Five Reasons Why Snow in the D.C. Area Annoys My Life

When my mother, my brother and I moved to Elmira Street in Southwest D.C. in 1994, we were blessed with a decent snowfall in December.  After my brother and I built a snowman named Paco, a few of the neighborhood girls saw him and immediately declared war.  Let's just say Paco couldn't withstand the fury of the snow fight and neither did one of my soon-to-be best friends--one of the war declarers who got hit in the head by one of my schoolmates with a hard snowball that sent her in the house.  (We all laugh about it now, but she wasn't laughing then.  Come to think about it, she doesn't really laugh that much now.  Maybe the rest of us just laugh at her.)  Fast forward three years later to college and that signaled the end of my love affair with snow.  Being in upstate New York where they get snow like Seattle gets rain, they couldn't care less about three feet of snow on the ground; you just better have your butt in class because the professor that lived in nearby Ithaca was going to expand your mind through rain, hail, sleet or snow and make it before the end of that 15-minute grace period.  Heck, there was snow on the ground two weeks before my graduation in mid-May of 2001.  You grow up and you realize that you don't get to be the teenage kid defending the honor of your pitiful looking snowman anymore.  Unfortunately, you have to be the responsible adult who has to lace up his Tims, walk 15-20 minutes to get on the subway and trek to work because you live the second closest out of everyone designated as emergency staff.  You get to watch the neighborhood kids sled down hills and snow embankments and play with shovels while you're actually using every muscle in your body with yours while A Tribe Called Quest's The Low End Theory, Royce Da 5'9" and DJ Premier's PRyhme or Freddie Gibbs' Shadow of a Doubt albums are just about the only things helping you to ignore slowly losing the feeling in your fingers and toes.  Add insult to injury: you live in a region where schools close if it rains hard enough--except in D.C.--so imagine being told that a snowstorm of historic proportions is on the horizon.  Thus, as we deal dig out of the aftermath from Winter Storm Jonas (someone in one of my Facebook said that she didn't realize that they gave names to winter storms), allow me to trudge through five reasons why winter weather in the Greater Washington Metropolitan Area bothers every piece and portion of my existence...

MISSED IT BY THAT MUCH.  So one of these local news weather teams recently boasted a 97 percent accuracy rate in a commercial just days before Jonas hammered the region.  Okay, so they can predict that it's going to be colder than an eskimo's toilet water.  That's nice.  Well, remember all of the hype that the local meteorologists threw in our faces when Hurricane Sandy was upon us in 2012, making it seem like we were about to get dealt with like never before?  Well, unless you were one of the "stupid" ones who remained on the barrier islands against New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's harsh but sound advice, then you quickly realized that you purchased all of those canned goods and cases of bottled water in vain because what was supposed to be a big, ominous hurricane was nothing more than a hard thunderstorm.  Yeah...we get those all the time around here.  Good job selling us on that chitlin loaf of a weather prediction, Hustle Man.  On the flip side, these same meteorologists predicted that we were only expected to get "a dusting to an inch" last Wednesday, which caused everyone to treat it like a winning football team overlooking their game against a substandard opponent while looking ahead to the following game against their division rival.  Last time I checked, "a dusting to an inch" shouldn't cripple an entire area so badly that it took some people upwards of eight to nine hours to get home...well, unless it's Atlanta.  The ground was cold enough for that "dusting" to stick and, because the roads had not been salted or sanded, that created dangerously icy conditions.  Furthermore, the National Weather Service actually knew how serious Wednesday's "dusting" could be, but they didn't coordinate that information with the local media.  Thus, while these weather men and women might be right 97 percent of the time, they're like Tom Brady missing Wes Welker for the death knell in Super Bowl XLVI the other three percent of the time.

STOP STEPPING ON THE GAS SO HARD FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!!!  Among many bad experiences from the "dusting", being stuck in traffic for two hours on my way home and not walking through my apartment door until exactly 1 a.m. probably tops the list.  So I'm on Ethan Allen Avenue in Takoma Park and intended to turn onto New Hampshire Avenue in an attempt to get some grocery shopping done two days ahead of the storm...wrong.  Southbound traffic on New Hampshire moved like pond water for at least fifteen minutes.  I ended up taking East West Highway to Riggs Road to circumvent some of that northbound New Hampshire traffic and in that roundabout excursion, I witnessed at least three accidents before finally turning onto University Boulevard and getting back to New Hampshire.  As evidenced in the picture above, I sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic for about 30 to 45 minutes.  Meanwhile, the southbound traffic coming up the hill toward New Hampshire and Quebec Street was a joke as drivers in vans, trucks, SUVs and other vehicles with supposedly better tires and driving functions could not get up that hill to save their lives.  The two biggest mistakes that they all were making were 1) accelerating even more while shifted in drive and 2) not turning the wheel in the direction in which their rear was skidding.  Hence, you can imagine the fear that it struck in those drivers on my side of the street who had an even steeper hill to climb between Piney Branch and Metzerott Roads.  Even that Ride On bus in front of me with no passengers on it was too scared to go down that hill.  Realizing that Google is one of the greatest inventions ever while recalling my previous experiences, I quickly went to the Internet for an on-the-fly refresher course in driving up hills in snowy/icy conditions.  After that, I saw an opening to the left of that bus, went down the hill at a lower gear, came to a light and was blown that I had to break my momentum, got annoyed once the light turned green because some fool got in front of me who was too scared to drive and carefully cruised up that hill while leaving all of those other scaredy cats behind.  Thankfully, I didn't skid one time and, mind you, I drive a Honda Accord not known for being the biggest beast in conquering the elements.  Bottom line, D.C. area drivers get petrified behind the wheel when it's raining, so it's even worse when there's snow and ice no matter the accumulation.  Heck, a car burst into flames in Forest Glen on Saturday trying to get up a snow-covered hill and I bet that person was stepping on that gas way too hard.  When in doubt, look to Kanye for your guidance: drive slow, homie...

SO ALL Y'ALL HAVE LEFT ARE BEEF RAMEN NOODLES AND BUTT ENDS OF BREAD?!?!  I think that in some wild twist of fate, news stations and weather forecasters collect money under the table from food manufacturers and grocery stores because that is an instant boost in revenue for them when these end-of-the-world predictions are released.  When I went to Shoppers in Takoma Park on Thursday night to prepare for Jonas, there were little to no eggs, meat or produce except a whole bunch of pork chops, ham and ribs--which is funny because it gives the appearance that people somehow want to eat "clean" during the storm despite having that bottle of Ciroc on tuck.  Darn near all of the fresh baked goods were depleted and the remaining packaged bread was the store brand, which is equally as interesting as the pork surplus because my favorite wheat and whole grain bread brands were all gone.  Conversely, there were plenty of fruits and vegetables left, the milk supply was still decent and, surprisingly, the chips aisle remained well stocked.  Despite the staff stocking more food on the shelves inching closer to their midnight closing time, it still didn't seem like enough food.  Here's the bigger question though: why do people take soooooooo much food?!?!  I literally purchased the same amount of food that I normally do, which is good enough to last for a week and which is what was suggested.  However, these nut jobs in the D.C. area buy into the hype of what the media sells them and buy food as if they're never coming back out of the house ever again in life.  I'd bet dollars to donuts that someone in Syracuse is not feverishly buying  every pack of ground beef or chicken wings that Wegman's has to offer because they know how to shop reasonably for two to three feet of snow.  It's not that serious, slim, and I don't want to eat pig feet and smoked necks for the next seven days.

DON'T FORGET YOUR BOOTIES BECAUSE IT'S COOOOOLD OUT THERE TODAY...AND IT'S COLD, TOO.  Okay, so JB and his friend aren't subjected to the current conditions out of which we in the D.C. area are currently digging.  However, for anyone who gets the biggest kick out of this scene in Pootie Tang like I do, this particular Captain Obvious moment is analogous with the overkill for which both weather teams and social media geniuses are infamous.  It's bad enough that I'm trying to combat cabin fever with my daytime soap fix/guilty pleasure in General Hospital.  It's even worse when the storm watch team believes in their heart of hearts that I don't need to hear Sonny Corinthos' advice to his son Dante after his wife was part of a fiendish plan with her fugitive ex-boyfriend that nearly got his mistress killed--you wanna watch it now, don't you--for the sake of telling me that it's cold outside, barely an inch of snow has fallen in Virginia and some guy made a last-minute run for Doritos and Coronas.  Yeah...none of that is breaking news enough to ever interrupt Sonny Corinthos.  Priorities, people.  Fret not for the news outlets are not the biggest offenders; it's the people on Facebook and other social media platforms who seem to think they missed their calling in life--and probably for good reason.  Yup...it's colder than a polar bear's toe nails...it's snowing...there's a lot of it...okay...we get it...we see it...it's the same reason why some folks are Netflix and chilling longer than expected and the wine is already gone.  I understand that we don't get hammered with snow as often as other places and it can be quite amazing when we do.  I'm not even opposed to the pictures and videos that flood my timeline because it's cool to see it from different angles and witness what people are doing to keep from going stir crazy. Nevertheless, if I don't need a storm watch team to keep me abreast of every centimeter that falls from the sky, then it should be crystal clear how I feel about some weather snorecaster slowing down my ability to see the latest tomfoolery in these Snow Challenges.  I can't stress it enough...priorities.

OH, NOW Y'ALL WANNA SHOW UP?!?!  So clearly, D.C., Maryland and Virginia are not as accustomed to or equipped to handle snow as well as Buffalo, Chicago, Denver or the like.  Because many of these cold-weather cities often have snow on the ground halfway into the spring, their respective removal crews can have three feet of snow cleared out in enough time for kids to get to school and maybe even on time.  They know that life must go on and have the necessary equipment and manpower to ensure that normalcy is intact, but no matter how much more money is invested into snow removal and inclement weather preparedness, it never seems like our area is ready enough.  Let's go back to Wednesday's "dusting".  Mind you, the weather people are the main culprits who jacked the money on that one.  However, there were moments during my drive home when I didn't see one plow for 20 to 30 minutes at a time let alone a team of them.  Supposedly, a lot of the snow removal crews in this area didn't get out to salt, sand and plow the roads until right in the thick of rush hour after 5 p.m.  By that time, there were already too many people on the road and not enough room to prevent the massive amounts of accidents that occurred.  Moral of the story: always take the C.Y.B. approach by salting and sanding the roads, even if the local weather or the National Weather Service tells you that it's only a "dusting".

Much like the sentiment expressed in my rant about D.C. Metro, I would absolutely love to feel like a carefree fifteen year old again when it comes to snow.  I will say this: during the Blizzard of 2009, Paco may have been reincarnated as Mrs. Scribbler and I built a snow bird and later traded a few snowballs back and forth.  (She slipped and fell trying to throw a snow ball at me...AND I have it on tape.  Dirk Scribbler, FTW.)  I nearly dropped down on Wednesday night to make an impromptu snow angel in the middle of a sidewalk, but I thought about the light color of my pants and quickly decided against that.  Heck, I wanted to have a Frozen moment with these neighborhood kids and start singing, "Do you wanna build a snowman?"  However, after the long hours of traveling in gridlock, managing to find some turkey meatballs and turkey burgers out of the scraps at the market, skidding a time or two while nearly rear-ending someone once, praying that my brakes work when they need to and shoveling piles and piles of white stuff while listening to someone talk about moving a different type of white stuff, the last thing that I wanna do is build a friggin' snowman.