Every time I see that anything in Toronto has been cancelled due to snow, I feel obliged to note that the entire time I lived in Regina, they NEVER ONCE cancelled school in the winter — including during winter exams in Grade 9 when we couldn’t walk more than half a block without taking refuge in a nearby grocery store just to make it to the bus stop. (This week in Regina, it’s been around -40 C — which is also -40 F; with the wind chill, I read somewhere, it’s been more like -55, which is -67 F.)
Meanwhile, there hasn’t been snow in Manhattan that’s lasted longer than a day; as I write this, I can hear it raining. I’ve basically spent the winter in my thin-fleece-lined LuluLemon raincoat. Not that I’m complaining, but winter is usually my favourite season — partly because inclement weather gives me an excuse to cocoon in the house drinking hot chocolate and reading magazines. When the weather’s nice, Dave’s all like, “Let’s go do things!,” and I have to pretend I want to.
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Not to mention that when it snows in Toronto, they call the army (ok, that happened once and I know it’s cliched to mention it at this point, but bear with me), but in PEI, when 22,000 houses and businesses don’t have power for four days, they ask the military to be on standby. “We just want to make sure you’re there if we need you; we’re okay for now!”
Anyway, I grew up in northern Manitoba (then I lived in Regina for 7 years!), and now live in southern Manitoba and am so confused by all this school-closing nonsense. Toughen up, princesses!
I’m pretty sure they only closed school one time ever in my entire childhood. But it was so snowy we couldn’t really do anything to enjoy it and my mom made me shovel. (We didn’t get a ton of snow ever in Calgary, but we did have to go to school in -30 and below regularly.) Vancouver’s way worse than Toronto! It’s never colder than like -5, but basically anytime it snows everything shuts down and the buses stop running.
Having grown up in middle of nowhere Manitoba, I can attest to going to school no matter how cold and how much snow. This ’storm’ is laughable.
I’m one of the first of my friends to finish with school and enter the workforce. Been working for CanWest about two weeks now.
Today, all my school friends got a snow day. I did not. Being a grown up is BULLSHIT.
My school called snow days all the damn time. We were a private school, so we didn’t have to make up the days at the end of the year like the public schools did, but mostly it was because our headmaster’s daughter had died in a car accident during a snowstorm and he just didn’t want anyone out on the road. One flake went past his window, we got the day off.
I grew up in Ontario, but on Lake Huron, in the snow belt. We very, very rarely had snow days; and even those “snow days” we had were “busses were cancelled, all those within walking distance get yer asses to class.” And I was within walking distance, dammit. In my high school years, more frequent than snow days were “black ice days”, with perfect visibility and low winds, but the highways being too slippery for buses to drive on.
I understand closing everything yesterday though; Torontoanians have trouble being good drivers under the most perfect of conditions, and you add a foot or two of slush coming down too fast to clear the roads, and the city potentially becomes one very large, slushy death trap.
I concur with Brenda, however; Toronto’s a little silly, but Vancouver is populated with total pansy-asses. “Oh! I see a snowflake, and it’s not on the mountains! Cancel everything! PANIC!”
The first year I moved from Regina to St. Catharines (which is where I went to high school and undergrad), they cancelled a couple of days in the winter after an ice storm. And that, I could understand. Waking up that morning and seeing the tree branches completely enrobed in ice was the craziest fucking thing I’d ever seen. That, we did not get on the prairies.
I grew up 30 miles north of Syracuse (average snowfall = 180 inches/year), and school was rarely closed for snow. But we would get two or three of those ice storms every winter, and would always shut for them — which made sense especially due to the fact that some kids lived 30 or 40 miles away from the school.
But now I live in D.C., and if there is more than half an inch of snow, everything shuts down. It’s pretty sad. The worst part is that I live close enough to walk to work, so I’m expected to show up whatever the weather.
We recently had a whopping 10 cm of snow here in Vancouver, and the papers were calling it a SNOWSTORM. Oh, Vancouver.
(But you people who use umbrellas in the snow, please don’t ever stop. You make my day.)
When I was growing up in Fort St. Nowhere, in eastern Ontario, we’d get the odd snow day, but that’s only because we were super rural, and most of us had one-hour bus rides on back roads. Once, our bus went off the road during an honest-to-god snowstorm, and we were stuck on it for three hours. That poor, poor bus driver. I think she developed a permanent nervous tic.
I live in Regina, and the -51 C temperature last week finally made my break out my gloves, and start plugging in my car. Cancel school or work? Are you kidding?
I grew up in northern/western Michigan and it had to be pretty damn bad for us to not have school. Like, multiple feet bad. I lived on a dirt road way outside of town that was always the last to be plowed. There were days when we would have school, but the bus people would actually CALL OUR HOUSE to say “Yeah, sorry, we’re not coming down your road, you have to get your kids to school on your own”. I got a few personal snow days out of that deal. :-)
I remember one day when they went through all the trouble to get us to school, held us on the busses, then sent us directly back home because the windchill was so bad they didn’t want us outside.
Then there were the standoffs our school district would have with the rival district. We had a pact that if one district cancelled, the other had to, being that we were in the same county. It was like a freakin’ game of chicken every time we had a storm. I can clearly remember cheering when our rival school’s name came up on the tv. We very, very rarely caved first. Thanks, school.
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