QST de N7GMT

OK, so whose idea was it to hold the Payson Golden Onion Days Parade in the freezing, hail-laden, nigh-hurricane yesterday?! Seriously wet. And cold. Those poor Queens and Attendants up there on their floats. The Drill Teams, Bands, and other assorted marchers. Yikes!

Here, let me show you what I mean:

Incoming storm (with reports of hail on its way)

Color Guard at the head of the Parade
(They’re not going to let a little rain and wind stop them!)

National Guard (hopefully dressed for the weather)

After that, it got down-right nasty out there. The winds were whipping along, rain was coming down in sheets. Nearly everyone stayed right on parading though:

A soggy marching band

A soggy float

Soggy pipers

Not everyone let a bit of damp get their spirits down. Apparently they grow them plucky down in Santaquin. Here we see Miss Santaquin and her Attendants really doing their best to show us they’re having a grand time, the sassy wenches! Way to go, gals!

Miss Santaquin and her “Attitudes”

We were operating at the announcer booths so we could feed them line-up changes and call in any problems. I was actually under the Push-Up shelter thingy for the announcer, so I only got wet from the waist down (about where my rain-coat stopped), but with the temperature drop and the wind-chill from 20-50 mph winds, I can only imagine how miserable some of those parade folks were.

As it was, we lost the mountain-top repeater for a bit — possibly due to the lightning in the area — and had to switch to a backup frequency. Other than that (and the weather) the parade went very smoothly.

Certainly not something anyone will be forgetting any time soon.

Oh, and do you know what puncture weeds are, or “goats heads”? These little beggars completely covered the empty lot where we were setup. A few folks came through in flip-flops — which, given the weather, I thought was insane anyway — but no one seemed to get stuck very bad. It took me a while to pull out all the goats heads stuck to the bottom of my shoes when I got home, and longer to pull out all the broken off spikes. These things are vicious! Take a closer look at the tires on this pickup that had backed up to the sidewalk so they could watch the parade from the bed.

OK, so what if it’s the third of December; who’s counting? Other than my boy, of course. And my oldest daughter. It’s not like I promised I would put up the Christmas lights this weekend … <sigh> except that I did.

But it wasn’t my fault that we got four inches of snow. We never get snow in our part of town—well, almost never. If the benches and foothills get lots of snow, we’ll get a skiff. (That is indeed a word that can be applied to snow. It means “slightly more than a dusting” I think. Just ask Mark Eubank, the former weather man on KSL News.)

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