Good Morning.

It's a whopping zero degrees out my back window at this hour.

So naturally, I'm going to suit up and head out for some snowshoeing in about an hour. For pay, since this is our usual bi-weekly outing with the store.


I don't know what it is; I've never worried about the weather too much. Perhaps it goes back to childhood, for as a sixth-grader we walked home through the teeth of the Blizzard of '78...from school. But the forecasting was different then; it wasn't even forecast as a blizzard, which we can historically show also led to the"Bread, Milk, PANIC!" mode for every storm these days. Some people actually did get trapped in their homes for days and ran out of stuff during that one, but I digress.

Maybe it's Scouting. You should all be familiar with the mantra "Be Prepared". Sure I've got food in the house, I checked some flashlights and batteries, and of course I've got all my cold-weather gear that would enable us to 'shelter in place' should we be without power for a few days in the cold. But there's a line between "Prepare" and "Obsess".

This New Year's storm (I refuse to call it "Loded Diper" or whatever ludicrous thing the media named it, but that's a different debate.) has me particularly miffed. Beginning on New Year's eve they started with the hype. "Worst Ever!" "Huge Nor'easter!" "We'll need to evacuate!" "Schools are closed NOW!" Seriously, were we really this retahded in the olden days?

I used to live behind the hill from my Jr. High Schoool. I could see the parking lot from my bedroom window. It was simple; I'd wake up and look out. If the parking lot was clear, we had school. If it wasn't, we didn't. If I saw trucks working, we'd have to check the teevee and see. Nowadays it feels like the lawyers have won; many communities cancelled school a full day ahead of the event, and some of them pulled the plug for the entire week. Not that New Year's falling on Wednesday had anything to do with that, and those two extra days off now, could it?

But it's not just school - the Mayor and the Governor both called press conferences and urged businesses to close early and consider not opening at all on Friday. Many did. I can remember a few storms in the late 80s where it took me over 4 hours to get home because nobody closed and we all hit the roads at the same time, but that's not my point. Yesterday, I needed a bank with a person; but these were all closed. I might have wanted my hair cut, but he was shut tight. The only place that was open was the supermarket so naturally I bought bread, milk, and eggs. (in reasonable quantities because I was actually low on these things.)

In 1978, then-governor Dukakis declared a State of Emergency, which was not lifted for days. Such a thing didn't happen again for 35 years. Governor Patrick declared another one for the major storm we had in February of last year. But there was talk of doing so for this past storm, too.

In the end...we got maybe ten inches of light, powdery snow. I had everything dug out in an hour; some storms with the heavy wet stuff it's taken me that long just to get my car out. Thursday was ridiculous, since it wasn't snowing at all - I drove home from Worcester in flurries and perhaps a half-inch on the ground. There could have been school. Friday morning, we awoke to plowed streets and flurries again - the snow came overnight as forecast, but nowhere near what they were expecting.

And in a final note....3 weeks ago we camped up at our Scout Camp in Barstead, NH. During a snowstorm. While Boston didn't get as much as the North country, we awoke Sunday morning with better than 14 inches on the ground. I don't recall national histrionics then, and the kids went home and right back to school Monday morning.

Maybe the bigger question is, why do we pick and choose what storms are "Armageddon" and which ones are "Ordinary"?