Today is a third day off from school. All the sleety snow that fell on Tuesday night is now frozen hard. My own street still has a sheet of ice on it.

I’ve had about enough of the house. I was concerned on Tuesday that we might lose electricity, but that didn’t happen so much in Northern Virginia. (Maryland is a different story, however.) Since we had power, I had Internet. I am now one with my computer, and I’ve almost made a complete migration of three websites to one new server.

About midday yesterday I had to leave the house. So what did I do? Like all good Americans, I went to the mall.

But as you can see, not a lot of other people made it to the shopping cathedral. It’s still quite cold, and after a warm January, folks may be in shock.

The Washington Post reports that the “wintry mix” is paralyzing the DC area. Over at Wonkette, folks who grew up in snowier places than the U.S. southeast are harumphing and growling like 80-year-old curmudgeons that these wimps in Washington can’t deal with a little “frozen water.” Makes ‘em feel superior to the yokel natives, I guess.

Whatever. Washington, DC is not New York or New Hampshire, for God’s sake. I’ve made this argument for about 25 years. Why would a community that hardly ever gets any snow invest tons of money on snow removal preparations? The fact is, the side streets are still slippery and dangerous to drive on.

But the point of this post is to talk about the solitude I’m experiencing today. My wife is running a large week-long national meeting in DC, and is camped out in a hotel in town. My daughter has gone in to work with her for the day, since she’s not at school.

Therefore, I’m at home alone, still unshaven and unshowered at 12:30 PM, wasting hour after hour customizing a couple of blog sites and drinking coffee.

I find that I’m tyrannized by my solitude. My school district has already cancelled school for tomorrow (the only responsible thing they could do, Wonkette, if there’s ice and snow on the roads the school buses travel). Therefore, I have nothing pressing me to come alive, really. My neighbors are already busy shoveling their sidewalks while I’m blogging and taking photos. Guess I’d better go out and be responsible now.

I believe that by the end of this two-day forced vacation from teaching I will have had enough of snow days. Let’s get back to our regularly scheduled life now.

In the DC area we live right at the ice-snow line. North and west of us they get snow. South and east of us they get rain. Where we live we get the ugly, nasty mixture of sleet and freezing rain cutely referred to as “wintry mix.” Heavy ice accumulates on power lines and trees. Sometimes at my house the power goes out for 36 hours or more.

So they didn’t call off school this morning, but they sent us home two hours early. My commute home, which normally takes about 40 minutes, was well over an hour.

Some places get real blizzards, like in this video by a Canadian graduate student. Not us. We get slush. And then a hard freeze.

Well, they did it again. The weather pundits, who had been waving their fingers and warning ominously as recently as Sunday that the DC area would get maybe 10 inches of snow, once again missed it completely.

This morning, Tuesday, there is not a drop on the ground. No snow, no sleet, no wintry mix. Nothing. There may be some during the day today. This means, of course, that we will go to school today and either drive home in a nasty, dangerous mess, or not at all.

I have to remember, when these kinds of warnings are on the horizon, how absolutely, dramatically wrong the mass-media weather prognosticators can be.