Las Vegas was covered in storm clouds today that blocked the sun, but the clouds only extended across the city and not out by the mountains. This engulfed the city in darkness, but the mountains were still sunny. Here’s a view from central Las Vegas facing northwest:

I haven’t been around in Las Vegas for that long, so I don’t have any prior first-hand experience with snow in the desert city, but I’m hearing that there is usually noticeable snow about once every 3-5 years. However, I’m also hearing that having this much snow piling up and actually sticking to the ground is extremely rare – closer to happening once every decade or so, most recently in December 2008.

So, as we can obviously see at this point, just because Las Vegas is in the middle of the desert and is one of the (if not just straight-up the) least humid cities in the United States doesn’t mean that it doesn’t get cold and there isn’t precipitation. People still wear coats in Las Vegas in the winter, and on occasion, have the privilege of building snowmen.

Unfortunately, after the snow stopped falling and it became midday, temperatures rose to the mid- to upper 40s in Fahrenheit, and the snow melted pretty quickly. I captured a final photo later on in the day as I was headed back to the house after getting some food, and the only remaining snow was high up in the mountains.

I’ve never really been an active voter because I move around so much. Since turning 18 and being eligible to vote, I voted once, as the other elections happened to fall during times when I was out-of-state and never requested an absentee ballot (e.g., when I was in Madison, Wisconsin for my under­grad­u­ate studies), or when I was in California and never registered to vote again because I didn’t know how long I would be staying there.

But, since voluntarily moving to Las Vegas and picking this city as my preferred permanent residence of choice, I decided to register again when switching over my driver’s license to Nevada. Now, when I vote, I generally lean towards the Democratic Party, though I’m more of a case-by-case-basis voter. As a result, when registering, I marked myself as “non-partisan” to remain neutral.

That was a catastrophic mistake.

Since registering, I received pretty much non-stop political spam from the Democratic Party of Nevada trying to convince me to vote in their favor (because, according to my registration, they assumed I wouldn’t be voting with them already, and wanted to “convert” me into a Democrat). Leading up to the election, my mailbox literally became a receptacle for garbage. And of course, when I originally registered to vote at the DMV, they never took the initiative to give me a form I could fill out to withhold my information from these campaigners, so the paper just kept flooding in.

This ended up becoming so annoying that, at one point, I literally considered unregistering to vote, but I realized that would be a very un-American solution to the problem, so I decided to just deal with it for this election season, then fill out that privacy form later.

Today, I went to my local polling place and cast my ballot. When I voted in Illinois (and when I see other people showing their “I Voted” stickers on social media), the sticker I received was a small round one with an American flag that says “I Voted.” Apparently, Las Vegas doesn’t mess around when it comes to voting, and they gave me this monster sticker instead: