You Wacky Californians

We’ve had two pretty good snowstorms in New York this year, both happening on weekends in December. The first was fairly brutal and ended with my spending the night here at work, sleeping under my desk. Not my favorite activity in the world.

The next was the very next weekend, and ended with me spending the night over up by work again, but this time at least at a hotel. So not a total wreck, and I actually remembered to back a change of clothing this time.

The funny part of the story goes back to the first snowstorm. It was going to start getting bad on Friday night, so I drove to pick up my friend Chris from his university for our usual weekend hangout.

As I’m standing outside the dorm while he grabbed a few Playstation2 games, I was talking to one of the guys on the steps as the snow is slowly falling with big, wet flakes.

At one point he gestures towards the falling snow and says something along the likes of, “This is pretty bad, huh?”

Now, I grew up in mid-Michigan. A bit of light snow and 30-degree weather is nothing that I usually even notice. I stared for a second, and said, “You have no idea. Just wait till it actually starts coming down.” He seemed rather nonplussed. Come to find out, he’s a first-semester student in from Los Angeles and had never seen snow excet for skiing trips. Just amazing.

So after we both took turns explaining the horrors of a New England winter, he seemed far more eager to actually go out and get some shopping done before the brunt of the storm arrived. Not a bad thing at all. Look at me, helping humanity one displaced sun-worshipper at a time.