Winter Comes to Portland

Okay, I just have to complain for a moment because it's been really, really cold in Portland for about 2 weeks now. Normally, late Fall in Portland means 50 degrees with drizzle, and a low of about 40 degrees overnight. Lately it's been dropping below freezing overnight, and the high gets up to about 40 during the day...but it's been clear and sunny...until yesterday, when it SNOWED!

Unlike other Portlanders, I do not get all giddy on the rare occasion that it snows. I grew up in the Rockies where it snowed ALL THE TIME. My parents forced me to learn how to ski at an early age too, and I hated it because I really dislike being cold and wet. Even though I was a terrible skier, I would occasionally go skiing up until I reached my late teens. I just never understood what was so great about skiing.

However, I love visiting ski resorts...especially Park City. I used to make it a habit of attending showings at the Sundance Film Festival every year, back in the mid-nineties when it wasn't so extremely popular, and a normal person could actually get a hold of tickets. I thought it was fun to spot celebrities at the festival, although I never bugged them or asked them for autographs or anything like that.

Let's see...Winter activities.......my mom sent me a box full of old videotapes of past family Xmas festivities, taken with the camcorder long, long ago. I had promised to transfer all of these tapes to DVDs to give out to everyone this Xmas, and I'm getting there.

Man, has my family owned a lot of dogs over the years! There's extensive holiday video footage of my older brother's late St. Bernard, named Dubage, running around in the snow. He was a very sweet dog most of the time, as long as he wasn't in the presence of my younger brother's dog, named Peanut (he was a large and friendly Cocker Spaniel). We had to be very careful that the two dogs never came into contact with each other, because the one time that happened, Dubage grabbed Peanut by the scruff of the neck and tried to shake him to death. My younger brother had to get in the middle of them to save Peanut's life, and ended up with a serious bite, and in need of dozens of stitches in his arm. Anyway, when my older brother moved to Liverpool to escape some trouble with the law (and in case you're the kind of loser who is busy calling the authorities to report my website, my brother is totally in the clear now)...I ended up spending a lot of time looking after Dubage until another home could be found for him. He was usually very kind and gentle, but he was constantly drooling.

I guess my family was always relatively normally over the holidays. We would get into fights about inane things such as games of Trivial Pursuit and Scrabble. My brothers and I were always ultra-competitive about board games for some reason. Which reminds me, I recall an Xmas several years ago which was one of the first times I met the man who is now my father-in-law. We were over at his house, and for some reason we all decided to play a game of Trivial Pursuit, and I somehow managed to win against everyone in my husband's (then my boyfriend's) family...even his dad, who is supposedly a very smart guy (smart enough to have finished college at the age of 19 or 20). I wasn't even trying to win the game, but I did. Thinking back now, that's probably when my father-in-law started to dislike me. Apparently he was humiliated that his son's girlfriend beat him at a game of Trivial Pursuit. Isn't that the most moronic behavior? But I digress...