Snow? I've Gotta' Know

In my household SNOW is a nasty four letter word.  I despise it and feel as if, when it snows, someone or something is truly out to get me.  My husband is from eastern Pennsylvania and has had his fill.  Besides, knowing how much I loathe it has only made him have even less love for the white stuff.
Snow makes me feel trapped.  Snow has been at least partially responsible for me wrecking my car right before our first anniversary and hence making it so we spent the money we were going to spend on a fun trip paying our insurance deductible.  The weight of heavy, wet, northwest snow has caused the carport at my old apartment to collapse.  Thankfully, that time I followed my gut instinct and moved the car right before this happened!  Once there was a sudden huge snowfall that caused a big tree in our neighbors yard to crack and drop one ton of itself onto my nice new car.  Funny, the old car was closer but somehow that tree had it in for the new one.  The car was never the same, even though it was fixed.  I couldn't stand it and traded it in with less than 8,000 miles on it.  Yeah, I really don't dig snow.  Maybe snow just has it in for my cars.

This winter has actually been pretty mild out here.  And I missed one really cold stretch while I was in Palm Springs, so that was awesome.  Naturally, I am feeling pretty darn good about the fact that I am NOT sitting in any of that crummy white stuff right now.  I mean, what are the odds that I would be in one of the best weather spots in the whole country right now?  O.K., I'll shut up about it.  But I am also feeling like my non-love of snow is really not fair.  It never gets that bad around here (OK barring the winter of 2008 in which Christmas was basically cancelled and I actually started to cry daily when the stuff wasn't melting AND a pack of raccoons took over the neighborhood because the garbage truck couldn't get there for 3 weeks, but anyway...)  So my thought is this:  while I have had my 'bouts with snow and my reasons for not loving it, tell me what's going on where you are.  Give me the worst of it.  The uglier, the better.  Oh and let me know what I am missing out on as well.  I'm sure snow has some redeeming quality, right?

Think 7

Today at noon is liftoff for my husbands current nasty actuarial exam.  As mentioned in a previous blog post here, this is not as easy endeavour.  What he wants to receive as a grade or passing score is at least a 6 out of a possible 10.  For the last exam, I felt strongly that he would get a 7 and he actually earned an 8!  That was excellent.  There is always much riding on passing these tests, but as of late we are especially interested in what passing yet another of these will mean for his job prospects in Texas.
Up until just recently, the Casualty Actuarial Society has had a policy of making you wait until 6 weeks after the test to get a result.  Even at 6 weeks, you were only shown whether you had passed or not.  You had to wait another 2 weeks for an actual score.  That was a form of torture all its own.
Today will be the first time my husband will be given at least a pass/fail result immediately following the test as the test has been computerized this time around.  Funny enough, we are both kind of freaked out by getting a result right away.  To think we have become accustomed to the torture of waiting so much that it seems we may actually miss that time in no mans land...
At this point, we have put in the time, sacrificed missing things we would have rather been doing and are not sure whether any more practice would make a damn bit of difference.  In other words, I feel my husband is right where he should be.  He works so hard at this; he deserves to pass every time.  Today, I will be thinking 7.