Stuck at Home

Sometime around 6:30 am Liu Laoshi from Thea's school called to say no school due to the snowstorm, then around 7:30 am Ela called letting us know Summit was also closed and Group was cancelled. What happened to getting up around 8 am and confirming at NJ 101.5's web site the schools were not opening?

On the other hand, Princeton University is business as usual. You'd think that a major university could do the humane thing and give its employees some extra time to chisel and scrape their cars clear of the ice. (I'm on a major rant about that because I was stuck last week behind one of our across-the-street neighbors who was driving his or her white SUV in front of us down River Road at a crawl because he or she had just scraped a small opening in the ice and was hoping the defroster would do the rest. Moron, moron, moron. Thank you for thinking yourself so much more important than the rest of us. I don't give a fig if you endanger yourself, but do it when I'm not sharing the road with you and you are slowing me down.)

It is not that much snow, complete over-reaction. If I was still living in Illinois it would be business as usual. I remember the first major snowstorm after we moved to Bolingbrook, it was deep enough and had enough drifting for my brother to construct tunnels in the backyard. After school, because the buses ran and we went to school as usual. Reason #1 to want to move back to the East Coast in the mind of a 14 year old. (Not that anyone cares what any of the other reasons are, but #2 would be the combo platter of Long John Silver and Red Lobster are not authentic seafood restaurants and no crab cakes to be found until you drive about 750 miles to the east. #3 would be flat, flat, flat and more flat, like living on a topographical ironing board. The only good thing was that I learned to drive in snow and ice during the time we lived there.)

So now I am stuck with the brat who spent 10 minutes yelling, "I WANT MY BREAKFAST NOW!" a few hundred times despite being told she had to maintain a civil tone of voice and add a please to the end of that sentence to guarantee my immediate departure from the warm covers, and her brother who is walking around in a t-shirt and diaper proclaiming, "MI-cah's nay-KEE!"

So the plan to throw him in a snowdrift when he gets on my nerves and dig him out in the spring thaw isn't going to work on two counts: the snow is turning into freezing rain or sleet, and I don't think it would much bother him being out in the elements without proper clothing.