Snow!

It’s been snowing here in Burlington since about 10:30 this morning and it keeps coming down. I’m mostly fine with this. Although we got tons of snow around the holidays, we’ve been in sort of a snow slump ever since. And really, when you move to Vermont, you naturally expect to be moving to something of a winter wonderland, so something about it snowing outside just feels natural.

But.

There’s a reason I’m “mostly fine” with it snowing. And that reason is what passes for acceptable road care during an incident like this. It’s not like we don’t all have access to weather.com; it’s not like we don’t know these things are coming. I’m used to local, county, and state road crews twitching  with anticipation, waiting only on the go signal to get out and do their work. When the flakes start falling (and sometimes before), they’re on the move salting, sanding, cindering, whatever. They don’t get it perfect and usually give us something to gripe about, but as the storm’s overhead, usually there’s at least the sense that they’re tryingI.

Vermont? Not so much.

Smaller state/smaller budget/less manpower? Maybe. But since we’ve been here there have been a few snow events in the immediate (say a day or two) aftermath of which I was surprised at how much snow was allowed to remain on the roadways. And yes, I know MD was a much warmer state, and yes I know that major snows will melt there whereas here they’ll stick around for much of the winter. I’m trying to compare similar-sized snow events with similar afterconditions (again, for a day or two) and so far my experience has been that the roads just aren’t as clear as they would be elsewhere.

So there’s that.

Other than my road-clearing agitation, this has been a pretty good week. It seemed to fly for me. Learned a little about railroads, taking attendance in my TA class is smoothing out, and I learned how to recreate a historic mortar based on a sample pulled from a building. Cool!