(Dazed kitteh from ICHC? captioned by me, Sungold)
Despite having foolishly booked my return flight to Ohio through Chicago, I managed to avoid getting stuck there in last weekend’s blizzard – only to be snowbound with the kids all this week. We’ve had three full snow days and two mornings with two-hour delays. The high school kids didn’t get to take their final exams today; my fifth-grader and his friends have to postpone their geography fair until January; and neither of my kids had math even once this week, since that’s scheduled first thing every morning.
A walloping half-foot of snow has fallen over the course of the week, maybe a tad more.
We here in Athens, Ohio, are not like Seattle or Atlanta, where snow takes everyone by surprise. We get it every darn winter. Here in southeast Ohio, we actually get less snow than, say, Cleveland, but my students from Cleveland laugh at our inability to carry on with school once a snowflake sticks to the ground.
The problem, this year and every year, is that we don’t have the equipment to clear the snow quickly. We don’t have the manpower. The city does pretty well at clearing the main streets, but the county roads remain impassible. It’s all a function of money. You could just as well call many of our snow days “poverty days.”
It’s not even the first day of winter, and we’ve already blown through all our snow days. In fact, thanks to our “tornado day” back in September, we’re one in the hole. Our inestimably wise legislators reduced our allotment of calamity days from five to three, starting this fall. I guess they thought our kids would get more edumacated this way. Instead, we’re likely to have a few dozen more two-hour delays between now and March. To make up the snow days that we’re sure to have in the new year, we’ll lose every holiday except MLK and Memorial Day. The school year will extend into the summer, like it does every year. And our kids will miss a month or so of math.
(From ICHC? captioned by me, Sungold)
Patron cat of Kittywampus (1985-2001)
I moved to Athens from Wisconsin where we had 110 inches of snow during my last winter, so I’m a bit flummoxed by the snow problems here since the winters seem pretty mild by comparison. But I live just outside of town on a street with a fire station and I found the roads pretty bad this week, so I can’t even imagine what it’s like for my neighbors up the hill.
It was like that when I lived in Knoxville, every time it rained in the winter they would close the schools and people would run to the stores and buy all the bread and milk. Without fail.
We got a little snow last week; mercifully, it didn’t hang around long. I got my fill of the stuff growing up in northern climes and would be only too happy to never see it again. But curling up with kitties is always welcome!
Well, the upside of the snow is that it looks like we’ll have a white Christmas this year – the first time in several years – with a fresh coat of snow due to arrive tonight. This is the one brief window where I actually appreciate snow – lucky me!