Rodriguez: Blame it on social media

I’m thinking there just may be a baby boom in September, following last month’s Goliath snow storm. People cooped up in their homes for days, forced to talk to each other. Cook. Eat. Sleep. And … surf.

On second thought, maybe not.

Helena Rodriguez

Some people lost power during the Polar Express storm we received over the High Plains between Christmas and New Year’s. Many of us lost pizza and even mail and newspaper delivery service. That was roughing it. But one thing I noticed we didn’t lose — our sanity not being one of them — was Wi-Fi. More specifically, social media. If we don’t see a baby boom when nature intended there to be one, blame Facebook.

I can’t tell you how many people-about-to-be-avalanched-by-snowdrifts-the-size-of-the-abominable-snowman photos I saw posted. Oh, and the most annoying, “Does anyone know how the ice-packed roads, which state police are warning people to stay off of because they will not be rescued, are? We’re out of triple A batteries and wine.”

And so many people living in the same households really didn’t have to talk to each during Goliath, unless they were liking, commenting on or sharing each other’s photos.

No, I didn’t hear of anyone losing Wi-Fi service. As a matter of fact, the types of posting I post, which normally get only a couple or less than a dozen likes, were getting dozens and dozens more than usual. I didn’t kid myself. My postings weren’t going viral. They were going Goliath.

Maybe there will be a few Goliath babies come Labor Day, nice end-of-the-year tax deductions to offset a colder and snowier-than-usual winter. I have a couple of friends who were last-minute tax deductions, born on New Year’s Eve. My daughter, Laura, was a mid-year deduction. Unless you think of her mid-July birth more like a beginning of a new fiscal year deduction.

Well, Goliath is now a snow storm story. It goes like this: “When I was your age I had to stay home and Facebook during that monstrous storm of December 2015 because we were buried alive in our homes, with only people we live with to talk to, not Skype with, and we only had a year’s worth of food supplies because we were only given a 10-day blizzard warning, and we only had our cell phones to communicate to the outside world with and were severely limited on the spaces in which we could take selfies and pictures of our snowed-in food creations.”

Helena Rodriguez is as Portales native. Contact her at:

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