SNOW!!
(View from my window this morning. That red, reliable friend of mine is Carmen.)
Do you know what happened yesterday? It was the first snowstorm of the season for New York! Whoohoo! And by New York, I mean the NYC Metro area. Not places like Buffalo, NY, which is way up north, bordering Canada. That place gets 20 feet of snow in, like, August.
A lot of New Yorkers don’t like the snow. They don’t like the winter actually. I understand. It’s cold, and wet, and cold. And the snow gets dirty quickly in NYC, so it doesn’t stay pretty for that long. But whatever! I still like winter and snow very much. The two best things about snow are snowmen (snowpeople?) and sledding! Whoohoo! I used to go skiing all the time with my family, but quite frankly, it takes too much effort to go skiing. All that equipment. Those awful stiff boots. The driving there and back, the trekking back and forth. Ugh. Then snowboarding became really popular, but I never got into that because by then I’d had my fill of skiing. You know what my favorite part about skiing was? Besides drinking hot chocolate in the cafeteria? Taking one of the plastic trays from the cafeteria to go sledding! Whoohoo!
I also like building snowmen. I did build a snowwoman once. The snowwoman is actually the only one that kind of had a personality. As the snow melted, her upper body started moving forward, so each day, it looked like she was bowing lower and lower to us…to show us deeper and deeper respect. Very Asian of her. Appropriate since the people who built her are Asian. 
Speaking of Asians and building things out of snow, you know who else takes snow seriously? The Japanese. Every year they have the Sapporo Snow Festival. Just to give you an idea of how seriously they take their snow…look at what they built in 2004:
Snow sculpture of the Taj Mahal. (photos: Douglas S. Mann)
Look what they built last year:
Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
Relics of Egypt
Inuyama Castle
And look at the all the snowpeople they made!
Alrighty. That’s enough snow stuff from me today. If you’d like to see more pics of the Sapporo Snow Festival, go here. There are some other cool snow sculptures from various competitions here and here.
Yeah snow!
jen, I wished it snowed regularly in CA. That would be a dream come true for many of us :/
ahah This year, every vehicule in Quebec has to be on winter tires, and I think it’s a good thing actually 
jessica f
December 20, 2008I’m so jealous you have snow, Kathy! Snowmen are hard to build sometimes! Those pics of the japanese snow sculptures are breathtaking. My favorite are the thousands of wee little snowbabies. haha. Thanks for sharing!