“WHY IS THE WEATHER LIKE THIS???”

From yesterday’s Ann Arbor News:

Ann Arbor has received 70.3 inches of snow so far this winter, compared with 36.8 by this time last year and 40 inches in an average season. The record is 75 inches in the 1981-82 winter season.

The exclamation above is what some undergrad was screeching into her cellphone when I was walking across campus this afternoon. Well, yes, I can sympathize, despite my vaunted fondness for winter. I spent much of the weekend in pain due to an injury induced by slipping in ice caused by the winter weather, so I should be just as pissed off at winter as that undergrad was. And damn was it ever cold today, all day. It seemed somehow even more piercingly and bitterly cold on March 8 than it did in January when the temps were at zero and below and you couldn’t walk anywhere without nearly freezing your sinuses.

It’ll all be over soon, or so we keep telling ourselves. Right? We’d like to think so — even I wouldn’t mind a change in scenery on a day like this — but as long as that “polar vortex” that the weather-head was pointing to on the map on the news tonight is spinning up there in Ontario and shoveling that Arctic air down in our direction, well…..