Ellesiouville is in the Midwest. You know, where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain and all that? So in January and February, most of us, whether we like it or not, expect some snow.
For the Department of Transportation, the Ellesiouville City Schools, LSU and most Ellesiouville drivers, the yearly inundation of snow always comes as an unwelcome surprise. What is this "snow" you speak of? White stuff from the sky? Surely we have no need of these big, smelly plow things, nor salt! Well, okay, maybe one for emergencies, and we'll buy enough salt for the mayor's driveway.
The city schools are canceled when snow accumulation reaches approximately three inches -- this, according to the Ellesiouville sheriff, constitutes a "snow emergency."* A snow emergency, which we are facing this evening, gives all the KCOW meteorologists a single, continuous orgasm. The station broadcasts all weather all the time, complete with some poor bastard with a microphone under an overpass. "The sky is falling!" they scream, smiling mindlessly. "Save the women and children! Make sure you have enough toilet paper!"
(About the toilet paper... It's the first thing to disappear from the Safeway when there's snow in the forecast. What do folks do with all that toilet paper? Is there some survival benefit to owning large quantities of toilet paper? Do people realize that they don't actually need toilet paper, and that more advanced civilizations don't even use it? (Or not nearly as much of it, anyway.) When next I have a few $10K to spare, I hope to rearrange my life so that I never need to use toilet paper again.)
One good thing about Ellesiouville is that the powers that be wait to start canceling classes and closing down essential services until the snow actually falls. Back south of the Mason-Dixon line, in the large East coast city that is home to ILU, the snow fell reliably in January and February and we could always count on a good quarter-inch of accumulation. Every public and private concern closed and canceled when snow was merely forecast. This was good for a laugh when the snow failed to appear on schedule.
LSU, unfortunately, shuts down almost as frequently as ILU did. So I'm almost 100% certain that I will spend tomorrow entertaining a young child** rather than giving my statistics students the exam review they so desperately need.
*I can't help reminiscing... am I the only one to remember the "Blizzard of '77"? My school was out for two solid weeks. We lived out in the middle of nowhere, and it took that long for the plows to come through. After they came down our county road a few times, the snow was piled in the roadside ditch and up approximately 8' over the level of the road. The chicken house was completely buried in drifts and we tunneled through them from the house to feed and water the poor birds. A stranded motorist, hiking through the drifts in his attempt to get home after going out for groceries, slept in the basement for a few days until he felt it was safe to start walking again. Now that was a snow emergency.
**Yep, Ellesiouville schools just closed for tomorrow.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
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My school had it's first snow day in ten years my freshmen year... and we had two (one for 2ft of snow and the other because it was below -26˚F without windchill). Today we're getting a foot and a half, but I still have to haul my butt to campus.
I remember '77! We got 23 inches of snow with drifts up to my chest. My grandmother sent me over to shovel the steps of the convent, just a block away. It took me 20 minutes to get there -- possibly 20 of the happiest minutes of my life.
Living in Chicago now, we don't get nearly as much snow as I would like. I envy NW Indiana and Buffalo, NY -- they seem to get all the good snows!
We call those shoppers French Toasters. Here in St. Louis, they're there for milk, bread and eggs. I haven't noticed the lack of toilet paper, but I'll have to be more observant in the future...
I too remember '77. That was the year that we had enough snow in Columbus OH to build an actual igloo out of packed blocks of snow, and it stayed up until spring.
In Hawai'i, it's Spam and rice that run out first (hurricanes, not snow).
I remember '77, I think. We were visiting family when it happened, so we got back home and had to dig out the entire driveway before we could park the truck.
We're getting 18 inches here and school's in session. I think the university closed once in 2007 when we got 4 feet of snow.
I still hope for snow days, sometimes. Nothing like snowshoeing to the coffee shop and reading the Times.
I remember North Jersey getting some pretty substantial snow in the 1970s -- school wouldn't be cancelled for less than 4 inches of the stuff, though, unless there was an ice storm. Rumor had it that the decision was partly determined by the conditions in town, and partly by the conditions in the town where the principal lived.
My University decided to wait until 6pm last night to decide that classes starting after 5pm would be cancelled. Three of my 6:30pm students were already in the classroom!
When I was stationed in Jacksonville, NC, it used to crack me up that not only did everything close if even a handful of snowflakes fell, but the local hospital would ask the radio stations to put out public service calls for people with 4-wheel drive vehicles to go and pick up staff so they could make it to work.
And in December of 1989, when due to a meteorological freak we got eight inches of snow (which is normally the accumulation of a couple of decades), everything in the county shut down for week. A solid week.
(stout daughter of Detroit that I am, I drove around in my Olds Cutlass Supreme, sneering at the pickup trucks in the ditches).
Sorry, no sympathy here.
I have a 5 foot snow drift at the bottom of my steps -- it will be their until june.
Its been -30 to -40 (F) for much of the last month, and probably will be for at least another month.
The whole city iced over in december, and now they just put gravel where the roads were.
I have to walk the same route to work every day because my (and others) daily tramping keeps the snow packed on the path we all walk.
If i didn't like it that way, I'd probably move south of the arctic circle!
Lovin life and snow in Kotzebue, Alaska.
Having conducted fieldwork in one of those places where toilet paper isn't seen as a necessity, all I can say is no. No. You don't want to live that way. I promise. Sans bidet (which requires a reliable water source, which requires consistent electricity in most third world hellholes), it's just...no.
For me it was a Blizzard of '78. We missed so much school we had to go on Saturdays. We could touch the roof if we stood on the drifts, and we made the best snow caves. I remember my dad laughing when upon seeing a completely white window I asked if I had to go to school. The only downside was my cancelled birthday party. I was just telling my daughter about it on Tuesday when she pronounced it looked like we were having a "blister" outside.
Growing up in California, I missed all this. There are no 'earthquake days' unless buildings have actually fallen, which is more unusual than the media coverage suggests.
When I lived in Montreal, no snow days. In DC and Tennessee, snow days! Utter foolishness - I love them.
Sheeeit. Here in Georgia, we hope to see just a couple flakes in the air. That constitutes school closures and general freakouts.
Long time lurker, first time posting.
Yes, I remember the Blizzard of '77! We have pictures of my brothers and I standing in front of the picture window, and our feet were level with the bottom of the window. The back door of the garage was the only door we could use to get out, because it was the only one that opened inward. Dad shoveled out a path to the front door but left a snow arch that stayed up for weeks. AWESOME snow tunnels. I no longer remember how long it took the county to get our road plowed out, but it was several days. People with snowmobiles would make runs to town for supplies for neighbors. Good times, good times.
Now I live in the south, and yes just last week school was closed because snow was *forecast*. It's a different world. I miss the snow, but my wife doesn't.
I'm Canadian. In all of my 13 years of primary and secondary education, we never had ONE day of school canceled because of snow. That includes the blizzard of 77.
Remember well the snow of '77 - I was in Ohio no less.
My mother has a cartoon on her fridge of a man listening to a weather forecaster saying Cincinnati is going to get 3 inches of snow and the man is screaming "we're all gonna die!" While sitting on boxes of canned food. She jokes about the milk, bread, and egg buyers too. Although it never occurred to her that they made french toast. She always wondered what they made.
It snowed down here in December for an hour this year - everyone was so excited and the school posted tons of pictures with snow on the campus. Sure beats having to evacuate for hurricanes (thanks Gustav).
We even get laughed at by the President for our snow antics.
I did my undergraduate schooling in OK, and although it rarely snowed, we did have a couple closings for ice. Nothing a plow or sand can do against a two-inch sheet of ice. One of my favorite memories still is watching a few sorority girls tottering across those sidewalks in heels...
Hope things swing back into routine for you soon -
We have snow here too!
But I do admit that sometimes the snow days are a welcome respite!
I think there has been maybe 2 or 3 snowdays in the nearly 5 years of college I've had. One was when we had alot of snow come down in a day it seemed, they were having real problems clearing roads and the walkways of the college, I think the snow drifts/piles that year lasted till nearly May from all the snow and ice that got piled up. And the other was less snow but high winds and it was too dangerous for commuters to come in, no sense dying coming to a lecture and then have the school sued.
@New York Intern: if you're at the same pharmacy school that I went to, in my three years of professional studies (dating myself now) plus one year living there after graduation before moving home, I remember the school closing d/t weather a grand total of four times, and two of them were because of ice, not snow: they'd closed the 290 and none of the teachers could get to the campus. Snow doesn't faze Buffalonians, we just shrug and bull through it.
(I was a kid in '77, but I do remember drifts in my parents' backyard in Brooklyn that were over the top of the fence, and that fence was taller than I was. Long time Buffalonians told me that in '77 some of them were going in and out of their houses via the second floor windows.)
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