Publisher’s Perspective

Chad Koenen

We all have those people we love to hate—the ones who know your weakness and do everything they can to rub your nose in your shortcomings. 

After spending most of my Monday and Tuesday digging out from what seemed to be at least 2 feet of snow, even though the National Weather Service “claims” we only got 9-10 inches of the white stuff, Mother Nature has proven its point that I am in terrible shape. I came into the office early on Monday morning like we typically do on deadline day, and left about noon, only to find that several drifts in our driveway had already gotten so deep that we couldn’t get our cars from the road to the garage. 

I’m sure someone was laughing as Dani and I shoveled portions of our lengthy driveway enough to get our vehicles off of the road and into the warmth of our garage. Even before the winds picked up, many of the drifts were knee high. Of course that was after I spent the better part of my morning shoveling the newspaper office sidewalk and back step so I wouldn’t have to worry about it quite as much the next day (even though as quickly as I shoveled the step outside our door the snow would reappear).

After finishing the newspapers at home on Monday night, I came back to the office on Tuesday morning, only to find that all my hard work of shoveling the day before was for naught. The snow drift on our back step was about knee deep once again as I broke out our shovel and started to move snow once again.

Over the past few years I have gotten a lot less active. I have been busy at work and chasing kids around from one event to the next. Needless to say Mother Nature was probably laughing a bit as I continued to hunch over due to being out of breath as I tried to move snow from one spot to the next. My children often joke that I look and act much older than I am and not in a positive way. 

What I found most interesting about last week’s snow storm was that it occurred 100 years to the day that another large snow storm basically brought life as we know it to a standstill. The 1922 snow storm left about a foot of snow on the area, and I suspect back then shovels were working overtime since snowblowers were probably nothing more than a pipe dream.

Regardless of whether you like snow or not, I think we can all agree that there are easier ways to get a workout than piling and moving snow in a losing battle. Hopefully we are closer to the end of winter than the beginning, even though the state basketball tournaments are still a few weeks away and we are almost guaranteed to get a snowstorm that weekend.