After the Holidays

I don't know if this is the case with most people, but as soon as we ring in the new year, I turn the page on the holiday season and start taking all of the Christmas decorations down. Everything from the lights, the tree, and putting away my Christmas music. It's amazing how it works, really. There's something inside of me that grows tired with the holiday season. I just don't want to deal with it anymore until December 1 of the next year. Even the slightest mention of Christmas after January 1st, whether it's a holiday jingle on the radio or a Christmas image on the TV. I am tempted to flip the channel in disgust. "Christmas is OVER! Get that junk outta here." And this coming from the person who's second favorite holiday is Christmas.

I used to find Christmas much more joyous than I do now. I probably mentioned it in an earlier blog, but for me, when you're an adult, Christmas is not as enjoyable. YOU have to buy presents to almost everyone in your family. YOU have to do the decorating. YOU have to send the Christmas cards. When you're a kid, you just sit back, relax, be lazy on your Christmas vacation, open a ton of presents on Christmas day, eat a ton of cookies and candy, and play with all of your new toys until school is back in session. I mean honestly, you didn't have to worry about one single thing, except if Santa was going to come to your house this Christmas. I remember doing the whole "put the cookies and milk out for Santa" routine. Oh yeah, and write a list to Santa, and even see Santa in the mall (but I was often petrified of seeing Santa at the mall - I only remember one time that I ever went and sat on his lap). When you're grown up, you're either working right up until Christmas day or if you're like me, you actually have to work Christmas day. I used to do all sorts of fun activities during the Christmas season when I was younger. But now, hardly nothing! Maybe that's why I am glad it's over on January 1. I guess I am just sick of the whole holiday season. It's gotten so commercialized anyways.

So this will be the last I write about Christmas until this coming December. I am done with it.

We still hardly have any snow where I live. We probably picked up a trace of snow today, and in a few locations along the way to work, around one to two inches of snow has fallen. Still, not a lot. Incredible, considering that we're almost 1/3rd of the way through January. As much as I've enjoyed this snowless winter here in Upper Michigan, I am beginning to become concerned for the people that depend on this weather. In fact, the mine where I work is getting prepared for possible drought conditions this coming spring due to a lack of snowfall. We use a lot of water in the process of mining low grade ore into a high quality product. Much of the water we use is recycled, however, we do lose some. The mine depends on reservoirs, lakes, and streams in order to bring additional water into the process. However, those reservoirs are already at low levels and with the lack of snow cover, we can't really count on the spring snow melt to bring those levels up. A dry spring would only make matters worse. For the plant operators and assistant plant operators, we have been told to conserve water as much as we can. We control much of what the plant uses. So if we use as little as possible, that may help things in the long term. In the meantime, mine management has started planning for the possible drought in the spring. They may either hook-up to a new reservoir, lake, or stream to pump water to the plant, fix our water reclaim system which would better control the usage of water in the plant (right now we have many pumps that are broken (including four variable speed pumps that would run on their own), or do nothing and try to run the plant how things are and hope we get lots of snow between now and April. More than likely, they will do the last two, as the first option may become too costly for mine management.

So yes, this snowless winter may come to bite me in the butt as well. As much as I like driving 60 MPH on dry roads in January, I don't want to be on layoff in the spring if we don't get enough snow. It sounds like we might start adding to our snow cover this coming weekend with a low forming to our south. If that low comes into the Great Lakes Region and strengthens, we could get a lot of snow. At this point of the season, one can only hope.