This is what it looked like outside today, a bit more than the half-inch of snow that had been forecast:
Four inches still wouldn't be that noteworthy, except it came on the heels of the three coldest days in a row the city has had in something like 15 years, and there was an ice storm on Monday night that had dumped about an inch on the roads. Apparently in Dallas they don't believe in salt, so they use sand to "treat" the roads. This is a joke, as sand doesn't do anything to ice except go on top of it. The city's real strategy is to just let things melt -- only they didn't do that this week. Hence, the city has been effectively shut down since Tuesday. Mike still made it to work all four days, but dealt with rolling blackouts, server outages, and a mostly empty office. My office was closed Tuesday and Wednesday but I worked from home (and was grateful Elizabeth managed to come over for a few hours around lunch each day) and then made it in yesterday, even though the main roads I drive on were still essentially covered in ice. You drove in grooves, but there were multiple stretches of solid ice. After the snow this morning, though, I threw in the towel and finally took a "real" snow day and was home with the boys without much work.
We had fun even though poor Michael's been going a bit stir crazy. I brought some snow inside for him to play with this morning, and he liked playing with it and eating it, until his hands got too cold. Then we moved on to the usual cars, dump trucks, blocks, music, and Curious George.
