If you live anywhere near the northeast quadrant of North America you’re probably hearing some variation on these sentiments everywhere you go.  My Facebook homepage is already one undifferentiated mass of updates from Wisconsonians and Montreal…ans?  ites?  (What are we?) about snow, blizzards, hibernation, and the impending chilly apocalypse.

Montreal has started to receive the first of its predicted 8 to 14 inches of snow for the day.  I originally thought that the hype surrounding Snowpocalypse 2009 was because we’ve received virtually no snow at all this winter, and the city feels sadly barren and unfinished without it.  I mean, as I’ve previously discussed, this city is uniquely qualified to swiftly and efficiently remove large quantities of snow; I’ve been hearing the little sidewalk plows zip by as I type.  (Montreal: so hardcore, we remove our snow with farm machinery and semi trucks.)  Much to the amazement of newcomers, life goes on in winter — the city can’t operate if everybody stays home when the white stuff begins to descend, and the temperatures are only just below freezing today.  But all the same, 60 flights have already been canceled at the airport this morning, so perhaps I shouldn’t be so cavalier.

A quick search on Google reveals that Montreal averages 85.6 inches of snow per year while Madison averages 44.1, but Madison’s got the typical Midwestern snow-removal scheme of an inadequate fleet of city plows.  As a consequence, when this storm went through Madison last night I got a message in my inbox saying that the UW has been shut down — something which happens rarely, and always belatedly — and, for the first time that I can remember, Madison’s Metro system has been completely halted.  The National Weather Service in Milwaukee has been putting forth Blizzard Warnings, predicting, in typical all-caps style, that the snow “WILL LIKELY HAVE A SIGNIFICANT IMPACT ON SOCIETY.”  I remember one or two storms during grad school when the snow in our neighborhood was piled so high on both sides of the sidewalk that it was like walking through a little alpine valley between mountains, and I almost wish that I could be there now to enjoy the blizzardy-ness of it all, and to feel all the profundity of its societal impact.

In the meantime, I’m going to don my oversized Wisconsin hoodie in solidarity, and retreat to the couch for the rest of the morning to knit some mittens.  It just feels wrong to be working on my dissertation.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 at 12:06 pm and is filed under bits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.