A snow day?

This Groundhog Day morning, I woke up to a news report on CBC radio that said the schools in the city of Toronto were having a snow day. Apparently, a huge storm was building, and someone at Environment Canada's weather office panicked and convinced other people in key positions that it would be a bad idea to send kids to school, open government offices, or conduct any sort of business as usual. To be sure, some snow fell, but the weather fooled Toronto again, and when I checked the news on the internet this afternoon, there was a lot of guffawing going on when it came to the snowstorm to end all snowstorms. Montreal got it worse than Toronto, and the grade eight kids from my girls' school might be stuck there for a couple of days until air travel gets itself sorted out.

Weather has got to be one of the worst things to try to predict. I remember reading a book a while back on "The Butterfly Effect," which said that there are just too many variables affecting too many things for anything to be truly predictable. Even the flick of a butterfly's wing can change a weather pattern somewhere along the line. But we still watch the Weather Network to see what's coming, even if it never shows up.

I get quite a charge out of the Weather Network people and their cheerful commentary on what's going on across the nation, and I really enjoyed Rick Mercer's visit with them. He's such a crazy Newfie!

"We love watching somebody else suffer through bad weather while we're not, or we love suffering through bad weather and showing it off to everybody," says Chris St. Clair. Personally, I just like watching Rick goof off with his "invisibility cloak." Enjoy!