Let it snow

Is anyone going to get their panties in a bunch if I become the naysayer, the poo-pooer, the wet blanket for just a second?

While the entire world appears to have bought into the media hysteria about this piddling snowfall we’ve had of late, somebody’s got to point out how much this flurry will mean in the bigger picture. Come February, you’ll wonder, ‘What was the big deal? It’s not like it was Noah’s flood or something.”

Has anyone out there been more than slightly inconvenienced by this stuff? OK, there have been more than the usual numbers of traffic accidents, but my observations suggest that the problem isn’t the snow; it’s that people refuse to adapt their behavior to drive in it. Slow down, people. It’s snow. It’s slick.

I guess I’m lucky because Kathleen is a teacher, so when the kids don’t have school, I don’t have to find somebody to watch them. I don’t mean to diminish the suffering of people who’ve had property damaged or the homeless who’ve had to find a place out of the weather, but for the vast majority of us, this is really more of an adventure than a disaster.

From a purely aesthetic point of view, the weather has been beautiful. Our city has been transformed. Take a second to enjoy it at the level the not-in-school children are.

Now, as long as I’m being contrary, is it time for the cities and the county to come up with a plan for how to deal with this kind of weather? I see a lot of construction equipment, graders and front-end loaders, sitting idle. Is there any reason not to have advance lease agreements set up with private industry and the state for times like this when local-government-owned equipment isn’t enough to handle the weather? In other words, wouldn’t the state prefer its road-construction equipment working, and wouldn’t private equipment operators prefer to be making a little side money when they can’t be digging the next home site?