The Great Snow Storm of 2007

Well, for those of you who weren’t here to witness it, Cornell yesterday had to close early due to snow. This is an extremely rare event, having happened only two or three times before ever, as far as I can gather. The reports seem to be a little unclear, but there were apparently a couple of times in the nineties where they closed because of some extremely impressive storms. The Cornell Daily Sun erroneously reported that the university had closed in April of 2004 because of four feet of snow (as reported here http://www.cornellsun.com/node/21346), which made me wonder if I had been somewhere else at that time, because I certainly did not recall there being any kind of snow closings during all my time here. I don’t even recall the City of Ithaca having declared a Snow Emergency, for that matter, which obviously also happened.

They’ve now plowed my street once, so there is at least one track free running down the middle. But it’s hardly the highest priority for the city, I imagine, so I don’t know when they’re going to get it cleared more. However, things are sufficiently clear for Beth to get here this afternoon, which is the important thing. I also discovered that my landlords had shoveled my side of the driveway, which was nice. There was a big pile of snow at the foot of the driveway from the plows, which I did have to clear, but that was a relatively minor thing on the whole. It turns out that my landlords thought it was just part of the deal that they cleared the snow. And they were impressed that I’d cleared the pile at the foot of the driveway. I’m the first tenant to actually do any kind of snow removal, apparently.

Anyway, I’m off to teach lab now. There’s going to have to be a makeup session in a couple weeks for the section yesterday that got canceled. I’m sure the students aren’t too crazy about that, since it will be the day before their first prelim, but I don’t see any way around it.