weather wimps

New Yorkers are weather wimps.  I'm sorry, but we are.  The kids had a snow day from school today, and had several last year, too.  Pretty much every time it snows, they have a day off school.  Last night we got about a foot of snow.  But it was overnight, and the roads were pretty much plowed by the time the kids would have gone in this morning.  Also, there are no buses in my town.  So the weather should have to be bad enough that the kids can't walk to school to justify cancelling it.  Wimps.  In Michigan, where I grew up, it pretty much took a one inch layer of solid ice on the roads before we got a snow day.  And the layer of ice had to be on the roads by 4 am, when the superintendent looked out his window.

However, the wimpiness of New Yorkers dealing with snow is excellent for the scam plan.  It means that in the last two weeks, I got to work from home two days.  I told Kathy I was considering going in around 2 today, working for an hour, walking around the halls, and then going home, so it looked like I really made an effort and came in.  Then I found out that 75% of the partners in my department were working from home today.  Walking the halls is totally unnecessary, it turns out.  It's awesome. 

So today, I got up late.  I shoveled my driveway (yes, using a shovel, not a snow-blower) and drank coffee.  I made homemade chili.  Now I am writing this.  Later today I will have to do some work, but in my yoga pants.  And because I grew up in Michigan, where I once had to drive all the way across the state at 5 am in a blizzard to do inventory at my retail job, snow does not stop me from doing anything I actually want to do.  And also, Michiganders are tough as nails.

What it really comes down to is how much you want/have to get where you're going in weather like this.  I have a friend who walked 2 miles in the last blizzard to go drink beer with her friend.  But she did not walk 1/2 a mile to the working subway line to get to in to Manhattan to go to work.  The reasonableness of going out is totally shaped by whether I want to do the thing that requires me to leave my house in this weather.  2 miles for beer?  Reasonable.  1/2 mile for work?  Unreasonable.  It's all your perspective.  For example, here is a picture of the car we usually use to commute to work:

Looks pretty dire, doesn't it?  But here is a picture of our driveway.

See the back end of the car there?  So really, all I would have to do is back the car out, to go get my coffee.  It's just how you frame the picture.  But aren't most things like that?