Snow Days

Yesterday was one of those typical Michigan days that I've gotten used to over the last 5 1/2 years. The forecasters were calling for up to 15 inches of snow by nightfall, everyone was going a little hogwild, and I still had to go to work. By the time Adam dropped me off at work, a 'wintry mix' was already starting to fall, but because I work in a windowless room, I had no idea how much momentum it gained during my workday. Around lunchtime I got up to stretch my legs and saw that the campus could barely be seen through all the heavy blowing snow. I remained at work. Around 3pm my brother (who works at NOAA headquarters) sent me a radar map for conditions over Michigan, and of course it confirmed everything that was going on outside. My brother, who lives in Maryland, also didn't fail to mention that it was an unseasonable 70 degrees by him and he was going to take the baby for a walk that evening. I thought of my poor Kika, who has taken to urinating on the back porch because walking down to the yard to pee means being nearly covered in several inches of snow (she's a little dog). At 4pm, my boss came in to say that his wife had called about the poor road conditions and that he was leaving, and I should consider leaving, too. But Adam was at an appointment and I had to wait for him to be done there before he could pick me up. I remained at work. By 4:45 I finally climbed into a warm vehicle, and the usually 10-minute drive to our house took an obscene 35 minutes instead. When we got home, I forced Kika into the yard to do her business; she didn't speak to me for the rest of the night.

We shovelled our neighbor's sidewalk and driveway (she's 77 years old) as well as our own, with no help from the other set of neighbors with whom we share the driveway. They are nice, and hard-working, but they haven't helped shovel that pain-in-the-arse (it's really long) driveway once this winter. Thing is, we can't sit around waiting for them to shovel because they won't, and we don't want to deal with slipping and sliding on an unshovelled driveway. So we shovel and we complain...to ourselves and to our friends and to this blog. We don't complain to them because they are generally really nice people.

After the shovelling was done, my elderly neighbor made me tea and we sat and talked for awhile, which was nice. She works at the local high school cafeteria and was hoping for a snow day today. I was hoping not to get any more snow that would cover up my almost-2 hours of work shovelling; besides, universities hardly ever close down so I knew I would still have to travel through anything else that decided to come down during the night.

They said on the news last night that Lansing got 8 inches of snow, about half of what was predicted, which is always the case. I wonder if we'd actually gotten 15 inches, if I would have had to come to work today. I woke up this morning to NPR listing the school closings this morning. My neighbor got her snow day.