that I saw that the side streets north of the boundary were already plowed curb-to-curb by Sunday afternoon, while south of it (just 50 feet away! at bottom of photo) snow was piled up as if on a backcountry road.

Mrs. Melobi was sick all weekend and I didn’t have anywhere to go, so I was content to stay home, but by midday Sunday the cabin fever was starting to set in. Maddeningly, I saw cars drive by that had no right to be in snow that deep, and yet seemed to be traversing the shin-deep ruts without difficulty. I knew, though, that either of our vehicles would be doomed should I dare venture out of the driveway – and I raged. It was almost as if everyone else was driving in a world with different physical laws. How else would that little Toyota Corolla be driving around in a blizzard? How did that minivan survive, when the snow between the ruts was up to the grill and the woman driving had the gas pedal to the floor, tires howling on packed snow as she plowed that snow at 5 miles per hour (with the speedo at 40 or 50)?

Maybe the difference wasn’t physics but foolhardiness – with nowhere to go and the risk so high, my mind boggled at the prospect of even making the attempt. But next time, it won’t be an issue, since we’ll be living in a suburb that plows.

Last week, I came across a remarkable site called Listening to Katrina. It’s both a description of one family’s experience fleeing Hurricane Katrina and one man’s take on emergency preparedness.

I tore through the pages on his site in about two days, and immediately started taking his ideas to heart. To her great credit, Mrs. Melobi didn’t give me the stink-eye when I brought up the topic – indeed, she embraced it fully, even being the first to jump out the bedroom window as a test of our fire escape plan!

The great thing about the author’s ideas is that he is both a “survival enthusiast” and a pragmatic, regular guy. This gives his ideas a solid grounding in reality, which is different than many other writings about survival, which emphasize the Zombie Apocalypse sort of scenario, rather than the more prosaic Electrical-Fire-Burns-Your-House-Down scenario. He uses a lifeboat analogy to make this point:

Sit with me a moment in this lifeboat. There are a number of people here. Smart people. People with skills. People with forethought. Men and women of a Serious Nature. We ask our simple question, “So…what’s the plan?”, and they respond without skipping a beat. “We’re going to SURVIVE! We’ve got lots of SUPPLIES, and we can FISH and HUNT, and we know all the right things to do to LIVE in this LIFEBOAT! We KNOW how to distill SEA WATER, and we can DRINK our own URINE until the still is up and RUNNING!”

[snip] While I enjoy a nice warm glass of urine as much as the next guy, I really want to be in a different lifeboat. I don’t know about you, but I want to be in a lifeboat that is seaworthy, yes, but light and fast. I want to get back to dry land, cold beer, juicy steak, warm blankets, and hot pie as soon as possible. Drifting the open ocean with a bunch of people – no matter how skilled or prepared they are – is not my idea of life.

Indeed. If nothing else, thinking about disaster planning got me to clean out the file cabinet, and seeing the Mrs. crawl out the window was pretty humorous.

I plan to write more about my take on this guy’s ideas – his stuff is obviously pitched at a southern audience, living in the hurricane zone, and so doesn’t take into account the considerations of northern life. For now, though, I think everyone should read at least the first few pages of his stuff – it’s a real eye opener.

The last weekend of January has now become a near-tradition of skiing and drunken insanity at the Lutsen resort in northern Minnesota, thanks to the efforts of the Pontiff.

No shit, there I was, and here are my pictures. (By the way, the last photo is from the start of the John Beargrease sled dog marathon in Duluth, where I stopped briefly on my way home from Lutsen.)