Thursday Thirteen # 38

Thirteen Things about the white death Cincinnati received between 5 and 7 inches of snow Tuesday afternoon, depending on what part of the city was reporting. Cincinnati is very funny about its snow.  Every snow storm is treated like news of an impending nuclear strike.  It's jokingly called "the white death" around here. I've never been able to understand that.  Having been raised as I was in Austin, Texas, I have a healthy love for and respect for snow.  In Austin, a snow like this would be a major emergency.  But this makes sense, as Austin has no snowplows, salt trucks, or any snow removal plans or equipment.  Cincinnati has.  I don't know why it's such a big stinking deal but it is. I guess I'm rather non-chalant about the white death due to my 6 year sojourn in Columbia, MO, where snow is accepted as a matter of course.  The first winter we lived there, it snowed at the end of November and continued to snow throughout the winter.  It never got warm enough to melt the white stuff, but the street crews did an excellent job of keeping it off the roads, so I never gave it a thought.  It was rather difficult to get it off our driveway to get out onto the road.  For some reason, I don't believe we purchased a snow shovel until we moved to Northern KY.  We'd occasionally go hack at the snow with our garden shovel, treat it with salt, and be off on our merry ways. Although 7 inches of snow would be watched in Columbia, I don't recall its being the reason for closing the schools.  I could be wrong, though, as I did not have school-aged children when we lived there. I do not ever recall the university closing, though.  I do remember, when I was hugely pregnant with Sarah, waddling out to my car (a tee-tiny VW Rabbit) and driving in to school.  I also remember having a tremendous snowball fight with Friend Husband in the parking lot after school and amusing my advisor and her husband greatly.  Somehow along the way, I became the designated snow shoveler for the family.  I think it started in this way:  Friend Husband, being a man with no body fat, hates the cold.  I, being a woman with tremendous reserves of body fat, plus Scandanavian ancestry to boot, don't mind it so much.  So, while he's inside getting ready for work and doing Bible study with the girls, I'm outside moving the white stuff out of the way so he can leave for work on time. This last snow came down like rain.  At first it drifted down lazily, but by the time we were through with our grocery shopping and leaving for home, it was coming down in a hurry.  I love to watch it snow.  It's so much prettier than rain and so much less messy when it gets tracked into the house. As you may have seen on my video yesterday, Lucy the Wonder Dog also loves the snow.  Unfortunately, she seems to have sprained her doggy paw leaping about like a maniac.  Or perhaps she sprained it in her mad dash when she ran away from me yesterday afternoon.  Another wonderful thing about snow:  you can more easily track your runaway mutt through it. I forgot to mention that this snow was extremely light and dry, unlike the last snow we had.  Not good for snowballs or sledding (doesn't turn to ice as easily) but excellent for shoveling off the driveway. Yes, we still have school when it snows.  We also have long breaks where the children can run amok in the white stuff with the neighbor children who didn't have school. When it's snowy outside, it's comfy to knit and quilt inside.  'Nuff said. Links to other Thursday Thirteens! 1. (leave your link in comments, I’ll add you here!)

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