Snow in Alabama!!!

Whatever!

This morning when I woke up - for the second time - I put the coffee on and then looked outside. It was very beautiful. There are woods about ten feet from the back porch. The trees and the ground were both covered with snow. Not a lot, but enough to be really pretty. By the time I was on my way to work, most of it was gone; the rain had melted it all. While it had lasted, it was so pretty and peaceful. And the kids were happy because the got to be two and a half hours late to school.

Now let's back up to yesterday. The media just hypes things up unbelievably. I am accustomed to this because I have lived in Alabama for 26+ years. In that time, I have seen this type of snow on numerous occasions. I have seen four "big" snows in 26 years. Because we live in Alabama, the most perilous part of the snow is the ice. The ground is never cold enough for snow to stick to. However, if there is enough moisture on the ground to freeze, then snow will stick to the ice, making travel somewhat difficult. But back to the media. They started screaming ice and snow Tuesday night. Yesterday, everyone was going crazy. The "investigative reporters" were doing stories on early closings and delays, interviewing small children, interviewing grocery store managers about their supplies of milk and bread, and informing the "uninformed" public on how to stay warm - do they really think that we're so ignorant that we don't know how to stay inside during cold weather? Gracious.

I had to go to the grocery store yesterday for work. And tell me, why did I wait until the afternoon of a "pre-snow-day"? I have to buy 4-6 gallons of milk every week for work. There was barely any left in the cooler at the grocery store yesterday, but I got my 5 gallons. People were giving me dirty looks as though their families were going to die slow horrible deaths of milk-withdrawal during these "rough times" and it would be all my fault. Get over it!

As badly as I would love to have a real "snow day," I knew that last night was not the night. Nevertheless, as all the kids were leaving work yesterday, I told them all to go home and do the Snow-Dance. One little boy is very serious. After I told him that, he said, "It's kind of like the Tango." How he knows what the Tango is, I'll never know, but he cracked me up!

As I was on my way to work late this morning, the ice and snow had melted off the roads. Schools and businesses were going full force. Life was back to normal. I'm sure the discussions of the day will completely revolve around how we were all watching the news to see what time we had to report to work, how bad the roads were, and how we wished we could have stayed home the whole day. My "snow" story is unmatched by anyone who hears it. There were two icy patches on my road, but nothing major. The snow was basically gone from the treetops and was almost completely gone from the forest floor. When I got "out of the woods" I noticed that the cows in the two cow pastures were nowhere to be found. Snow was also nowhere to be found, except for what was piled on top of the cow patties. As far as the eye could see, there were little white dots across both pastures. I don't know the proper scientific rationality for why it had melted off of the ground and not the #$%^, but I got a good laugh out of it. Can you tell that I live in the country?