When you think about it, snow is nothing but frozen water vapor.
We got hit with a couple of snowfalls here in DC this week-- nothing terrible, but legit storms. It looks like there's about nine inches on the apron of the trampoline in our backyard. The streets never got that bad. Contrary to what people might say,* DC seems to be pretty good about plowing the roads, especially if you live in the mayor's neighborhood like we do. They are super cautious when it comes to schools, though. If there is any new snow on the ground whatsoever, it's at least a late arrival -- we got one of those on Wednesday -- and often a closure. There was no school both Tuesday and Friday this past week.
*Is there anything more ubiquitous than people complaining about city services? Every city is the worst-run municipality in the country according to the residents of that city.
I'm of two minds about snow days. On the one hand, they're super inconvenient, made much more so in recent years by Zoom culture. This is when a flex-schedule backfires. In the olden days, if the office was closed, not much was expected of you. Yeah, you might check some email or log into your laptop for a bit, but for the most part things were shut down. Now, for the vast majority of traditional office jobs, there's no difference between a snow day and a regular day. You're working from home in a business-casual top and PJ pants, regardless. We workers demanded this flexibility, and we mostly got it (thanks, Covid!), but we have to take the good with the bad. You don't have to sit in daily rush-hour traffic anymore, but, on rare occasions, you do have to keep your children occupied, while simultaneously putting in something that passes for a full day's work.
On the other hand, snow days are fun and make me happy. They bring people together. In our neighborhood, during snow days, everybody goes to one of two fields for sledding and frolicking. If you have small children, you go to the field with the small hill; if you have big children, you go to the field with the big hill. We are definitely a big hill family, so I took the boys there on Wednesday, and S took Lil' S1 there on Friday.* We live a little too far from the field to walk to it in the snow and cold (it makes for a lovely promenade on warm days), and they wanted to go at different times, so I spent the afternoon shuttling them back-and-forth and standing in the freezing cold, chatting with parents I kinda know. But it was really cool to see all the kids out and about. That's something I didn't get much of growing up. There were only a couple other kids in my neighborhood (nobody I was really tight with), so the spontaneous mass gatherings of childhood revelry were few and far between. I was always jealous when I'd go to a friend's house who lived in a "happening" part of town, and we could walk somewhere with decent odds of chancing upon some random classmates.
*Lil' S2 was refusing to go for some reason. Perhaps because it was 25 degrees out, and he outgrew his boots, so he would have to wear sneakers, which fill with slush 20 minutes after going outside. Actually, that's a pretty good reason.
So, I'm not mad at DCPS for cancelling school for two days, even though it was not that difficult to get around either day. (As I said, the roads were almost completely clear, and everybody could have driven to school fairly easily.) What I'm mad at them about is their makeup day schedule. Instead of designating a few of the numerous off-days students have between now and the end of the year as makeup days (there's no school next Friday, for example), they tacked them on at the end of the year. What's more, school ends on a Monday, but the makeup days aren't until Thursday and Friday, so two days of snow effectively extend the school year a full week. I'm sure DCPS could give me reasons why it had to be that way -- the off-days are actually professional development days for the teachers or something like that -- but why can't you turn those into makeup days, and then make them up at the year's end, if need be. Staff would have to come in all the days either way. Also, I see at least two days on the schedule between now and June that are just marked as "no school for students or teachers." They aren't holidays or development days or parent-teacher conference days or anything. Why can't those be makeup days?
The thing is, it's DC, we get snow here fairly frequently. It's not some rare occurrence. It's about 50-50 we will have a snow day in a given school year. They need to have a better contingency plan that doesn't involve extending the school year a week for one or two makeup days. Now, one could argue that no matter how the schedule works, the school year has to be extended in some way to account for snow days. If you want to have built-in makeup days throughout the year, like I do, then you would have to push back the scheduled end date, thus extending the year. But that's okay. People would rather know up front.
Part of it is psychological. If you tell somebody they have to wait for something for an hour, they will be a little annoyed. If you tell them they have to wait for a half-hour, and then you add 25 minutes once the half-hour elapses, they are going to be really annoyed, even though they actually waited less time than in the former scenario. That's just how humans are, and parents are humans.
But part of it is practical. Parents have to make plans for their children for the summer -- camps, vacations, summer classes, etc. -- and it's difficult to do that if you don't have a set end date. But maybe I'm just particularly salty because the makeup days could actually mess up our summer plans this year. Waiting around those extra four days could force us to rearrange a bunch of things. We could always just skip the makeup days, which is probably what most parents would do,* but our kids already racked up a bunch of unexcused absences from our India trip. I don't want DCPS social services showing up at our door wondering why our kids are delinquents.
*This is another point: If you have in-year makeup days, they will likely be treated as real days that actually advance the curriculum. If you have makeup days two days after the "final" day of school, they will likely be treated as bullshit goof-off days. My conspiracy theory is that the teachers' union intentionally pushed for it to be this way to make it easier on them. I'm sure this isn't actually true and is incredibly insulting to hardworking teachers across the city. But ever since they fought so hard to keep schools closed for Covid after vaccines were widely available and after it became clear kids were low risk and not great vectors for spreading the disease, this is where my mind goes first.
Anyway... Thursday was the only full day of school for the kids, and it turned out to be the most stressful one of the week. I woke up and turned on the faucet to brush my teeth, but no water came out. Instantly, I thought a pipe was frozen, which made me super nervous, as we had one freeze and burst at our old house, and it was a huge headache to get everything repaired and dried. But that turned out to not be the case. Something was wrong with the pipage on our street, and the water was turned off in several houses while they worked on it.
I was actually relieved -- to me, that's much better than a frozen pipe -- but it made S really anxious. Whenever our water or power goes outs or something like that, she worst-case-scenarios it and starts thinking about staying the night at her sister's or going to a hotel. I've learned to just not say anything and let her work through her disquietude* on her own. Nothing I say will help. If I agree with her then, then I just add fuel to the fire. If I disagree with her, then I invalidate her feelings (not my intention, but that's how she perceives it), which really makes her mad. So, I say nothing but think to myself: We could do that, or we could just wait a few hours until everything comes back on, as it almost always does.
*I think this is the first time I've ever used this word. It's a great word -- way underutilized.
But this time S was totally right to be so worried -- well, maybe not totally right, but certainly not wrong. The issue turned out to be much bigger than just "the water went out for a few hours and now everything is back to normal." There was some sort of major leak in our neighborhood -- for the past few weeks we've seen sitting water in the street at the bottom of our hill, even on dry days -- and it apparently proved quite difficult to fix, if it's even fixed now. Since Thursday, our water status has intermittently fluctuate between totally off, a tiny trickle, low but tolerable, and normal. Right now it's normal, pressure-wise, but also undrinkable. We got numerous messages from DC Water (which prompted a very funny text chain between all our parent friends in the neighborhood) that we're in an area of the city -- a big area, containing probably a third of the total population -- that is under a "boil" advisory for the weekend. Do not drink the water without boiling it first. Awesome.
I did not expect to be more concerned with safe drinking water after we returned from India. But here we are.
Until next time...
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