School Canceled on Account of Beautiful Weather

The weather forecast predicted a snowstorm for today, so I awoke at 4:30 A.M. to allow myself time to grade a set of quizzes and still have time to snowblow the driveway before needing to get ready for work, drive the girls to school, and make it to my 8:30 A.M. class. I was outside at 6:00 A.M. to discover a lot of snow but an otherwise calm and temperate morning. It was so warm that the bottom layer of snow was slushy, making it heavy and occasionally plugging up the chute through which the snow is thrown. There was a waist-high drift from the front door to the northwest corner of the driveway, so I started there. Two neighbors across the street were out with their snowblowers, too, clearing the concrete of the wet snow before future cold weather could turn it to ice. It was a beautiful morning, and I made good progress.

Then the announcements started coming on the radio, and Susan popped out of the house to relay them to me. School was canceled in several area towns. Makes sense--with so many rural students bussed in to town and so many rural roads inaccessible after a storm, it's common to delay the start of school or even cancel it in those towns on days like today. They're at the mercy of snow plow availability. The majority of Dickinson schools' students, though, live in town, so no need to cancel school here.

Except that was Susan's next announcement. No school for her or the girls! Again (remember?) administrators canceled school on a perfectly beautiful day! After keeping it in session on far worse days--you know, days on which it was actually storming! I don't get it. On the plus side, that enabled all of them to bundle up and come out with shovels to do "cleanup" work, catching the strips of snow left behind by the snowblower and enjoying the lovely morning themselves.

Are you understanding that we had beautiful weather this morning? Is that fact registering with you? Well, it didn't register with DSU administrators who canceled all classes and activities at the university for today! Yep, that was Susan's last major announcement for me; she popped out of the house with a sheet of paper on which she had written in marker "DSU CLOSED" (knowing that I could read better than hear over the noise of the snowblower). As rare as a winter school closing is (or used to be) in ND, a university closing is rarer still. When I was an undergraduate student at UND, the only time it was shut down for winter weather was once when the governor commanded it. And that was because of temperatures around 40 degrees below zero. And the shutdown didn't even happen until late in the day so that I had already been to all my classes that day anyway. So today, with temperatures high enough to melt snow and visibility as far as any day in the summer, we needed to shut down our university? It boggles my mind.

We finished clearing our driveway and sidewalk of snow, and then I--can you guess?--yes, went to work. The snowplows hadn't been out yet (and still haven't), but I just stayed in the ruts of previous drivers (yes, plenty of people were out and about in the beautiful weather that had caused schools and universities to close for the day), drove to my office, and adjusted course schedules to figure out how, in future class sessions, to make up for this lost instructional day. Aargh.

Bright side: Susan felt a "snow day" urge to bake and used some Amish friendship bread starter to bake apple coffee cake, butterscotch bread, and lemon poppy seed bread. Tasty. It would have been an especial treat had the warmth of the freshly baked bread stood in contrast to the cold storminess of the weather. As it was, it was like eating hot food on a summer day. Here's hoping for actual cold temperatures, high winds, and reduced visibility tomorrow so that administrators will leave school in session, and we can get back to normal.

Good Neighbors

Our last trip to Young's Park for Tuesday Nite Live was so fun that we decided to do it again tonight. We had Chuck and Reba and their kids over for supper (bratwursts and hotdogs on the grill, raw veggies, pasta salad, cookie salad [courtesy of Reba], and chips), and then we all hiked over to the bandshell in the park on the hill overlooking the city. It was a cool, breezy evening, so we dressed warmly, and Susan brought fruit snacks and cookies (made by our daughters today) to enjoy while seated on our quilt and listening to Cotton Wood, a ND bluegrass band. They were good and interacted well with the audience between numbers. Still, they mostly served as background music for us while we adults visited and the children found other kids and played tag and hide-and-seek and gave piggyback rides until it was time to walk home.

Cotton Wood on stage

Our next-door neighbors John and Beth's daughter joined us for supper and the concert, too, and she hung around to play with our kids on the lawn in the dark after we got home from the concert. While we remained outside playing, Chuck and Reba took their little boy to Beth to have her look him over; he had fallen and hurt his clavicle in the afternoon and continued to complain of pain throughout the night, and they wanted a nurse's assessment of the situation. (She gave him a clean bill of health.)

Jack ready for the ride home from the concert

I continue to be impressed with how neighborly the people in this neighborhood are. Even our next-door neighbor Ivella waved broadly to us from the couch in her living room as our gang tramped past their (Ivella and Leo's) house. In our previous neighborhood--with few exceptions (like our wonderful next-door neighbors there, Bob and Judy)--people stayed in their houses and kept their curtains drawn and their eyes averted: no waving at passersby, no dining at one another's houses, no going to community events together, no sending your kids with the neighbors to a concert, no watering your neighbor's lawn or examining a neighbor kid's bruised shoulder, no offering to fix your neighbor's lawn sprinkler (thank you, Chuck), no snowblowing the neighbor's driveway * (thank you, Neal), no bringing over fresh baking the day after the neighbors move in (thank you, Ivella), no popping over to help a neighbor start a stubborn garden tiller (thank you, Leo), no supplying popsicles to the neighborhood children (thank you, Roger and Audrey), no stopping to visit anytime you're out and about and see the neighbors out, too (thank you, pretty much anybody in Dickinson), etc.

This is a good place to live.

* "No snowblowing the neighbor's driveway" is really just a way to thank Neal; it's not really true of our previous neighborhood, where Bob quite often snowblew our driveway while he was out cleaning off his own. Bob and Judy really were great neighbors.