And people seem to buy into this tripe every time. They get one of the field reporters into a store to report on rock salt and shovel sales. They get a cameraman do a long angled sweep of the supermarket bread aisle, the shelves empty but for a broken bag of raisin bread. A similar shot for the dairy cases, interviews with a few late-comers debating on using soy milk in their coffee tomorrow. Jump back to the newsroom to give some late breaking details on the weather: the storm is moving. Fall to your knees and pray for salvation, the storm has moved! Now on to another field reporter, showing how traffic is crawling along the local highways, probably more so because there’s a camera crew than the roads being bad. Run the standard footage of some jackass who rolled his SUV while doing 80 in an ice storm and chatting on his cell phone (damn Republicans!). I have only one question for the dairy and bread shoppers and the speedball drivers: what was it that made you so easily forget last winter? Make that two questions: what do you do with all that bread? Make French toast?

Personally I think it’s some sort of kickback scheme between the local dairy board, the baked goods conglomerates and the news stations. The reporters drum up the storm, there’s a surge on milk and bread sales, and the newsrooms get a nice "donation" from the bakers and moo juicers. And who’s going to report on this scam, you, you tired blog hack? You’ll get nothing and like it.

Sure, sometimes we get belted with a good storm and you’re stuck in the house for a couple of days. More often the Storm of the Century fizzles out for one reason or another (a good sneeze from someone in Boise might alter the storm’s course for all I know). We get a few inches of the white stuff, we dig out where we need to and get on with life. Need anything from the store? No, we still have three gallons of milk left in the fridge.

In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m running on very little sleep and way too much caffeine. Spent most of the night trying to help Kate rebuild her kitchen. She got a donated countertop, dishwasher and sink and we attempted to install them using the existing cabinets. A lot of work with little equipment and even fewer screws to result in...nothing. The structural support we had to put in to make the cabinets solid enough to hold the sink was the exact location the sink needed to be in. I know that two objects can’t occupy the same place at the same time, but we did our damnedest to try and break that rule. In the end, the most we got done was getting power to the dishwasher. Despite staying late and making Kate feel guilty about it enough to think she was Catholic, I enjoyed it. It’s always good to put the tools back on and roughen up those too smooth calluses once again. I just have to remember to stick to electrical work and not carpentry. You’d think I’d learn by now.