We are expecting a possible foot (FOOT!) of snow tonight and tomorrow and it's so different than the experience in the midwest. A foot of snow or less wouldn't stop things where I used to live, much less really slow them down. I remember so many mornings spent out shovelling the snow from around the car and practically screaming "I can't believe they are making us go to work in THIS!". Here's the biggest difference in how Illinois handled this kind of thing and how Virginia does: how they handle the roads.

Right now, we are under a winter storm warning. At this point, we'd have seen the faithful Illinois IDOT folks out salting roads, those frighteningly huge orange snow plows out and about, people with their personal plows on their pickup trucks. The noise from those machines was insane. I remember waking in the wee hours of the morning to the loud rumble of the plows coming down the road and I never could resist getting out of bed to watch the sheets of snow blasting out from them at heights taller than my head (trapping my car in the driveway, but that's another story). By the time we got up to check the school closings (they never did), the roads were clear and fairly safe, and off we went to work.

In Virginia there is no apparent pre-snow preparation. I'm honestly not even sure if we have salt. I've seen no evidence of the giant salt domes that were so familiar in the midwest. I don't see or hear the giant plows, I've seen a grand total of two pickups with plows attached. I'm not really sure what happens when it snows this much. Last year it snowed a couple inches and everything shut down pretty much. This was fabulous because in Illinois we would never have gotten a snow day, but what a pain to not be able to go anywhere because of the roads here! I've got 4wd, I drive for years in really horrid winter weather but I can't here because we don't clear the roads well.

So, in the spirit of the true "snowed in" scenerio (which is happening on a Saturday, of course, so no snow day. Thanks mother nature!), I present the O'Keefe household emergency shopping list:

cinnamon rolls
chocolate chip cookie dough
beer
cider
hot chocolate
jalepeno poppers
milk
pancake mix
beef roast
potatoes
batteries (for the weather radio or if we keep power, for the video game controllers)
movies
books

The plan for the next 24 hours is something like this... Bake. Eat. Sleep. Blanket. Couch. Fire. Video games. Movies. Read. Chill.

It's kind of nice to truly have nothing to do and nowhere to be and a real excuse to be lazy. Stay warm!