--- In [email protected], "Daria Akers" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > People in Oswego know not to wait till the snow stops falling to start > shoveling. My dad did his Masters at Syracuse and his doctorate at Cornell > (Ithaca) - the stories my parents used to tell me about the weather would > make me cold just hearing them. Not only that but people die from slipping > on the ice or when icicles fall from gutter and poke someone's eye out. > (wait maybe not.. that was a red rider BB gun)
Just in case Daria's description creates any confusion: it gets damn cold in Ithaca, but Ithaca is not in the Snow Belt the way Syracuse is. Cayuga Lake is big enough, believe it or not, to create its own lake-effect, but it ain't nothin' compared to what Lake Ontario produces. Not that Cornell doesn't get snow, but not six feet at a time, thank God. Molly Weingarten can undoubtedly attest to this. If I lived downwind of a Great Lake, you wouldn't catch me shoveling that much snow in any case. I'd have a big-ass snowblower. But Toledo, being at the (normally) upwind end of Lake Erie, doesn't get snow the way metro Cleveland, Ashtabula, Erie, and Buffalo do. This is my 14th winter here and the most we've ever gotten from one storm is 12 inches, which pales in comparison to the blizzards I remember growing up in metro New York (or to the 2003 Washington storm that kept me in Argentina for an extra day of vacation when my connecting-flight home was cancelled.) If Toledo gets lake-effect snow at all, it blows all the way across from Lake Michigan. David Patch Cornell '88
