This photo is from 2014, the Polar Vortex winter. The year that Canananada got drunk and fell asleep on the northern USA. (Somebody else somewhere on the internet came up with that quip, not me.)

Winter started in earnest on January 1st that year. The Detroit Red Wings played the Toronto Maple Leafs here that day on The Planet Ann Arbor in the Big House (aka Umich football stadium). Football Saturdays on The Planet Ann Arbor are quite orderly as the city and most of the fans understand the traffic / parking “rules”.

Not so much for this one-off hockey game. A different crowd of fans and 8-10 inches of snow? Um. A bunch of folks parked at Briarwood Mall, about a mile away from the stadium. After the game, they traipsed right down the middle of Main Street to Briarwood. On foot. In the snow. The police were pretty much helpless at any kind of cat-herding at that point.

The next day was a work day for us. The EPA called a snow day so the GG didn’t have to go in. I have always been able to telecommute so that’s what I did. As it turned out, my work parking lot was not plowed and the folks that did show up got stuck in a big mess. When the plowing contractor finally showed up, everybody had to go out and push cars around so the lot could be plowed. The LSCHP (my boss at the time) bellowed “if all we’re gonna do over here is push cars around, we might as well all work from home”. Indeed. And now we all do work from home but not because of snow.

That began the worst, snowiest winter I have ever experienced here on the Planet Ann Arbor, aka the Ice Road Asteroid. I won’t describe all of it except to say that we had a *glacier* in our back yard in mid-April.

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