Too many snow days.

With the kids home for their second full snow day, I am beginning to feel somewhat grumpy about the snow experience in Portland. About five inches of snow fell in two separate storms, and it's been 48 hours since it stopped snowing. Temperatures have been above freezing all day today. Not only is nothing plowed (except the freeways), making the streets a sea of slushy misery, but fewer than 10% of homeowners and 30% of business owners bother to shovel their sidewalks (let alone clearing the storm drains on the street), making the sidewalks a slick of slushy, slippery misery. I know these people are not ALL physically incapable of shoveling. They may just not grasp their civic responsibility. Or they don't have snow shovels. Or they're just assholes. The residents of several properties we crossed on our walk to the library today had cleared their driveways, shoveling the snow onto the sidewalk.

We also realized that our snow gear is woefully lacking. When it only snows for real once every five years or so, your preparedness is minimal. We do have a snow shovel (because we are not assholes, and we clear our sidewalk), which has mostly been used to shovel mulch. We do not, however, have anything else, as we don't do any snow-related sports of any kind. So we set off for our family sledding expedition on Saturday all wearing rain pants (with cotton leggings underneath, except for Cook, who owns actual long underpants) and rain boots. We did not have a sled, but the pieces of cardboard we brought worked pretty well. (The leaky camping air mattress we brought as an additional "sled" did not work as well.) The kids were thrilled. Take that, fancy plastic sleds!