Snow day

Last night before heading to bed, I went through my AIM buddy list to check everyone's away messages and was a bit amused to observe that about 70% of everyone referenced the snowstorm that hit us. Here are a few away messages from last night that I managed remember, and no I did not copy and paste them into a notepad file and save it onto my desktop, because I'm not a no-life loser with nothing better to do at 1:30 in the morning:

"Damn it's cold... :-["

"its all snowy and icey out, think ill chill in tonight..."

"Brr it's cold... time to cuddle up under the covers!
-life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the number of moments that take our breath away"

"waiting till tomorrow to come back to dekalb due to this ridiculous snowstorm. :-!"

"I guess this is payback for the last two weeks of good weather..."

"WAKING UP IN 4 HOURS TO SHOVEL MY DAMN DRIVEWAY!! I LOVE IT"

"Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!!!"

"gunna be a long drive to work tomorrow...."

"i love this weather"

"how mi gonna get to work?"

It's interesting seeing how strangely excited everyone's gotten over this. We're kind of like kids on the night before Christmas, where we'll impatiently hop into bed at 9 PM and shut our eyes as tight as we can in hopes that tomorrow will come as soon as possible. And then we'll wake up in a blink, finding to our delight that there are dozens of presents lying beneath a Christmas tree. Only, in our case, the presents are streets blanketed with a foot of snow, as well as plenty of things to gripe about by the water cooler in the morning.

Reading everyone's away messages, it's almost as if a snowstorm is something to look forward to, and if everyone instead woke up this morning to a 75 degree, radiantly sunny day, we'd all be screaming "GOD! FUCKIN'! DAMNIT!" in unison.

The funny thing is it was kind of like that this morning. For us city folk, at least. I woke up this morning thinking I'd be somewhere on the Planet Hoth, but instead it was still very much Lakeview.

And I muttered, "GOD!..."

I looked out my window and could still make out the Wrigley Field infield, only covered in a light speckle of snow, and said, "FUCKIN'!..."

And I walked out to the balcony and leaned my head beyond the railing, and could hear not one snowplow in the distance, and bellowed for all below to hear, "DAMNIT!!!"

Icicles would have surely broken off of the bottom of the balcony from the sound of my loud roar, HAD THERE BEEN ANY.

Turns out the 6 to 12 inches of snow we were supposed to get overnight was more like an innocuous half inch of powder. Why do weathermen tease us like this? And, of course, even more puzzling is: why do all of us enjoy shared misery so much?

My boss barged into work this morning looking like an Eskimo in Cancun, decked out in earmuffs, two coats, two scarves, and what looked to be ski goggles. I laughed when I saw her and asked, "Was the Great Blizzard of '06 what you expected it to be?"

She ripped the ski goggles from off of her face, let out an exaggerated sigh, and responded, "No, but we still have a good three months of winter left for something to happen."

And then she added, "Oh! But I took the Red Line this morning and our train broke down. So that was pretty cool."