Winter...Wonderland?

Today we were let out of work at 1 pm. I took a picture of my commute home.



At least we didn't try to move in the snow. Here's a pod just like the one we used which I saw two girls trying to wedge closed in the snow down the street at the outset of this afternoon's blizzard.



We are expecting 12 inches of snow in a 6 hour period today. That's what they call a "white out". While I've lived through a snow storm here and there during my winters in Virginia, I was unfamiliar with this term before today. Allow me to explain. A white out is when you are driving home from work and are admiring the snow falling over the nearby reservoir, and the next minute you look back at the reservoir and you see nothing except white. Huh! I am still trying to get used to sundown at 3:30 pm. I mean, it's not Alaska, people! What's up with the sunset???

The other day I had to laugh out loud when I picked the morning after an ice-storm to drive to work. Like a truly pathetic ex-state-riate in New England, I peeped through my blinds around 7 am to "check the weather" as we do in CA and noticed that there wasn't any more snow on the ground (after having taking the "T" for several days due to snowy roads.) I thought, "Hooray, I can drive to work again! Winter must be temporarily over." It wasn't a step beyond our front porch leading down to our driveway that I learned how see-through ice can get. A good 1/4 inch of it was covering our porch. If that wasn't ominous warning enough, how about the fact that no one in our 15 car parking lot had removed their cars to drive that morning? As I ice-skated down the parking lot driveway, I considered bargaining with God that if he'd get me to work, I'd quit driving until March. At that point, I was far too late to catch the T.

When it comes to weather, I'm not what you'd call a "quick" learner. This morning, I was lured behind the wheel again when after testing our front steps carefully to ensure that the ice had melted, I felt confident that the roads would be safe. It's a good thing I work in Human Resources at the University. We were the first to know that things were shutting down when the skies began to dump buckets of flakes around noon.