The last time the Philadelphia area got as much snow as it's gotten this winter, I was in 8th grade. Back then, snow was a God-send. It meant time off from school, playing tackle football in the streets and a license to sleep in and be lazy. Even when the snow was too deep to go outside and play in it after that epic blizzard in 1996, I still had a bunch of stuff to do indoors. I had a NES and a buttload of games, a Creepy Crawlers oven and illegal cable to watch movies ad infinitum on pay-per-view (don't judge me now, cable companies, I'm totally legit at this point). The only bad thing about it was the shoveling, but really, when you have two brothers and a father like me, it didn't matter if youdid a half-assed job. Shoveling in and of itself wasn't even that big a deal to kids in general; the entrepreneurial spirits in the neighborhood saw it as a way to make a nice sum of cash for their labors.
Fast-forward fourteen years, and as the Delaware Valley is bracing for (or in the midst of if you really think what we're getting right now is bad) its fourth accumulating snowstorm in the last 2-and-a-half months, I meet the new weather pattern with a loud groan. As you grow up, snow suuuuuucks. Big time.
For one, you no longer get snow days unless you work for the government. Most jobs remain open or at the very least, with the proliferation of reliable wireless Internet connections, make you work from home. Bummer. In addition, snow gives commuting by anything other than snowmobile as great a degree of difficulty as trying to get a babyface over with a flamboyant homosexual gimmick in the WWE. Double bummer. And don't think that you get off the hook for shoveling. More often than not, your kids whom you send out to shovel do a half-assed job (Lord knows I did when I was younger), so you have to clean up after them. If you don't, and some dumbass slips and falls on your property, you're liable. Joy. And of course, if you don't want to do it yourself, you're paying for one of those aforementioned entrepreneurial kids to do it for you. Snow then goes from a potential money maker to a money sink.
So yeah, with another 3-to-18 inches of snow baring down on the area on top of the already record-breaking snowfalls seen this winter, you can't blame me for being a bit testy. Well, unless you live in Canada or Buffalo or some other locale that gets this kind of snow all the time. Then you can tell me to shut up. But yeah, snow sucks when you're an adult, and the last time I checked, despite the four video game systems at my disposal and my ever-burgeoning comic book collection, I'm an adult.
So what's the point of this? Well, there really is none other than to vent frustrations at Mother Nature. It's all you can ever do about the weather, really. It's a fickle bitch. But then again, maybe it's not all that bad.
I mean, being snowed in provides an excellent opportunity to catch up on watching wrestling on DVD, right?
