NOW We're Cooking With Gas

Yesterday could pretty much be summed up in nine letters: OMG! SPS: WTF?!, SPS being Seattle Public Schools, which canceled school on account of wild rumors of SNOW! Possibly arriving... Sometime... Maybe. They starting things off with a bang at 6 a.m. with automated calls to every telephone number they could possibly think of -- so we had the landline and three different cell phones ringing in series, all to let us know that we didn't have to get up yet. Then of course the whole day passed without a single flake. Children all over the city optimistically donned snow suits and dug sleds out of their basements, and then were reduced to gazing mournfully out the windows and bickering with their siblings. Meanwhile countless parents scrambled for child-care, or else stayed home and missed their last chance to get anything done at work before -- oh, Lord -- January 5th.

Fortunately, today more than lived up to the extra 24 hours of anticipation. By the time the SPS robocall came at 6 a.m. there were several inches of snow on the ground and tons more coming down, and children who normally have to be dragged out of bed by the hair at 8:15 were already dancing gleefully in front of their bedroom windows. By 8 am everyone had scarfed down their cereal and located boots & hats & gloves & snowpants, settled the inevitable arguments about which boots & hats & gloves & snowpants were whose, and headed up the hill with an assortment of toboggans, saucers, and makeshift sleds.

Because what could possibly be more fun than bellyflopping onto an Obama yard sign and flying headfirst down Spencer Street with your chin inches from the ground, feeling every bump and dent scrape past your belly through the corrogated plastic? Except possibly bellyflopping onto a red plastic saucer and flying down Spencer Street with a shrieking eight-year old clinging to your back? Or maybe flying headfirst down Spencer Street on a red plastic saucer with a shrieking eight-year-old on your back while another shrieking eight-year-old on a boogie board hangs on to your ankles and you all catch air going over the snow jump before the whole crazy formation flies apart and you all skid into the row of garbage cans in a whooping heap?

We know we have not fully explored all the possible answers to this question, not by a long shot, and we feel that an exhaustive program of field research may be required to come up with a definitive conclusion. Fortunately, we have already received word from The Machine that there's no school tomorrow either. (We're still turning off the ringers on all the phones before we go to bed, just in case.)