No, this is not San Fran. I wish! I remember the first time I went out there, I was looking up and down those hills and wondering what the heck they did in an ice storm! Oh roight, I’m not in Kansas The Great Lake State any more. Anyway, this photoooo is the looooverrrrly Jackson/Maple intersection right here on the western hemisphere of The Planet Ann Arbor. And that big pile (bunch? not sure what to call it) of snow is what the snowplows left, more or less in the middle of one of the most heavily trafficked intersections in town*.

This has been a challenging week around here. We are accustomed to snow and I actually like to shovel, although it gets a little old when there’s so much snow you start running out of places to put it and you have to lift the shovel up above your shoulder and throw the slodgy old wet snow over the top of a three or four foot snowback snowbank. Or wherever. Lots of people have been grumbling cursing about the crappy plowing job the Planet folks have been doing. I may have been one of them the morning it took us a half hour to get our loverly Ninja rolling down the street. But I dunno. This is not the Yooperland and we really do NOT get a whole heckuva lot of snow around here. More often we get long stretches of ugly gray cold dry weather. Is it better for the Planet to buy a bunch of fancy new snow removal trucks and equipment that might sit largely unused for a year or two at a time? Or should we all try to be patient and wait for the plows? I can telecommute (and I know not everyone can) and I can walk (or ski) to the grokkery store. With the 8-10 inches we got on Sunday-Monday, we could still get two of our fleet of vee-hickles out and neither of those are 4WD. I’m not sure what my opinion is about this… I think that planning for snowstorms could be improved but I’m sure there are a lot of variables that can’t possibly be known unless you are in the trenches of public snow removal.

At least we *have* snowplows. Not so sure about San Francisco!

What else? We have another winter weather “advisory” for tonight into tomorrow. We’ll see what we get. I am not sick, at least not significantly. Mild cold with intermittent nose-blowing and occasional coughing, thank you very much. And just for fun, I found this link to a balance the Great Lake State budget game this morning (and Dogmomster and others subsequently tweeted or fb’ed it or whatever). I have not played it yet. I was sitting over at Barry Bagels waiting for MMCB when I found it this morning and I only had my phone, on which the game wasn’t very accessible. Tried again this afternoon from my laptop but after a brain-convoluting day at work, I got to about the second page in and realized I would have to actually try to read and digest choices with facts and figures in them. Not tonight!

* The GG says that verbalizing nouns is not allowed. He is right and he did not even have Mrs. Pratt for 8th grade English. He thinks that “one of the busiest intersections in town” would be better. I agree. I’m taaarrrred. My brain is dead. I was racking my brain thinking of how to write that. This is a baggy old blahg, not the next great American novel. Mea culpa.

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