h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

A fleeting white flake crosses your field of vision, a chilly gust of wind whips by your ankles, what have you discovered? why its snow! The solid version of Rain. Oh boy, how wonderfully exciting. And it is, the first few times you see it and even the first five or ten minutes you see it again. but then it comes full force and your car is covered in a foot of drift and your PORCH has snow on it and your shoveling and spinning tires and...AUUGHH!

Ok, im fine now. i just got in from an eight hour day of work only to find that not only did my drive way, sidewalk, and steps needed to be cleansed of the white substance, but my entire porch needed it as well. Right.

The Midwest and especially the area around the great lakes has this strange propensity for snow. It loves dumping buckets of it, or huge three foot thick, fifteen mile wide flakes upon your poor unsuspecting head, and then melting it three days to weeks later, having all the icy fun it may with you in between. And then it gives you about a week to two of nice days interspersed with horribly freezing tundra windy days, and then the cycle begins anew. The term that most midwesterns and especially Michiganders have come to use is "Lakeffectsnow" Which is thrown about quite liberally whenever a flake is spotted in the air. As if this "lakeffectsnow" will somehow be simpler for all of us to shovel if we have some deeper understanding of what it might be called.

No.

The fact is that we humans can never predict or control the almighty system known as weather. But we sure can come up with alot of cool names. Like stratus; or nimbus; or Meteorlogical effect. And some person will of course use these fancy words as if they have, on some deep subconcious level, merged with the entity known as weather and now will cause it to perform a hat dance while juggling flaming torches, but what they are really thinking is "I have to shovel the darn porch AGAIN!"

So remember, next time your in the midwest, especially Michigan, watch out for the horrible "lakeffectsnow," before it eats all your children.

I'm from Buffalo, and they've had to shut down the city proper twice in one week in the month of December alone -- and the weather men are so fond of saying that "winter hasn't officially begun yet."
If there's snow on the ground, my bet is that it's winter.