Drunk people

My wife is leaving in about an hour, flying off to one of the Dakotas to visit her sister. I'm not going with her. This is partly because my parents are arriving while she's gone, but also partly because I simply don't feel like visiting a place that has plenty of snow, then returning to this dismally blue desert town.

There's this thing my family has about cold weather. We love it. We left Texas when I was just two years old and settled in Alaska for the next four or five years. Then we returned to Texas, but ten years later, we were in Alaska again. Somehow I ended up in Nevada, and my sister in Washington. My parents are still in Alaska.

But not one of our hometowns has seen snow yet, and we're all going slightly insane. We'll all congregate here for a week, giving gifts and staring sadly at the dry streets, and back in Alaska and Washington, the winds will hurl truckloads of snow against doors while my family watches the news and cries.

By the time they get back it'll be dry, like nothing happened, and before they know it, spring will arrive, and they'll have missed everything.

There are drunk people on my boss's radio right now.