It Keeps Piling Up

Normally, the first couple of day after Christmas are spent trying to find places in your house for all the new treasures. However, this year Mother Nature decided December 26th was a fine date to hit us with a ton of snow. This meant, instead of spending my Monday trying to decide whether my new Family Guy DVD should be filed under 'Family Guy' or 'It's A Trap!' in my movie collection, I was trying decide where to put the almost two feet of new snow we got overnight. Shovelling this much snow can be tricky, because the last thing you want to do is create even bigger piles that won't melt until June (as it is I may not get the Christmas lights put away until April) and can also weigh so much they end up crushing any bushes or garden structure. On the other hand, when snow is this heavy you also don't want to carry it a distance just to pile it in some desired location. In the end I decided that I value my back more than my Christmas lights and completely buried them. I have also decided that, since you can't see the wiring from the street, if they do actually make it to June before defrosting I'm just leaving them up for the year.

-For years, I have been making fun of weathermen because they always gave snow estimations with huge ranges. ("We're looking at between 6 and 48 inches of snow out there!") However, today I can see why they don't want to commit to an amount. One spot of my deck has about two inches of snow on it. But, 50 feet away on the driveway, the snow was up to my knees. Because of this discrepancy, now I understand they simply want to cover their asses. I've heard the people who call my mom to complain when their Globe is four feet away from where they requested it be place: I have no doubt those people have the kind of free time on their hands to call and complain about a bad weather prediction.

-That concession aside, there are still a few things I want to clear up with my local weathermen. Here they are, in no particular order:

A) Do not seem so happy when we are about to get buried by snow. I get that snowstorms are the weatherman's time to shine, but could you not be giddy about a storm that is about to seriously mess with people's lives?

B) When showing us the map with the estimated snow totals, you do not need to be on screen. I can read, see colors and I know where Norwood is located on the map. I don't need you there - just move. For some reason the local weathermen always want to stand right over the part of the map I need to see. Look, you're going to get roughly 20 minutes of camera time for a 30-minute newscast, so just give us 30 seconds of you-less graphics to figure out how much snow I am in for, because that is all I care about. Speaking of that...

C) I don't want to hear your weather-geek speak. I don't care where this storm came from, why it is sticking around or where it will head once it leaves. Also, irrelevant to me are things like what kind of clouds are rolling in, the scientific name for the type of snow or when they started keeping track of blizzards. Just tell when the snow is starting, ending and roughly how much will be left on my doorstep.

D) That being said, you need to loosen up some of your weather terms. I was just watching the news and the weatherman said that technically yesterday's storm wasn't a blizzard because we didn't have sustained winds of 35+ MPH for over three hours. We were close, but not quite. I counter that point with the fact that this afternoon I was standing outside in cold, gusting winds and snow that was almost taller than my snowblower. Felt blizzardy enough for me.