Thursday, January 17, 2008

Talk About The Weather And Everybody's Health

Normally, I wouldn’t write a post about the weather. It’s boring and what can I use for small talk if I have already written about it? However, Virginia is such an odd place in the winter that I have to make mention of it. It’s snowing right now. For the family and friends from out west, I’m sure the general consensus is “snow? Who cares.” For the area in which we live, however, the mind set is, “It’s snowing? I had better go stock up on toilet paper and bottled water before I’m stranded!” Okay, that may be a bit of an exaggeration, but seriously, people tend to go a little crazy when the weather turns bad. I was driving in to work this morning, it was a bit cold, but not a drop of moisture to be seen. Then on the radio, the dj announces that the schools in such and such counties have been closed due to an impending storm expected to drop one to two inches of snow. An Impending Storm! That’s right, it hadn’t even started snowing yet and the panic had already set in. And, apparently, whenever it’s about to snow, people rush to the supermarket and stock up on supplies as if they’re preparing for some sort of natural disaster. I would almost like to go to the local supermarket and sit and watch people prepare for the worst before a storm. I'm sure the scene would be kind of novel and a little funny, like a talking dog. Also, may I just say that if they cancelled school every time it snowed one or two inches in Idaho, school would only be two months long. At Bear Lake High, they only cancelled school if the temperature was -20º or colder, and that was only because the busses wouldn’t start when it was that cold. They didn’t care how much it snowed or if there were two inches of pure ice on the roads, as there sometimes were for weeks on end. Not that I’m complaining. I’ve gotten a few days off work due to snow, and it’s always entertaining to watch people out here react to bad weather. Speaking of getting days off work, due to snow, our office closed early today!

1 comment:

Shanna said...

It is so funny that you wrote about the weather out here in Virginia. Josh and I were just talking about the same thing. He is from Alaska and, well you know I went to school at Bear Lake for a while. It really is a novel experience to watch everyone freak out because of the impending snow storm. I keep seeing these news commercials about their advanced Weather Doppler so they can give us up-to-date warnings. "You know it's coming, you don't know when or how bad it's going to be..." Something like that. I just laughed when you mentioned the -20 degree weather we had to have to get out of school. I told the kids in our primary class about that and they thought it was crazy. I guess just about as crazy as I think it is for them to get out of school for one to two inches of snow. Quantico Marine Corps Base was even open 1 1/2 hours late due to the "terrible" weather.