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[side_show]

I have no comprehension of why being able to function is dependant on snow clearing. Snow clearing is infrequent at best in my neck of the woods, and it has never been an issue that prevented me from dealing with day to day living.  Do people think snow is made of poisenous acid or something?  Do they not know it can be walked upon, with little effort?

The important thing to note is that all this fuss is about dependency on automobiles.  I'm not automobile dependant, and perhaps part of why I've chosen to make my life this way because of where I live.  It's not uncommon for this to be the case locally - a large number of my coworkers walk or jog to work.  Whenever myself or other Canadians are tourists to the states, the thing that is commonly remarked upon is how few pedestrians one encounters in the U.S..  I'm sure this isn't the case everywhere, but there is a noticeable difference in this regard everytime I end up in the States compared to my experience when visiting other Canadian cities.  I'm guessing there are many cities that are not designed to be livable without access to and use of a vehicle.  I was once walking around Grand Forks noting this to the person I was with (another Canadian) and we saw other pedestrians approaching, and it turned out they too were Canadian visitors when we asked - and we all had a laugh about it.  Then while visiting a friend in Minneapolis, I decided to walk to the Mall of America, which was about an hour from where I was staying, but as a tourist, I like to see each city I visit on foot.  Not only did I not encounter a single other person on my walk, but when I got to the mall, I discovered it was surrounded by freeway (thanks a lot MapQuest!), leaving me no choice but to climb a fence and illegally walk about a block on the side of the freeway to get to a place where I could safely cross.  

I do not/can not shovel snow since a back injury, and my husband is often out of town.  When or if I do shovel, it is using the same 15+ year old rusty steel garden shovel I use in the middle of summer for the compost and dealing with soil.  But this makes no difference because I walk most places I go, and there's enough pedestrian traffic in my area that the snow is commonly tramped down pretty quickly, often before I head out for work.  Like I said, snow isn't poisenous acid.  In my neighbourhood I'm lucky if the street gets plowed once a winter.  In some Canadian communities there is no snow plowing at all, and certainly there are many where side roads are never cleared.  Locally we've had two snow storms since the plow cleared our street (or any part of our neighbourhood, including major routes), which was weeks after a storm, and more than a month after an earlier storm.  

When it comes to automobiles, I have never owned snow tires in my life.  In a huge splurge, I bought a Hybrid SUV last winter, but before that it was 15 years of driving two-door rear-wheel drives all winter long.  But again, I've always depended on my feet as a major mode of transportation, so I commonly parked my vehicle for the winter.  I live walking distance to work and stores and such though, so the Hybrid is more for visiting our rural family.  Because an idiot rearended the Hybrid (while texting on his phone), it was in the shop over the Holidays, so we drove out to the country in the middle of a blizzard in the Ford Focus the car insurance provided us with this Christmas.  At the turn off to the dirt road to our family's place, there was a two foot snow drift, and we tried to plow through it, but got stuck.  Three cars pulled over and strangers pushed us loose, so we took a different dirt road, and got to our destination.  If we couldn't have taken another road, we would have walked - because we had expected possible challenges driving out into a blizzard, and had brought along extra layers of clothes thinking we might need them.  We did not consider this to be "snow-pocalyse" or whatever the news is calling the latest snow storm in the eastern US.  We considered this... life, and we planned ahead, and anticipated challenges, and when they came we dealt with it, without complaint and with the help of random strangers who also considered it a part of life.  

[side_show]

Sorry, I want to add that infrastructure-wise, the one thing we definitely benefit from is that Manitoba Hydro has decades of expertise at dealing with winter conditions, and so when power goes down due to trees or other things falling on the lines, they've got back up generators in place, and emergency staff out on the road immediatly doing repairs.  That's clearly a huge part of the problem that communities that don't typically experience heavy snow fall are facing.

[wombat]

Smells, I walk most places too. The snow on my front walk is up to my hips. It may not be poisonous but I can't walk on snow that's up to my hips and I don't think most other people can either. And if finding it more than an minor inconvenience to have no power and therefore no heat for three days when the temps are in the 20s makes me a wimpy American, then sorry, I am a wimpy American.

One of my neighbors is actually shovelling out parking spaces, which is pretty noble. There was a brief period of people being friendly and helpful to strangers but unfortunately now we seem to be rapidly returning to the normal "assholes driving like idiots while talking on cell phones" mode, which makes it particularly hard to walk in the streets where the walks aren't passable. Oh well, I guess normal is a good thing.

[wombat]

It's almost three pugs deep in places!

[Doc]

Just wanted to say there aren't challenges living everywhere.

This message brought to you by the land of milk and honey.

[Doc]

How does the pug unit of measure compare to the daniel?

Don't be crazy man, the daniel is a weight measurement, the pug is a measurement of distance.

Though we could work out people's BMIs in daniels/pug.

[lprkn]

I prefer that we let it happen naturally, like the standard/imperial system. That way, nothing makes any fuck*ng sense whatsoever and we can be illogically and fiercely protective of our system and highly resistant to change.

[Choop]

asherdan i need you to do something for me.

write a book called "what every doofus forgot he should know" and fill it with your vitriol-coated wisdom.

i will pay for a copy.

[theinevitable]

my favorite reaction to the "hrr drrr americans don't use the metric system" thing:

there is this map, you see, where the three countries in the world that don't use the metric system are highlighted.
and then, there is this map:

"map of countries that have put a man on the moon, plus Liberia and Burma."

[jay-ell]

I bought a house in a neighborhood in the center of my suburb so that I can walk or bike to a few places, but public transit around here is a joke and Raleigh is totally the sprawliest so unless you live downtown you can't get most places of interest without a car. I mean, most people live in a place where the only other places within walking distance are other people's houses. There are a few mixed-use communities springing up locally, but they're all under construction or still in development, and condos start at $300K so we couldn't afford them anyway.

We Americans, we love our cars.

[CortJstr]

I had no idea Antarctica was a country.

Are snow tires still a thing? I remember growing up in PA my grandma would get snow tires put on every December but I've neither seen nor heard of them since then.

Also, never before has paying an assload of money to live in the most walkable city in America felt so good. Not to mention parking in a garage.

[lprkn]

Are snow tires still a thing?

Yeah, at least around here. I put the studded snow tires on every November.

[miles]

Just wanted to say there aren't challenges living everywhere.

This message brought to you by the land of milk and honey.

Didn't your Continent catch on fire last year?

Those of you who live in Southern California and/or are not old enough to own homes

Hey man, I may be old enough and just a fuck*ng loser because I don't own a home, but don't group me with residents of Southern California.

[Drygioni]

I don't have to deal with bushfires, snow, tornados, extreme siesta invoking heat, torrential rain, hurricanes, sandstorms, earthquakes, volcanoes or nowt like that

I have never loved this country so much as I do right now.

In Britain I LIKE shovelling snow. But then, I don't get loads of it so I don't get tired of it. I LIKE a bit of sunshine because it's not so hot I can't go outside in the summer. I LIKE a bit of rain because it's beautiful but there's not so much of it that I drown. I LIKE earthquakes 'cause they're rare and fun when they happen. I LIKE tornados 'cause they lift the roof of schools meaning I get two weeks at home. I LIKE hurricanes because the one time we get the remnants of one it gives old people stuff to tell young people about. And we don't get bushfires or volcanos or sandstorms.

Good god I'm a cunt.

[Doc]

Didn't your Continent catch on fire last year?

I live just north of the bush fires and just south of the cyclones. Also east of most of the poisonous stuff.