Snow Day!

Trafton B.

November 23, 2010 - 4:18 PM

There are several captions I had in mind for today's blog post. "Snow Day.....so why don't we get the day off?" or "Snow....before Thanksgiving? Who doesn't believe in climate change now?" The real story, however, is "Snow Day....and Eugene is completely unprepared."

Seriously, I love myself a good snow. Being a Californian I'm still excited by this crazy phenomenon that you call "seasons" in Oregon. Today's snow, however, was more of an early morning hindrance than anything else.

I woke up this morning, shivering under my covers and begrudgingly considering turning on my space heater with my house's heating bill (and the environmental impact) in the back of my mind. I then looked out my window, after clearing a porthole through the frosty condensate, to see a blanket of white covering my roof. My immediate reaction was, "Holy crap, the weather forecast was actually right," and then I was relieved to think that I finally had a legitimate reason to warm up my room.

Normally I ride my bicycle to class on Tuesday, but that was definitely out of the question today. My thin, slick road tires aren't really designed for icy streets. If only they made studded bicycle tires, right? Instead I bundled up in my long johns, wool socks and down jacket and walked, or glided rather, to the bus stop.

At the corner of 18th and Willamette there's a gradual slope just before the stoplight. In my fifteen minutes of waiting for the bus, which arrived much later than it's regular scheduled time, I witnessed three cars uncontrollably pirouette down the glossy asphalt. The first two were lucky enough to recover before colliding into the curb, but the third car's folly resulted in a fender bender with truck behind it, which couldn't have been going more than 4 MPH at the moment of impact. I felt bad for the drivers, obviously, but I couldn't help but chuckle. Have you ever seen a slow motion crash? It's pretty comical.

My bus arrived just moments before my shoes froze to the concrete and I was on the fast track to McKenzie Hall. I arrive at my class in the GIS lab about twenty minutes late, which still made me the third student to arrive. I gladly accepted the bronze medal, and the consolation prize for everyone that arrived after me was a roaring yet cynical applause for successfully making the trek to campus. Even our professor was surprised at how many of us showed up. Emma and I have a whole lot of work to do on our Willamette University Walkability project, so we sort of had no choice.

Thankfully the ice melted away by the afternoon because my roommates and I desperately needed to pick up a secondary carboy for our brewing operation, and I wasn't about to carry a six-gallon glass jug across town on foot.

Now, I'm sitting at my Aunt and Uncle's house in Sherwood and my cousin and I are about to head back into the cold to pick up my family at the Portland Airport. Happy Holidays to everyone and safe travels for those of you heading home for Thanksgiving. Enjoy the long weekend, and I'll see you back in Eugene for one more week of classes and another round of final exams.