The Inversion and Other Weather

This weather is beyond my ken.

Weather in Utah is usually strange, but over the past few weeks it's been stranger than usual.

First, there was the inversion. The inversion is a dramatic drop in air quality that we periodically experience. It's like playing the Floor Is Lava except it's the Air Is Inversion, which is a much worse game because there's no safe place and everybody suffers.

I've heard a lot of people blame their illnesses on the inversion, and I was excited about this. I thought maybe it was kind of like when Mercury was in retrograde and people just blamed everything on that. Like, "No wonder I had to get braces twelve years ago! Mercury is totally in retrograde right now!" It's always good to have a scapegoat, and so I was looking forward to making the inversion the scapiest goat of all.

However, apparently we could only blame ears, nose, and throat problems on the inversion because there are actually some scientific reasonings behind that stuff. But it worked out, because I had a lot of ear, nose, and throat problems during the inversion. My throat burned. My nose ran. And my ears popped constantly, like I was deep-sea diving or riding in the Empire State Building elevator with a cold.

To be fair, I often have ear, nose, and throat problems. Such problems aren't really new, since I've always had pet allergies, asthma, and a penchant for sinus infections. I also had the croup when I was two or three years old. (I remember it surprisingly vividly. First my parents ran a hot shower in the bathroom and made me breathe the steam. Then they took me out on the porch near the driveway and let me breathe the fresh night air. I'd hardly ever been outside at that time of night before, and I found it very interesting and beautiful. That's probably when I realized I was a night person, not a day person.)

But I wasn't the only one who was sick. Everybody was sick during the inversion. Baby Brother coughed and coughed and threw up blood and coughed some more. My parents discussed whether to take him to the emergency room, which you normally don't debate when little boys are throwing up blood. But as my parents' insurance now charges them literally 2,300% more for emergency room visits than it did a few years ago, and as my mother the RN thought the blood might just be from a broken blood vessel, they watched Baby Brother carefully and waited a little while to see what happened. Nothing happened, except that Baby Brother coughed a lot more and went to sleep. But there was no more blood...and he was soon fine. Which, let me tell you, I was very glad of.

After several days, the horrible inversion cleared away, and the sun came out. And boy, when it arrived, it really arrived. We went from weather as depressing as any that Charles Dickens ever made an orphan endure on the streets of London and into what looked...and felt...just like spring.

This beautiful weather went on for a few days. Then, one day, a storm rolled in,

It literally rolled, like the waves off the coast of Kealia Beach. A guy at my work stood by the window, eating chips and watching the storm chase away the sunshine. Then there were horrible winds. Then hail. Then thick, thick snow. And then, within a few hours, it was sunny again, and it's more or less been that way ever since.

I do not get the weather in this state.

Road Trippin'

A Shakespeare play is considered either a tragedy or a comedy based on the ending. It's a comedy if it ends with a marriage and a tragedy if it ends with death.

Going by that classification, road trips are tragedies, for they almost never end in marriage and almost always involve the participants being bored to death (if not killed by their traveling companions and stuffed in a trunk).

For serious, though. Road trip = 10% adventure and 90% brain-melting, body-numbing boredom. I should know--I just came home from one.

My family set off on the trip lively humans capable of intelligent conversation and returned weakened and stupid by the many, many hours in the Mormon Assault Vehicle. For it took many, many hours to get where we were going. For we were going to Nauvoo, Illinois, not-so-recently the home of Mormon pioneer ancestors on my mom's side.

A brief commentary on each of the states we passed through:

Utah. People working together. What a great place to be. Blessed from heaven above, it's the land that we love. This is the place.

Wyoming. Characterized by semi-interesting rock formations and cheaper gas.

Nebraska. Flatter than a pizza, a sheet of rice paper, or Flat Stanley. There were no mountains, which was horrifying. From Nebraska on, I had no sense of direction.

Also, I got the feeling that nothing exciting ever happens in Nebraska. Please feel free to provide evidence to the contrary.

Iowa. You really ought to give it a try.

We saw a million Iowan businesses with 'River City' on them. It made me like The Music Man that much more.

Illinois. About two years ago, Little Sister did not know that the 's' in 'Illinois' is silent. This brought great joy into my life.

Missouri. I spent the entirety of my time in Missouri calling it 'Missoura,' as I have been led to believe that is the proper pronunciation. No one corrected me, so either I'm right or I was bringing great joy into their lives (see above commentary on Illinois).

Kansas. When we stopped for gas in Kansas, Little Sister suddenly said, "I want there to be tornado while we're here. Not a big one. Just a small one that will follow alongside our van but not destroy anything in its path."

Colorado. It was windy whilst we were in Colorado. I had a sudden desire to spit on the concrete of a parking lot during one of our stops.

Now, I don't randomly spit in public. Excepting those times when the Chess Master would spit in the grass after track. And I would too because he did. We'd spit, and then we'd jaywalk.

I'm not proud of it, okay?

Anyways, I had that sudden desire to spit, but I had a just as sudden image of the spit being caught by the wind and striking the face of the guy gassing up his car a few feet away.

Other than that, I slept through most of Colorado. Also, listened to my mother traumatize my brothers by telling stories of giving birth.

I was a little traumatized, as well.

So yeah. That's an overview of the wheres and wherewithal of the trip.

I was only going to write one or two blog posts about this trip. But it ended up being so interesting, Imma write 3-plus instead.

Road trippin' posts, ho!

You Wear What You Eat

Every summer, Hometown throws an international fair featuring dancers from all across the world.

I love, love, love this fair. Apart from the dancers, there are crafts and delicious food. This summer I convinced Porch to go with me.

This is the line I used to convince Porch to go with me: "It'll be a multicultural experience!" I guess it's either a good line or he just has nothing better to do, because this is the second year I've gotten him to come to the fair.

This year, after carefully studying the merchandise at every booth (wooden shoe key chains from Holland! Hibiscus-print dresses from some Polynesian Island! Silverware wind chimes made by local artists!), we decided it was time to eat. We studied the food selection even more carefully than we studied the merchandise and finally chose Thai food.

I purchased red chicken curry with bamboo, fried rice, and a spring roll. Porch got the curry and the rice and some cashew chicken. We sat down at a table beneath a tree to eat our delicious food and drink tiny free cups of water, accompanied by some unknown women and a prepubescent boy. All was well. Except for the annoyance of the wind, that is. The wind persistently snatched up our napkins and ruffled our hair. It made eating the amazing Thai food a little less enjoyable.

Just when Porch cleared his plate of almost everything except driblets of sauce, fwap! His too-light plate overturned in the wind. The cashew chicken sauce and the curry sauce and little bits of food all splattered artistically on Porch's t-shirt.

I tried not to laugh. Really I did. I succeeded, too. Mostly. At least I didn't all-out bust up like the prepubescent boy at our table did. As we excused ourselves, we could still hear his laughter and the scolding from one of the ladies, "It's not funny."

I finally busted up once we got to the parking lot. So did Porch.

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: I kind of want to tell this story in a blog post, but I can't think of a good way to end it. 'And then, Porch was covered with sauce!' Is that funny?

PORCH: (examining his shirt) I think there's some rice, too.

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: 'And then, Porch was covered with rice!' Is that better? Rice is funny, right?

Porch never did respond to that. It was almost like he was avoiding answering the question to spare my feelings. I don't know why, though, because obviously rice is never anything but hilarious.

And then, Porch was covered with rice! The End.

See? Hilarious.

Say Wind

One of my nonGospel rules of life: Don't pay too much attention to the weatherman. Or weather websites. Or the weather app on your iPod. Or a weathervane. Or a psychic. Or anything else that tries to tell you what the weather of the future is going to be like.

Because guess what? It's probably going to be wrong.

So the other day, we were supposed to have an intense windstorm where I live. Mom ran around the house, unplugging things to avoid electric surges if the power went out. She handed out emergency flashlights and advised me to set my phone alarm for the next morning instead of relying on my obnoxious, electricity-using clock. I took her advice, but skeptically, oh so skeptically, because I knew just how tricky these weather types can be.

And sure enough, when the next morning came, was there an intense windstorm raging throughout the town?

Nope. Just a moderate wind, a light snowfall, and a bit of a chill in the air.

I didn't say "I told you so," but that was more because everybody else was asleep than because I'm a nice person. I guess, however, that if I really wasn't a nice person, I would have woken them up for the express purpose of I-told-you-soing. So I suppose the jury's still out on that one.

I got ready for school, grabbed my puffy winter coat, and headed out for Nameless Utah College.

However. As soon as I pulled out of the driveway, the expected intense wind started up. Clouds of snow swirled in the air and brushed the sides of my vehicle.

Well, I thought this is annoying. And it was annoying. It was so annoying that I started to feel, well, annoyed.

BUT. It got WORSE. At the bus stop, the wind was blowing from the north. Guess what? My bus comes from the north. So instead of peering into the distance to look for the bus, I had to turn my back on the expected bus or else my face probably would have been blown off in the wind. And while that would have been pretty uncomfortable, standing backwards in the wind was not much funner. 'Cause I still got wind on me, just... on my back. Also I had to worry about whether or not a tree or a small house might blow into my car, which was parked across the street.

Finally, the bus came and took me away to College City, where I was in for a big shock.

See, one of my other nonGospel rules of life is this: Whatever the weather is where I live, in College City it's always going to be about ten times worse. If it's snowing at my house, it's snowing ten times harder by the college. If it's a little warm by my house, it's a veritable oven at the college. And so on and so forth.

I got to College City expecting ten times as much wind and snow. Instead I got there to find, like, six and a half times less. It was utterly bruising to my ego, because my ego thinks it and I have the best rules of life ever.

"Don't worry," I said to my ego. "We're probably still right. The wind must have died down back home too, that's all."

With that happy thought, I went through the rest of my day. When I got on the bus to get home, the wind was very mild, so I of course expected to find it at least fairly mild when I got off the bus.

Well, it wasn't. In fact, that wind was freakishly strong.

To get to my car, I had to walk into the wind. Which meant that I was going at the approximate pace of a crippled turtle. Which just wouldn't do, because I had things to do and places to be and no time to make like a handicapped reptile. So I started running into the wind.

Imagine, if you will, a turquoise marshmallow that actually is a human in a puffy turquoise coat. Now imagine that marshmallow human running into a very strong wind, pumping its arms with all its might like a thing possessed. Now also imagine that this marshmallow only gets twenty minutes of exercise a day and because of that is somewhat out of shape and because of that is huffing and puffing like a chain smoker using an inhaler.

That's basically what I looked like.

Finally I made it to my car, completely out of breath but very pleased with myself. I unlocked my car and climbed in. Then I happened to notice a kid sitting in the next car. He was watching me, and, I highly suspected, had been since I started running. If he could say something to me in that moment, I figured he would say, "You're a loser."

And then I would say, "Au contraire, mon ami." And then I would hope that he didn't speak legit French. Because if he did he might say something in French back to me. And the only other thing in French I could thing of was "Mon petit chou." Which I'm pretty sure means, "My little cabbage." Which really doesn't add much to a conversation.

Then I drove home. On the way home I realized that the steering wheel was shaking. And I was like, "Why is the steering wheel shaking?" Then I thought that the brake was making a weird noise. And that the entire car was trembling.

First I thought my car was broken. Then I realized that it wasn't broken. The shaking and the weird noises came from the buffeting of the wind. It was so strong it was rattling my poor car right to the bones!

That was pretty disconcerting, but the last straw was when I got home. When I got home, the mailbox was wide open.

Now, this sent me into a bit of a panic. I love to get mail. Because I am a college student with friends who are all either a) married, b) living in a different city, c) just as busy and unavailable as I am, or d) all of the above, my soul often feels lonely. Getting mail makes my soul less lonely. Letters are the best, particularly from Best Friend Boy or other missionary friends, but I also enjoy getting newsletters, thank-you cards for wedding gifts, and even bills. Well, no. Not bills. My soul isn't quite that lonely.

The thought of not getting my mail was more than I could bear, so I dashed up and down the curb of my yard and the neighbor's, still looking like a turquoise marshmallow, still panting ridiculously, and pinwheeling my arms in a most spastic manner.

I was thinking that the wind had blown open the mailbox and stolen my mail, but I didn't find a single piece of correspondence lying about. Finally, I was forced to conclude that either the wind had blown my mail into lands unreachable and unknown, or that we simply hadn't gotten any mail that day at all.

I don't know which of those scenarios would be worse.

Anyways, this experience taught me three important things:

1) From now on, I should listen more to the weatherman and his ilk. This will save me a world of confusion and possibly some ego-bruising.

2) To avoid the trauma of not getting mail, I should write a postcard and send it to myself every single day. It will be like Fraggle Rock. Except without Fraggles. And without the rock. Unless I can find a postcard that has Fraggles on it. Or a rock.

3) I should invent an ingenious new system for the door of the mailbox, in order to avoid its being blown open and the mail possible being scattered to lands unreachable and unknown.

I'm thinking something with magnets.