The Saint Louis forecast for Wednesday night included rain with the chance of light snow, with little to no accumulation.  This was the forecast as of Wednesday evening.  Rewind now back to last weekend.  Holiday weekends are traditionally slow news periods.  For Cindy our TV weather personality, the whole month of November has been quiet, too quiet.  So last Sunday night she drops the bomb, there is a chance of a couple of inches of snow on Wednesday.  But over the intervening days, the couple of inches is whittled away to eventually become little or no accumulation.

It was with some trepidation that I went to the grocery store on Wednesday night.  Saint Louisans have this unusual behavioral characteristic when confronted with a winter forecast that includes snow.  They all flock on mass to all the metropolitan area’s grocery stores, clogging all their aisles and filling all the register lines and only to acquire just two items, bread and milk.  Bread and milk are the original Saint Louis survival rations.  Next month I’ll mark my thirtieth anniversary of my moving to Saint Louis.  In those thirty years there have been only a couple of times that I could not easily drive the day after a snowfall to my local grocery store.  Let’s cut to the chase, there were no crowds at the grocery store on Wednesday night.  I breezed through the aisles and found no line at the register.  I did buy milk, we were starting to get low, but I knew that we had almost two loves of bread.

I’ll leave you with this list of snow related terms that I’ve assembled from various sources.  This is an English list of words, as opposed to an Inuit (Inuit lists of words for snow are actually more popular), which I do not speak.  So let it snow …  😉

avalanche, blizzard, blowing snow, cornice (a drift of snow that overhangs a precipice), crushed ice (for cocktails), dusting, flurry, freeze, freezing rain, frost, flurries, hail, hard pack, ice, ice cream, ice-cube, ice floe, iceberg, icicle, igloo, lake ice, melted snow, powder, sea ice, sleet, sleigh, Slurpee (I like to make a suicide), slush, snow angel, snow bank, snow blindness, snow boots, snow cat, snow cave, snow day, snow depth, snow fence, snow fort, snow leopard, snow machine (any Canucks out there?), snow melt, snow pants, snow plow, Snow Queen, snow report, snow sled, snow sculpture, snow snake, snow suit, snow tire, snow train, Snow White, snowball fight, snowboard, snowed in, snowflake, snowman, snowmobile, snowpack, snowshoe, snowstorm, snowy egret (I couldn’t resist),  snowy owl (better), thunder snow and whiteout