NYC Snow Days

The glorious thing about snow days are they are unexpected breaks from work- especially in NYC. There is nothing you can do to prevent them and they almost always do decrease your workload, rather than increase it. In addition to that, you have an excuse to stay at home, not go out and do what you like. Personally, I took it as a chance to catch up on things and get prepared for parent conferences tomorrow, although we might get another day because of the weather.

Today I tried to keep a balance between school work, other work and no work. As of right now I still need to get a few odds and ends done, but I got laundry out of the way, planned my lesson for tomorrow, found out a doctor's office is closed, left a message at the amusement park our eighth graders will go to at the end of the year, dropped of some dry-cleaning and split a bottle of wine over lunch with my girlfriend. I've also spent a couple hours grading and doing other vaguely productive tasks and I went to get 25-cent hot wings across a very snow/slush-filled avenue.

We've been astounded all day by the way Bloomberg has handled this snow day business. Coming from Kansas and Michigan (two places with a history of being pummeled by winter weather and school closures), we were pretty confused by the way the mayor handled a snow storm in this city. Where we're from, school is never called off a full day before a storm begins. As it turns out, weather has a tendency to be somewhat unpredictable, so to pull an entire school system to a screeching halt based on a weather report the day before seems a bit silly.

Today Bloomberg decided he would be able to predict at 5:30 PM the conditions of the roads tomorrow morning at 5:30 AM. This is another thing that is different from what we're used to. School is never called until the morning of that school day. All things considered, I think that tomorrow is going to be a much worse travel day for students- especially who, for the most part, walk to school or walk to a bus or train- than today was, as the walk to school wouldn't have been that bad.

Ah, well. At least we got a day off and I was able to catch up on a laundry list of things, including laundry, instead of adding to the pile of grading and other things that need to be done.

Today's Wine: Tabor Cabernet Sauvignon Galil 2007. This one was under $15, very solid and from Israel. While the political situation over there is incredibly complex, whoever made this wine knew what was going on.