Snow Day
By now, most of us in Cascadia are experiencing some of the worst Winter weather since any of us can remember. I would normally be at work right now, so the experience is something like the rare day when we didn’t go to school because of the snow. Even though you have been at home during the afternoon before, there is something just a little bit naughty about being at home on the afternoon of a workday.
This week has featured all sorts of wintery weather. The scenario is a bit different depending upon where you live, but generally, there was enough snow on the ground by last Monday that many schools were closed. The freezing temperatures stayed with us all week, with the weatherman telling us each day that we should stay in tomorrow since there would be bad weather coming up.
Now, we have learned in our region that we will generally have a day of snow, everybody will stay home from work and school that day, then the snow will melt, and everything will be normal the next day. The rest of the country, at least the parts of it where snow is a fact of life for a few months every year, laughs at us for just how unprepared we are. We see it so rarely, though, that we just hide for a day, then it’s gone.
The difference this week is that we knew ahead of time that our latest Winter episode would be drawn out for a week or more. There’s no way we can put our lives on hold for that long. Some of us have to work for a living. As the week has gone on, I have become proud of my neighbors everywhere. We are learning to cope with and adapt to what Mother Nature had thrown our way. We are getting on with life.
Well, that was true until today. Tonight, we are dealing with a day of snowfall of record proportions, to be followed by bouts of sleet. Saturday night or not, this is a good time not to be out on the streets. Now we have a legitimate reason, even by “the rest of the country” standards, to stay home. So, as I sit at home cruising the Internet, I figure I should stop and make a few observations.
One observation is on our local television stations. While I think television has the potential to be a great medium, I don’t watch a lot of television. I see it as a wonderful opportunity to see pictures from the world around us, both locally and throughout the world. The medium is not used for that purpose as often as it should be. We have the opportunity to look into our TV screens and see what the world looks like before we even get out there. we can use this medium to get the information we need to get on with our day. instead, we get a circus of “reporters” who deliver some pertinent information about our snowy weather, then don’t know when to stop.
I need to know what it is like getting around the city. The TV station goes on for hours talking about how bad it is. Bad weather news sells! No denying that.The trouble is that the folks down there start to run out of information to relay to us. Stage 1 is when the TV station shows us pictures and comments on the condition of the roads and the state of the weather. When that is done, at Stage 2, we go on to the remote locations carefully chosen because they have the worst conditions in town. Interesting news, but not the whole story.
Finally, we get to Stage 3. This is when the reporters have nothing to do but laugh at one another. We get fluff stories on kids sledding down hills. We get interviewers asking people to show us how to put on their chains. We get reporters doing the oddest things in the name of continuing to talk about how sensational the weather has become. Eventually, we get very little really useful information.
Tonight, where I am, the weather is just too bad to go out anywhere. The “snow tonight” that the weather reporters have been predicting all week finally happened. Yeah, if we lived in Minnesota or somewhere, this would all be nothing. But for us Cascadians, it’s time for a cup of tea and sitting around the house.
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