in like a lion(-ish)

 On Friday, March 1st, H was already fretting by dinnertime.  The weather had been going on for days about the storm moving into the Cottonwood canyons: warm and windy Friday; colder, high winds, thunder-snow and heavy snowfall Saturday; not as windy but very cold and snowy Sunday.  Some sources were talking a potential for 42 inches of snow by the time it was over.  The fretting focused around the fact that high winds means lift holds, thundersnow means lift holds and so much snow means high avalanche danger and really messy roads.  I wasn't fretting.  None of that forecast sounded like anything I wanted to be involved with.

And boy was it windy!  It picked up Friday night, kept it up all through the night and was even worse come Saturday morning.  Like, shake the house / flip tractor-trailers on the interstate windy.  H reluctantly decided to not go up to Alta on Saturday - his first time being in the house on a Saturday morning since before ski season started in November.  I'm sure he was second guessing himself all day, especially since the precipitation part storm didn't show up until just after 2 p.m.  The winds dropped dramatically and it first graupeled, then hailed, then some thunder and lightning, before segueing to wet snow.  Powder Mountain hadn't bothered opening at all, citing the high winds.  The Cottonwood Canyons resorts opened, with some wind holds, until the lightning arrived ... and then they all shut things down.

Good sunrise from earlier in the week

Milton and I found it a little disconcerting to have H in the house but we didn't let him distract us.  We did a four mile walk in those strong winds - we had to dodge tumbleweeds flying down the street - and a nice lady told him he had "cute feet."  Then we did a quick run to Ocean Mart in Sandy for some specialty ingredients I needed for new recipes I want to try.  I could easily spend multiple hundreds of dollars there, there's so much I want to try: all the spices, condiments (chili-garlic sauces, banana ketchup, fermented bean curd, different vinegars and soy sauces), fresh fruits and vegetables, noodles and tofu, frozen buns and rolls and lumpia ... I got out of there with dark soy sauce, Shaoxing rice cooking wine, sesame paste, sambal oelek, tamarind paste, chili crisp, fresh shiitake mushrooms and long bok choy, extra firm tofu, a bamboo steamer and, my one impulse buy, Thai-spiced vegan jerky.  I love Ocean Mart.

Back home, I made vegetable broth from veggie scraps in the freezer, a vegan Nantucket cranberry pie dehydrated the shiitakes I didn't need right away, and made sesame noodles for dinner.  When the storm arrived, the streetlights all came on at 2 p.m. and we stood at the window, watching the snow come down.  It had been 63 F and sunny earlier in the week but March is now here and with a bit of a roar.