January 2025
Snowy Home Alabama
As many of you may have heard, folks down here on the Gulf Coast have recently experienced some — for these parts at least — rather extreme weather.
The weather people are calling it a “Generational” storm, meaning something that only occurs once in a generation. What it has meant to us is about 9 inches of snowfall over the course of an afternoon, and while many of you may scoff at why such a small amount is even worthy of mention, to a couple of native Californians that qualifies as a lot of snow.
In this modern age of course we all knew that it was coming. For days ahead, the remarkably accurate forecasts told us all about it; the when, the what, the how much, all of it. We knew we had four days of cold weather coming and that on Tuesday afternoon we would have this snow event. The YMCA announced reduced hours, other businesses did the same, schools closed, etc. Down here where every other person you meet it seems has either moved down from Michigan or comes down every winter, this sort of thing just isn’t supposed to happen.
At any rate, it happened, it was pretty, the overnight low temp following the snowfall was 11 degrees so nothing melted, and we just hunkered down, planning to stay home and ride it out. While all the relocated northerners presumably know how to drive on the white stuff, we do not so we wanted to minimize our exposure to accidents by suspending our normal activities and staying off the roads.
We wanted to share this ‘happening’ with you and decided that since we had not sent out a message recently this would be a good occasion to do so, just to catch you up on what we’ve been up to over the past several months, so here goes.
Things are generally going along pretty well for us. Back in November we both had bad colds, slowed us right down but they passed. Then shortly before Christmas Kathy injured her back; pinched a nerve that has given her a lot of pain. With care and good meds she is working through that issue and is making good progress. She’s going to Physical Therapy for stretches and other exercises, is back to going to the Y with Rick and is doing limited walking around the park. Still in the tunnel, but the light is getting brighter.
It has actually been a cold winter thus far even before the snow, so Rick has had a difficult time getting much work done on the outside of the coach. He’s been able to wax the painted surfaces, and the car as well, but has not gotten to the fiberglass repairs and refinishing he had hopes of doing this winter; at least not as yet. In a bow to the weather he instead decided to move his efforts inside and has done the painting in the bathroom that has been on the list for awhile. It looks nice and will inevitably lead to other painting in the near future.
We still have no firm plans for summer travels. We assume we will do some traveling, but are reluctant to cover as many miles as we’ve done each of the past few years. We’ll just have to see what we end up doing and let you all know when we can.
We hope you are all doing well and staying healthy, and send you our very best wishes.
Rick & Kathy, in the snowy wilds of South Alabama