Oh NO SNOW!!!

Not afraid of a little weather. Safe to say
I was the only one walking through the
multiple feet of snow on the bike trail.
I was NOT the only one at Dunkin' Donuts.

         There are oh so many things going on in the world to choose from this week. My favorite former senator is making up new countries (Kyrzakhstan – do you think Hillary’s replacement meant Kyrgyzstan or Kazakhstan? WHAT A DUMBASS!), the nations wealthiest egotists are giving themselves their annual award of faceless golden anatomically ambiguous statuettes on pedestals for best pretenders, said “artists” are celebrating MUSIC IN HOLLYWOOD while having the orchestra for the live event IN A DIFFERENT BUILDING (Oh don’t even get me started on that…), and most exciting of all and the topic I have decided to settle on: It’s SNOWING in WINTER.

            YES, CAN you BELIEVE it? It is SNOWING in WINTER. I know I was in shock when the meteorologists let me know that it was going to snow. I practically fell off the couch. I thought about writing them a hand engraved letter to personally thank them for interrupting my regularly scheduled programming to alert me that frozen precipitation would most likely fall out of the sky and accumulate on the ground. I don’t know what I would have done without the warning.

            That really used to piss me off as a child. We had a fair amount of snow days during my youth. The primary reason for this was not that my town couldn’t handle snow removal or ice removal, but because my town was too cheap to pay for bus service for the kids who lived within a half mile of the schools. Those kids had to walk to school. Road clearing was not so much an issue – sidewalk clearing, on the other hand, if they’re not budgeting for buses you can be sure they’re not budgeting for sidewalk shovelers. Rather than risk having the “walkers” break their necks on the way to school, we’d get the day off. I loved snow days. Hate school, love a snow day. It meant I got to stay home and watch my favorite daytime television shows. In elementary school those consisted of Tele Francais – a French language show with a talking pineapple, Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, Emergency, and The Price Is Right. (Aside from the French language show, I was watching the same shows as middle-aged housewives. Reason would dictate that when my programming was interrupted by the damned meteorologists, I also got as pissed as a middle-aged housewife).

            What is the purpose of interrupting the television programming to tell people it is snowing? Most people have windows in their homes. I don’t want to watch snow fall on other people’s lawns. And I don’t find watching sand trucks and plows particularly interesting. Why is it NEWSWORTHY every time there is a snowstorm in New England in the wintertime? It snows here pretty much every winter! It has since I was a child. I’m sure it did before I was alive. And I imagine it will continue to for quite some time. Interrupt my programming when beer bottles start raining from the sky. Tell me something I don’t already know. 

            The other truly mystifying behavior is people’s need to “stock up” on grocery store items for storms. Thought No. 1: If you lose power in a big snowstorm – your refrigerator will STOP refrigerating. Just let your noodle swim in that soup for a bit. Thought No. 2: When was the last time you remember being trapped in your house in a snowstorm for more than, oh, twelve hours? YEAH, I thought so. Do you mean to tell me that in those twelve hours you may need to ingest multiple loaves of bread, an entire bunch of bananas, and a gallon of milk? I have NEWS for you. ACTUAL news. If you do, in fact, consume all of those foods in those twelve hours, you will not need all of the multiple bushels of toilet paper you also purchased with all of those foods you stocked up on because you will be so constipated you may not shit for a week. That’s right.

            So – SNOW. It’s winter in New England. It’s winter in the northern hemisphere! And it snows here. It snows in the Midwest. It snows in Colorado. It snows in the mountains. It snows in Russia. It snows in the Arctic. Wake me up when it’s spring.