snowed in...

So when the weatherman calls for snow and you live in North Carolina, you do one of two things: ignore him or run out and buy bread and milk. It's funny here in the middle, where winter really isn't too bad and in the summer you can actually be outside. But when we do get that random winter storm, there's a panicked mentality. Suddenly, the local Harris Teeter has no milk left and the TV runs a constant bar across the bottom telling you all the things that are closed.

I managed to get this shot of the reindeer in our front yard. There are 14 others that are blurry, but this one's not bad!

The Thursday forecast called for the snow to start Friday at noon. This was our last day of school before break and our principal was determined to get us through it. We did not want a day to make up, and in reality, when the weather people say it will start at noon, that really means three. Or not at all. They don't have the best track record with snow. Anyway, the principal decided we would go half day and get everyone out around one. Okay.

But get this: it actually started at noon. The fluffy flakes were coming down, down, down and parents started showing up to get their kids. By one when we were dismissing, half the school was already gone and I was packing up all the gifts I had received to lug to my car. I called home and sure enough, the husband said we needed to get to the store! Normally, my drive home takes about 1o minutes, but everything was dismissing early, so the roads were gridlocked. When I finally arrived, we jumped in the car and went to the store to get supplies for the weekend and next week.

It kept snowing. And snowing. All in all, I think it must have been something like six inches by 9 that evening when we put in a movie. We rented a movies (Tom Hanks in Angels & Demons) and were snuggled up on the couch enjoying our night. In the movie, Tom and his female co-star are pounding on the door of some Vatican office and someone pounds on our front door! To say that we jumped is an understatement. It was our neighbor telling us that everyone was out in the street sledding and we should come out.

I jumped up and put on a pair of pajama pants, a sweatshirt and my coat, boots and gloves. Charlie laughed at my pants, but I don't have a pair of snow pants, and I didn't want to wear jeans. Jeans get wet and stay wet. I ran outside and found the group of people trying to sled. I say trying, because you can't sled on a newly fallen snow. It has to get packed down first. I knew this, but went outside anyway. I had a good little laugh at this, because as a good Alaska girl I know all about sledding. Sleds with rails aren't good unless you have ice. What is really needed is a piece of hard plastic that will slide over the snow. Which we didn't have. The best thing someone had was a boogie board, and I wasn't offered a ride on that. Plus, turns out our neighbor was drunk. She kept shouting that she was glad I came outside.

All this went on and Charlie was still inside putting on clothes. I popped back in and told him what was going on, so we just took a walk around the block in the snow, looking at the Christmas lights before making it back inside to finish our movie. It's a really good movie, by the way. Much better than the DaVinci Code.

So, we braved going to Kohl's yesterday and did some shopping, but our street is really icy and we can't get up our driveway. It'll melt soon enough, but for now we're just enjoying our movie collection and football. The dogs love the snow and so they have had fun, too. It's just funny how here in the middle there is such a panic over the weather. You have to know that somewhere in Canada there are people laughing at us.

Yup. They're laughing.