Tag: snow

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This weather is no laughing matter!

As it turned out, the voice on the CSC weather line was very calm and collected when I called at 10:00 this morning to let me know that all morning soccer games had been cancelled, but the afternoon games were still on. Then I called around 1:00 and everything was cancelled and all of the games will be played on Dec. 19th instead.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it on here, but I’m aiming to start getting back on the field at the beginning of 2011. Mom asked if I wanted to play in the game today—I answered simply: “Noooooooo.” I’m being realistic, especially since I’ve found out between using the Wii and shoveling snow this morning/afternoon that my right leg is still significantly weaker than my left. I didn’t think about it before, but when my right quad got sore or tired, I’d shift my weight to the left without thinking about it, something I’ve been doing for the past nine months.

And speaking of shoveling, we have an awesome neighbor named Rich Carron who is awesome. And when I write “awesome”, I mean AWESOME. Dad and I let Mother Nature do its dirty work yesterday because we live across the street from a lake. The wind blows across the lake, picking up velocity and throwing snow around wherever the hell it wants. If we shovel some away, the wind will replace it, quite possibly with the snow you just shoveled away. Mother Nature sucks.

It was still windy walking outside today, but we weren’t getting any more snow, so it was time to go to work. Mind you, not all of the house and driveway looked that bad because of the drifting. I looked at the upwind side of the Ford Explorer and thought it looked worse when we got hit with 14″ of snow earlier this winter. (Or is it technically still fall?) It didn’t look that bad until I got to the other side and saw snow snuggled all the way up to the level of the hood. On an SUV.

As I was clearing off the front steps, that’s when awesome Rich Carron showed up. In a Bobcat. He cleared off the front part of the driveway, along the sides, made some extra space in front of the mailbox and moved everything away from the fire hydrant. He got rid of hundreds of pounds of snow. Hundreds and hundreds. There are now five-foot piles of snow stretching at least ten yards down the block on both sides of the road. (Sure, some was already there, but it hadn’t been packed down by dumping more snow on top of it with a Bobcat.)

I have no idea how much time and effort he saved us in those ten minutes of work… heck, maybe it was just five… but however much it was, he is still AWESOME. So thanks, Rich. You’re a back saver.

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Games cancelled due to bwa ha ha ha haaaaa!

I’ve missed most of our Mad Dogs’ soccer games this season because of Mind Over Matt, but the final one is coming up at 3:00 tomorrow afternoon. I’m planning to attend since we play indoors during the winter, but the weather conditions aren’t really conducive to people driving to the field.

Cities Sports Connection, the group that organizes the league, has a “weather line” that you can call to find out if games have been cancelled. It’s probably used most often when there’s rain and lightning during an outdoor season, but Hennepin County (where the field is) shut down their plows earlier because blowing snow was obscuring the roads, 1/3 of city buses got stuck driving their routes and a few hundred accidents were reported during the day.

I wonder if I call the weather line tomorrow, will I hear a message saying games will be played, games will be cancelled or a voice saying, “You seriously think we might be playing today?! Bwa ha ha ha haaaaa!”

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Oh my God, it’s the worst snow ever!!!

I’ll admit it: I’ve accomplished almost nothing today since I crawled into bed last night. The sky has been dumping loads of snow on us the entire day—it started around midnight—and is still going as I write this around 6:30. Up to this point, I think we’ve had 15″; one area in the state is over 20″. With the snowing and the blowing and the drifting and the… rifting… today seemed like a good day to sit inside and accomplish almost nothing.

But there’s a problem. It’s the media. Actually, I think it started with the media and had a snowball effect [ba-dum-bum] that’s spilled out to the general public. It’s taking events like this and giving them names. Names that blow everything out of proportion. We’ve had plenty of snow here in Minnesota before. We’ve had lots of snow come down in a short period of time. We used to call this a “blizzard” or a “snowstorm” since it’s comparable to a “rainstorm”, but way colder and fluffier.

Nowadays, you see it on the news or read it on the Internet: a foot and a half of snow in a day has become “Snowpocalypse!” “Snowmageddon!” “Snowapalooza!” “Snownami!” (Yes, I saw that one on the Internet, too.) Everything is insane and crazy and if the weather gets the tiniest bit worse, you’re gonna buried be up to your nostrils in snow as soon as you walk out the door. Assuming that your house hasn’t collapsed from the weight of the snow, thereby crushing the door frame.

This is all I want to know: What happened to weather forecasts for “Blizzard”?

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Who doesn’t like icy intersections?

We got about 6″ of snow yesterday, which isn’t a big deal for Minnesota. Assuming that it’s not the first snow of the year, of course. I don’t know how the mind-wipe occurs, but it happens every year when even one inch of white stuff falls from from the sky (and I’m not talking coke that someone flushed down an airplane’s toilet to avoid getting busted by the cops). People forget how to drive in snowy weather and the late news reports 300 spin-outs and an eight-hour drive to make a 10-mile trip home from work.

But that’s here and now. My mom told me horror stories about when she lived in Pennsylvania for a while about 40 years ago, so I’m hoping people have outgrown the practice. (They probably haven’t, but hope springs eternal.) If there was ever any snow on the ground back then, a lot of people had no idea how to handle it. 300 spin-outs at the end of the day would be a happy surprise. What scared her the most, though, was when they were driving on city streets.

If you’ve done a good job teaching your kids to drive in snow, they’ll know to accelerate slowly until the car starts moving. Some of Mom’s friends back there used a different method: gun it until the tires melt the snow, hit the pavement and move you forward. It’s an interesting technique that might work once or twice, but there’s one teensy-weensy problem. Melted snow refreezes. That might not mean much once you’re gone, but I imagine the drivers behind you who can’t stop on the ice, slide through the red light and then into another car sure appreciate it.

So that’s my advice for the day. Take it easy, drive slow and don’t gun it to try to move faster. Even if you need to flush some coke down a toilet to avoid getting busted by the cops.