And So It Ends

The Great Blizzard of 2016 came through and dropped a whopping 4 inches of snow on my city. People are trapped inside their homes. Drivers are afraid to venture onto the roads. Whatever shall we do? (Sarcasm.)

When I was a child, sometimes it snowed, and sometimes it snowed a lot. When I lived in the state capital many years ago, we had two snowfalls in the same week that totaled 27 inches. It was an unusual amount of snow for Richmond, but it wasn’t a big deal, it was just snow and you shoveled it out of the way and got on with your life. Snow didn’t take over the local TV channels, and it didn’t preempt the national news shows. It was just something that happened in winter.

You know what is a big deal? During the winter of 2014-2015, two snow storms in five days dumped five to seven feet of snow on Buffalo, New York. And those snow storms were only two out of ten to hit Buffalo that winter.

The weather people say that Washington, D.C. received two feet of snow, and New York City may also get that much. That’s newsworthy, I suppose. Very light snow is falling here, and maybe we’ll get another half inch before it’s all over. The local TV news coverage of the “snow event” consisted of reporters standing outside the television studio, describing how the snow was hitting their faces, poking a yardstick into the snow and announcing it was “two inches,” – a monotony which eventually descended into the tedium of showing photos of kids and dogs playing in the snow. That boredom finally gave way to different kind of boredom: college basketball.

And the tedium continues.