Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow.....somewhere else!

Melanie's front yard

Seeing that Buffalo, NY's weather has been making headline news, I figured I should make a blog post about it to let out-of-state friends and family know that we were not buried alive.  Yes, Buffalo is infamous for its snow and yes, Buffalo just got slammed with a ton of lake effect snow.  But, I am happy to report that although I have many, many friends that are digging out of snow situations like the one's here (These are actual photos of some of my friends' houses) and digging out from 3 feet of snow with 5 foot snow drifts, I am happy to report that we just had a dusting of snow by us.

A view from Diana's house

By growing up within the city of Buffalo, I have had my share of snow storms and blizzards.  But since David and I moved north of the city we don't typically get slammed with these kinds of snow falls.  What generally causes such large amounts of snow is "lake effect" (Click here to read about "lake effect").  We, for the most part, live too far north to receive lake effect storms off of Lake Erie and too far south-east to get the storms that come off of Lake Ontario (those usually go to Rochester or Syracuse).  Certainly, we have received snow but I don't recall anything like this since we moved to the Northtowns.  Even the time I got stranded overnight during the Storm of 2000, I had traveled by car that late afternoon (before the storm started) to attend a wake in the Southtowns and ended up not being able to get home.  Meanwhile, there was green grass at home then too!  Yes, I love the fact that we don't typically get buried in snow. Yet, as crazy as this sounds, when I was listening to all the weather talk and people calling into our local AM talk radio station, I sort of felt as though I was missing out on something.  After growing up and experiencing the Blizzard of '77 and the Blizzard of '85 how could one not? I felt that way, of course, only until I talked to my friends that are still digging themselves out.

Mary's yard

Honestly though, I would much rather deal with the big snow storms than some of the other nature strikes that other regions of our country get.  Unlike tornadoes or earthquakes, we generally know that a snow storm is on it's way about 2 days in advance. So one just stocks up on food, rents some movies and hunkers down inside, and enjoys a bonus day off of work with family.

Finally, after viewing the storm pictures above, I will leave you with the sad little snowman that Madeline and I built.  As you can probably see, there were still leaves stuck to the snow because we were gathering every last little bit of snow we could find.  We used up the snow on our front lawn and stole some from both of our neighbors too....only to end up with this "vertically challenged" snowman.  That's okay....once all my Southtown friends are DONE shoveling, I'll have to take Madeline out to play in some *real* snow.