Pre-Emptive Panic

I’m pre-emptively panicking over the forecast for this year’s winter. It’s only October but it’s never too early to have a meltdown over what the Farmer’s Almanac predicts. I’d rather just get a jump on it, like Christmas shopping.

I’m hearing that it will be colder and wetter than even our miserable last winter. I believe I even heard something like we will get 10 percent more snow than last year. The Philadelphia area got about 67 inches of snow last winter. So if my math is correct (and it always is), that means next winter we will get …

… that’s 670 inches of snow. Oh my God …

What will we … I mean, how will we live?! That’s the equivalent of over 7 inches of snow every day from Christmas until the first day of spring. Or 11 inches of snow every day for 60 days. Or maybe Mother Nature will be really cruel and just drop all 55 feet of snow in one catastrophic burst on one black (really, white) day. Say, January 10.

Can you imagine? Even if those 670 inches of snow fall gradually, since it will definitely be much colder this year, you know none of that snow will melt. It will stick around, growing taller than the tops of the houses. We won’t be able to see out our windows. The lucky people who drive Hummers will drive them surrounded on either side by high white walls of pure death. I don’t know how we’ll eat … can you live on melted snow for three months? Really, it will be much longer than that. I don’t see that amount of snow melting completely until the Fourth of July.

Well, I’m not going to get caught unprepared this year. There’s plenty we can do to get ready for the guaranteed coming weather apocalypse. This afternoon I’m going to see a man about a cow. I’ll chain her up in our front yard and we’ll have milk all winter so we can survive. Maybe I’ll buy some chickens for eggs and also build a grain silo on our property so we can have an unlimited supply of the only acceptable winter foods.

There is one positive to panicking about the winter: It’s a distraction from my blind terror about catching Ebola from some strangers 1,000 miles away.