Thursday, January 31, 2008

Just When You Least Expect It

It's 5:15 am. I've been up for about half an hour, my hair is wet, and I'm watching the local news and waiting for my steel cut oatmeal to cook. My cell rings. It's Mrs. Eagle.

"Have you heard anything about us closing?" she asks.

"No, there's nothing on the news, but I checked The National Weather Service and it said we had a chance of snow and sleet. I didn't think that was forecast until late tonight."

"It wasn't, but it's snowing like mad here," she replies. She lives in the western part of the county.

I look out on my back deck. Nothing.

"Nothing here, but that just means you're at the beginning of the storm," I reply. I check the scroll at the bottom of the news and see that a few school districts west of us are closing. "I don't see us on the news yet," I tell her.

"Well," she huffs and I can tell she's outside, "I need to chase down the dogs, so call me if you hear anything."

So I watch the news for a bit and more schools start closing. I look outside and start to notice a few flakes falling down onto the deck. I check the news station again. And finally, there it was...

We're closed! We have our snow day!!!

And the funny thing is that after two near misses in snow days, where my students obsessed over the weather reports, this one snuck up and caught us all by surprise.

I hope my kids have a great day off. Me? I will too.

P.S. And for those of you up in the Great White North, I know you don't think snow days are a big deal...but for those of us in The South, they're rare and treasured like jewels!

3 comments:

Mrs. T said...

We got a surprise 2 hr early dismissal on Tues. because of blizzard like conditions- we were soo excited. Hope you had a fun day!

Anonymous said...

Ah, the joy of a snow when you're teaching. I remember it well!

nebraska girl said...

Strangely enough, pretty much all of our big snow has come over the weekend so we haven't managed a snow day yet. It has to be pretty nasty for us to get a snow day here.