"Everybody talks about the weather"

When I was an adolescent, I remember my father (a junior high school teacher) putting a quotation from Mark Twain (below left) on a piece of poster board for use at his school. The quote was something to the effect that "When I was 14 my father was so ignorant, I could hardly stand to have the old man around. However by the time I was 21, I was amazed how much my father had learned in the interim." At the time I couldn't figure out why my father liked the quote so much, by the time I was the father of an adolescent I understood completely.

Twain's lines are like that, another was (again paraphrasing) "What bothers me about the bible isn't the parts that I don't understand, it is the parts that I do understand." All of this was brought to mind by thinking about another Twain quote in relationship to yesterday's snow storm - "Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." I learned once again yesterday never to anticipate the weather - prepare for it yes, but anticipate it, never.

My experiences with running have taught me this lesson and I would have thought I would have remembered it. More than once there was a forecast for heavy rain early in the morning so I either didn't get up to run or got up looking for a reason not to run, when, in fact, the promised/threatened rain never materialized. As a result I developed the attitude that if I am scheduled to run, I plan on doing so and don't anticipate that the weather will be a problem. That's probably part of why I have become an AWR (all weather runner) unlike, for example, DT who has been known to consider a slight drizzle, the Johnstown flood, but I digress.

I haven't been running recently while awaiting an appointment with the podiatrist which was scheduled, of course, for Monday morning at 8:30. With a forecast of a foot of snow, I was sure that the office hours would be cancelled (foot problems don't tend to be medical emergencies). So once again, I anticipated the weather and was wrong. I should have set the alarm early enough to allow me enough time to get there, if the storm wasn't as bad as forecast. Of course, it wasn't, we had only a couple of inches of snow and with adequate time, I could have cleaned off the car and gotten there on time.

I was not pleased as this realization set in about 7:45. So now the appointment is off for another week and I can only hope that I have learned this lesson once and for all. We may not be able to do anything about the weather, but we can certainly prepare for it or, at least, prepare better than I did this time around.