Snow Day

How odd. Last time I had a snow day, I think I was about eight years old and happy to skip out on third grade.

But here I am, dug out of all snowbanks and warm and dry at home… on the boss’s orders. Go figure. (Maybe the fact that it took him nearly two hours to get into the office might have made him more amenable to cancelling work for the rest of us).

So far, over 30 centimetres have fallen, and the prediction is for quite a bit more, and it’s created quite a mess on the roads:

Ministère des Transports traffic camera: Autoroute 40 at Iberville at 11:15am

People are still getting around, but the going is very, very slow. One traffic report mentioned that employees of the Tim Horton’s on Cote de Liesse near Hickmore were serving coffee to stranded motorists who had parked and gotten out of their cars, figuring they weren’t going anywhere for a while.

It’s really kind of sad, though. We Montrealers love to brag about how even the biggest snowstorms leave us unfazed. And yet, here we are, the first major dump of the season, and suddenly traffic is a nightmare and schools, flights, and pretty much everything else is cancelled. Sure, the snowfall occurred mostly at rush hour, and it’s falling too fast for the snow crews to keep up, but it still seems like we ought to be able to cope with the white stuff a bit better by now.

Oh well. Time to curl up with some hot cocoa and watch the snow from the window.