It's official...

...Winter is not dead.



I woke up this morning knowing that there would be some degree of snow on the ground. I watched the weather.com reports and as the hours ticked by last night, more and more emails begain popping up in my University box from students who were already going to miss class today.

As the emails were coming in, there was barely a dusting on the roads, but it was slick in some places (in the city). I assume that it must have been near apocalyptic conditions in the country since almost every student had the same message:

"Roads snowed in. Can't get out."

So, this morning when I got out of the shower, I fired up the laptop to see what was happening in the world. I normally just hit weather.com to see if there's anything remarkable about the weather but for some reason, I decided to pop by the University's page to see how many more emails I received in the wee hours of the morning. That's when I saw it:

"Morning classes are cancelled."

So, I decided to go out in my sweats and shovel the drive since I knew that the combination of snow, slush and ice would spell certain doom for me either while leaving or later when coming back. This wonderful weather combination usually means that my driveway will become a solid sheet of ice. The water drains off the hill and right onto my drive. The wind is often buffeted by the two houses and the space between becomes a wind-tunnel and will aid in the freezing process. So rather than swerving into a gas meter, I decided that it was best go get steamy.

And steamy I got. About every third shovel, my cellphone would ring with someone telling me about the weather or that the classes were closed.

I'm so loved.

I, then, felt it my moral obligation to call up a friend in Huntington and inform him of the maddness. He had already heard of the weather and that Marshall was on a 2 hour delay and was laying in bed and being lazy; not that he doesn't - on occasion - deserve it.

My roommate, Josh, was still asleep when I walked out to start shoveling, but as his bedroom is in the back, there's no way to sleep through the constant 'scrape-toss' sounds of a plastic shovel on a drive.

I'm sitting in my office now and watching the slush to continue to congeal. The Univ. trucks are attempting to push the snow out of the way and it seems like all they're doing is stirring a parking-lot load of icy-slushy goodness.

it's days like this that I wish we had a BIG (I'm talking bubba big; so big that even bubba is saying 'Da-yum') mess of snow so I could make snow-cream.

Snow-cream is sort of an ice cream made with snow, sugar and vanilla that my mom used to make when I was growing up. It's basically just vanilla-flavored water with sugar mixed in, but I remember that was the BEST thing to slurp down as your nose tried to stop running after a morning of wintery warfare.

Ok, back to work. I have class in a half-hour or more.

I doubt that I'll have more than 20 students.

-Tom