The ice age is upon us!

Friday was another snow day at the high school. It was a "major snow squall event" according to environment Canada. We've gone from bare ground to almost two feet of snow in the last three or four days. Amazingly, we missed out on the worst of it. Minden, about 75km west of us, was reporting 121 cm (a whisker under 4 feet) of snow. By the time I finished shoveling the driveway Friday (the first time), I had to redo the walk and stairs because they had accumulated another two inches. Had to redo the whole thing Friday afternoon after the school was closed and Leaf got to come home.

Mars is happy. He likes the snow. We've all just been outside in the back yard cutting down a christmas tree. Daddy with a saw, Mars with a lightsaber. I think Odin might like snow. Except when it gets on him. He mostly stayed in the scoop and was happy to get pulled around looking like the kid who fell down in his snowsuit and couldn't get up again in "A Christmas Story". Which was in the news yesterday. Real kid gets tongue frozen to flag pole. Kid makes international news. Slow news day?

















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The secret lives of teachers - snow day

I'm no longer undecided about snow. Its sucking already. I think I had just developed nostalgia because I didn't have to do any shoveling last year and my dorm, the cafeteria, and my classes were all less than 100m from each other. Today, we are under a winter storm watch, the van wouldn't start, and I forgot all about wind chill.

A digression. When I was a kid, I didn't literally think that teachers slept in lockers at school and only came out on school days. But it was easy to forget that teachers had outside lives. Marrying a teacher has given me a look at the secret lives of teachers and schools. Its been enlightening.

A segue-way. Today is a snow day for all local schools. I bet you didn't know that teachers have been known to do a secret 'snow-dance' to incite the snow gods to ramp up the precipitation so that they will get a snow day. Of course you didn't. Its hidden in teacher offices behind closed doors.

The rationale behind a snow day is that it is unsafe for kids to take buses to school. However, teachers are expected to be at school. Irony. We talked about it on the way in this morning. Our theory is that while either a bus crash or a teacher car crash is tragic, a bus crash is newsworthy, but a teacher car crash is just tragic.