It finally looks like Winter.

 January 4

 The snow we got over the weekend is still here--mostly. Most surfaces were too warm for the initial accumulation to stay as snow so it melted and then froze into a layer of ice on top of which the rest piled up. Finally tally--about four inches. The roads were well cleared by yesterday when we had to go out and get lab work done for Mom's doctor's appointment next week.

I have seen numerous stories about the "labor shortage" with pundits trying to explain the phenomenon with everything from "lazy" workers who socked away the overly generous government COVID payment and unemployment to low pay and stingy benefits in the hardest hit industries. Yesterday I saw one that pointed to something no one else has acknowledged: deaths. Our economy has lost more than 800k people and a large fraction of those occurred among the primary working age population. That number doesn't include the deaths to which COVID contributed without being the direct cause because the hospitals were overrun with COVID cases. I looked up the population data because I remember an article which claimed that our population had actually shrunk a bit because of the pandemic. Not quite true though according to this piece from the Census Bureau our population grew at the slowest pace ever adding only about 1million which was the lower than the mark posted by 1937 in the depths of the Great Depression. COVID + reduced immigration = low population growth.

Another weather story: I-95 became a snow bound parking lot for up to 24 hours. As I watched the story I was reminded of the storm in 2012 (I think) when Chicago's Lake Shore Drive became a similar snow bound parking lot. This was the Chicago situation on steroids. The latest storm dropped up to 12 inches of snow on the Northern Virginia/D.C. area. Even Biden returning from Delaware was delayed both in just getting out of the plane and then in the motorcade which took more than an hour to go the short distance from Andrews to the White House. Weird weather continues.