Cleaning up the mess...

Let’s start with the snow. If you haven’t heard Madrid had over 20 inches Friday night/Saturday and you have to go back at least 50 if not 100 years to see anything close. It was wild and beautiful and grown ups and kids alike were out in force (with masks!) to play in it on Saturday. There’s a YouTube clip of a massive snowball fight on Gran Via (the Broadway of Madrid) with both sides focused on pelting a lone skier as he tries to skate by. Think about a freak 20 inch snow storm in downtown LA and you begin to imagine the possibilities for first timer fun.

Now given the passage of all that time with a little climate change thrown in for good measure you might guess that the snow removal plans and capabilities would be a tad rusty…and you’d be right. Since it hit on the weekend, until this morning, nothing was done to clear sidewalks or side streets and barely a lane of traffic on the major Avenidas managed to get pounded down and passable by mostly pedestrians and a very occasional car. Today Madrileños learned that shoveling snow would have been a lot easier than chipping ice. We’re expecting a deep, hard freeze within the next 24-48 hours so orthopedic surgeons are warming up in the bullpen…and oh yeah that Covid thing is still around…big time.

While we chip away at that mess, we keep time by shaking our heads at the bigger mess in Washington. At a lunch yesterday with 4 US Ex-Pats out of our max 6 at the table there was a lot of that while our Spanish host and friends tried their best not to giggle between bites of cordero lechal. The local reactions continue to swing back and forth from a mixture of shock & incredulity to mocking laughter.

The House Draft of the Article of Impeachment is a start, but only that until a sufficient number of Republicans take a similar stand. All levels of participation in this “day of infamy” starting with its chief instigator need to be made an example that discourages what will otherwise be an escalation of outrages with even more violent and deadly consequences.

For some time, Congress has been the branch of government held in lowest esteem by most of the people they purportedly represent. Now that they have been directly attacked with their safety and very own lives put in peril by the prompting of the Executive Branch of the same Government we’ll see if they can get out of their own way to take a stand to at least protect themselves and hopefully by extension, the rest of us as well.