As long as I can remember every time we get a winter storm I'm regaled with stories of the legendary winter of nineteen-seventy-seven, seventy-eight. This winter is not remembered, as you might imagine, for being the year I was born. Rather, my birth is merely a passing footnote in the saga of one of the worst winters in living memory: "Seventy-Eight, the year you were born, now that was a bad winter." That sort of thing. Apparently the roads were impassable for weeks on end and my mom had to stay in a motel in Great Falls for a week prior to my due date, other-wise there would have been a good chance of me being born in a snow drift.
Now jump ahead to two-thousand-eight and imagine my schadenfreudic joy when this winter suddenly deteriorated into the worst winter that I can remember. The temperature dropping to negative thirty Fahrenheit with wind chills to negative fifty and drifts three to four feet high. I've gotten stuck while feeding cows three times this week (and my dad once) and ruined an air-filter on our feed pick-up by trying to remove the snow that had clogged it so thoroughly that it would no longer run. So, as you may have guessed it's been a somewhat long week, but my primary comforting thought is that for the next thirty years (at least) my daughter Sophia will hear ad nauseam all the stories about that winter after she was born. And as she grows ever more exasperated about being told the same winter horror stories year after year I'll be there with a sympathetic ear to tell her: "Two-thousand-eight, now THAT was a bad winter..."
That poor girl.