“A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water.” – Carl Reiner
“Just the other day I sent my girlfriend a huge pile of snow…I rang her up and said: “Did you get my drift?”- Peter Kay
In many ways, Southern California and Central Pennsylvania have a lot in common. I can’t think of any examples but one of the least accurate illustrations would be weather. And in February when I say weather, I mean snow. Over the weekend we got buried in the white stuff to the tune of…well I don’t know the official estimates. At my house we measure snow fall in terms of “Hollys”. See, my dog’s name is Holly. And on Saturday the snow was two Holly’s deep. Holly comes up to about my knee. So two Holly’s of snow is quite a bit of snow.
Luckily for me, my grandparents used to live in Cleveland Ohio. Cleveland has even less in common with Southern California than does Pennsylvania. In fact, they get something called “lake effect snow”. Lake effect snow translates roughly to “you’re gonna die”. When grandma and grandpa moved on to better hunting grounds, they left me their snow blower which is of an appropriate size and statue to handle even lake effect snow. So at least when we get blizzards like this past weekend, I can survive and get my driveway cleared. In fact I don’t just do my driveway. I also clear both neighbors, the guy across the street, my parents, their neighbor……. All in all I cleared six driveways last weekend of two Holly deep snow. And that’s not counting what the plows do….Oh you Malibu-ittes don’t know about what snow plows do? Well typically what happens is you spend hours with a shovel or snowblower or maybe you’ve got a plow on your tractor (we own lawn tractors around here, you can find pictures of these on the internet), anyway, you spend hours clearing your driveway of snow just in time for your local government tax dollar funded snow plow to come flying down the road. As it does so, it creates a tidal wave of snow that then lands at the end of your driveway. Effectively sealing it with an already frozen solid block of mush and salt an ice. You then get to go back to work clearing this. Oh and if you’re lucky then the snow plow didn’t destroy your mailbox.
(You know, this always reminds me of a high school student I used to tutor in Thousand Oaks back in my Pepperdine days. I was telling him what winter is like and I mentioned putting salt on your driveway. He looked at me like I grew green horns out of my head. Why on earth would you put salt on your driveway? Salt melts ice I said. No way. Yes way. Go to freezer, get ice cube, put table salt on it, hum theme song to Mr. Wizard, abracadabra presto chango melted ice aka water!)
So that was last weekend. Today is Tuesday. Many parts of town, especially the City with its small tight roads, are still digging out. Parking lots are still bad, roads are still bad, you get the idea. Well in the next 24 hours we’re supposed to get another 10-18″ of snow on top of what we already have.
Behold the screeching halt.
Yeah stuff is gonna shut down. Its like when LA gets an inch of rain and buildings start floating away. The Township has pretty much already given up on tomorrow and decided to not even open. So I’ll get a day off to run my snowblower up and down my street freeing my poor neighbors. What I won’t get is any interesting work updates for you loyal readers. To be honest, next week’s post isn’t looking too exciting either. Hey I don’t make the weather, I just shovel it.
