The Official 10 Commandments of Winter Weather

My friends, winter has come to Pennsylvania. If you don’t live here, you may be thinking something

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to the effect of: “Get with it, old man. It’s been winter for over a month now.” My initial response to that would be: “Cool it with that old man business. I just bought a Meghan Trainor album off iTunes. Does that sound like something an old man would do? I don’t think so.”

               That aside, this winter had been a fairly mild one until this past weekend when much of the east coast was buried under unfathomable amounts of snow. So much snow that Woolly Mammoths would fall into a fit of hysterics just thinking about it. This sorry state of affairs is what led me to proclaim that winter proper has come.

                If we’re all going to get through the next few months, those of us who live in places prone to honest-to-god winter conditions need to stick together. That means following the Official 10 Commandments of Winter Weather. Now, I’ve already noticed a few of you breaking some of these, so I thought a refresher might be in order. Remember, these commandments are literally the only thing keeping us from going full Donner Party or Revenant on each other. 

Winter Update: One Snow in and I Already Hate Everyone

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I think it was the great philosopher Plato who said: “If you can’t be bothered to shovel a fucking sidewalk, you shouldn’t own a fucking home.” Or maybe it was Madame Curie. I can’t remember. The point being, someone over the course of ancient history knew exactly what he or she was talking about.

           If you’ve ever spent any time in Pennsylvania between November and April, you might have noticed our propensity to get a little snow during those months. We’re not talking Antarctic levels. There aren’t marauding gangs of penguins wandering the streets of the Keystone State, threatening children who are walking to school. But we get a little of the white stuff when it gets cold.

           Last Monday, we got quite literally a little of the white stuff. I don’t have the final totals in front of me, but I’d wager that we received somewhere in the neighborhood of two inches of snow. This wasn’t the heavy, water-logged, destroyer-of-backs snow that the heavens dumped on us last winter. This was light and powdery. It might as well have been left behind by a giant powdered donut who’d walked through the neighborhood sneezing.

My girlfriend and I shoveled our house and the sidewalks in front of our two neighbors, threw down some salt and called it a day. We did our neighbors’ sidewalks because we use the sidewalks and one of our neighbors is an old man and the other is a middle-aged cop who is never home and when he is home, he doesn’t give a shit. Despite the extra workload, we weren’t out there for hours, toiling away while the Snow Meister chucked iceballs at us and laughed wildly. It took maybe half an hour max. As far as shoveling experiences go, this was about as pleasant as you’re going to get.

And yet, that wasn’t enough for some people.

After Monday’s snowfall, the Ice Age happened. It was so cold in Pennsylvania last week that ruffed grouses were literally dropping out of the sky frozen solid. It was so cold that Gov. Tom Corbett’s icy heart was literally the warmest thing in the state. It was so cold that locals assumed the Philadelphia 76ers had won the NBA championship because hell had to have frozen over. It was a chaotic, confusing time for us all.

World War S: The dead-and-buried art of helping your fellow man

Rest easy, friends and loved ones. There’s more snow on the way.

                In just a few short hours, Mother Nature will begin dumping even more of rain’s awkward cousin from the North on my part of the world.

                It’s been a couple of weeks since we’ve had a snowfall of absolutely apocalyptic proportions, and I think I speak for everyone in the area when I say “What’s been the holdup?”

                After all, it just doesn’t feel like winter if I’m not outside using a shovel and a bag of salt to fight off giant menacing snowmen and snowwomen.

                Because inclusion and all.

                Anyway, the forecasters seem to have settled on the 4-8 inch range for how much snow is coming. Although, yesterday it was something like 8-12, so who knows?

                The only things that are certain are that we will get snow and that it will be somewhere in neighborhood of a light sprinkling to enough to make a wooly mammoth burn a personal day at work.

                There’s actually one more thing you can count on when the snow starts to fall in any low-to-moderate amounts: people marking their parking spaces.

                This drives me crazy. Now, it doesn’t happen in my neighborhood, since, for one thing, we all have driveways. But I’d like to think that even if we didn't, we wouldn't all go out and start marking our territory at the first sign of trouble. I guess I just like to think that my neighbors are human beings and not families of wolves or alley cats.

                And it looks like the City of Philadelphia has decided to do something about these deadbeats and their chairs, too.

                I don’t understand the twisted animal logic behind saving a spot. You dig out your car, but before you leave, you get to drag a chair down to the street and leave it there? Then that spot just becomes yours for a couple of days? And if some god-fearing American comes along and moves that chair, as one should do, you get to feel some misguided holy validation when you key that person’s car or slash its tires?