After my shower, I turned on the radio again. "...and there is a winter storm watch in effect for northwest Ohio tonight." Oh, joy! Just when I thought we'd seen the last snow of the season, just when I thought we were finally close to being able to walk down our unsalted street without breaking our necks, here comes some more of the hideous white stuff. The announcer went on. "One to two inches of snow, plus freezing rain, are expected." Well, a couple of inches aren't so bad, and I work Saturday instead of tomorrow this week. I can deal.

By the time I got to work, I was hearing some buzzings about the weather.

"Are you ready for the snow?"
"I've got my shovel ready!"
"We'll get killed tonight..."
"Yeah, everybody will need videos for when they're snowbound."

Snowbound? By two inches of snow? When did everybody turn into weaklings? I checked the Weather Channel homepage; we'd been upgraded to three inches, but still nothing serious. When I heard someone mention tonight's "blizzard," I had finally had enough.

"People, it's a little snow! Blizzards incapacitate cities; three inches will bring out a few plows. This is nothing! You've lived through ten times what you'll see tonight! Revel in your own strength!" I was suddenly a motivational speaker, enjoining my clients to empower themselves against Old Man Winter. They seemed confused. I unflexed my biceps and went back to my post. I guess people just need something to anticipate, and snow is as good as anything else around here.

I'm not a fan of winter weather. It's not just the road conditions that frighten me, though that's definitely part of it. I don't like walking on ice. I never had to do a whole lot of that before I moved up here to the top of the country. Maryland and West Virginia can get slippery, but they never do that thing where the snow turns into pseudo-fondant icing, and you have to slide along the shiny top of it, or else force your feet, one at a time, down through the layers of ice, cutting your ankles to shreds in the process. It's positively eerie to look out your window and see the yard glistening away in the moonlight, looking for all the world as if some joker has wrapped it in Saran Wrap.

When we first moved here, I wasn't worried about snow. "After all," said I, "if your car starts sliding, where's it going to go? Into a field? There are no mountains or anything to fall from." It was a valid point; I was sick of getting trapped at the bottoms of hills on patches of ice. I reasoned that if my car got stuck here, it would be an easy enough task to just push it back to where it needed to go.

Famous last words?

Last year, when we got back from Christmas vacation, we found my car positively buried under a heap of solid ice; I instantly decided that, as much as I didn't like ice under my car, I was equally opposed to having it over my car. Eric and I spent a long evening chipping ice away from its poor frozen inhabitant, and when we thought we'd gotten enough off, I got in and tried to pull out of the parking place. I revved and revved; the tires spun and spun. As it turned out, I was parked on an equally huge sheet of ice, and the car was not moving. We couldn't really push it out, either, because we had no non-ice-covered ground on which to plant our feet. We made a futile attempt to chip away the ice from around the tires, but nothing worked.

Here's the good part about Ohio: while we were working, our neighbors - a group of about six guys - were watching out their window. After Eric and I gave up and went inside, those guys went outside without even saying a word and lifted my car out of the ice and into a new spot. I love Midwest people!

Of course, I wasn't nearly so fond of the fact that they were also selling drugs out of their apartment and were on the receiving end of constant police visits, but that's neither here nor there.

Real blizzards, now, are another story. Does everybody remember the huge blizzard back in the early eighties? I was too small to remember any details, but I recall that my father's car, parked in our front yard, was completely buried - I mean, all we saw was a tiny little lump in the middle of a huge white expanse. My brother and I were ecstatic; we'd never seen so much snow!

My father had a gleam in his eye. He wanted to head off any cabin-fever craziness right from the start, so he made us a deal: make it around the outside of the house in half an hour, and earn fifty cents for the effort. My pre-school aged brother "suited up" first, took one step off the front porch - and disappeared. I didn't fare much better, and neither of us made it around our small house within the allotted time-frame. By the time we returned, we were so sick of snow that we didn't go out for two days. And for a couple of kids, that's a long time. I'm sure my mother was thrilled at the results of my father's enterprise.

I still like to play in the snow, though it's been a long time since we've had any snow worth playing in. The stuff that's almost pure ice makes it too hard to stand up, and the stuff that's all powdery makes terrible snowballs. This year, though we had some that was just the right mix of ice and snow; I went out one evening before Eric got home from work and practiced my old softball pitch. Beautiful!

If we do get substantial snow tonight, mayhap we'll go out and make snowmen. We haven't done that since the first year we were dating, when we made a snow-grandpa surrounded by snow-kids and a snow-basset hound. Unfortunately, they were plowed over by a non-snow Jeep a few hours later, but we had fun in the making. Hey, maybe tonight we'll make some snow guinea pigs! Of course, we'd have to make giant, prehistoric ones, or where would be the point?