Willing to Sacrifice

On the subject of manners, people aren't just weasels online -- they're jerks after a snow/ice/sleet storm, too. There are some standards of human decency in times of wintry weather that seem not to apply south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Namely:

1) A few handfuls of rock salt sprinkled on the ground are not a substitute for actually shoveling your sidewalk.
1a) Shovel your g.d. sidewalk.
2) When driving on a road covered with a light dusting of snow, it is not necessary to drive at 5 mph...while riding your brakes...uphill. Please get the hell over.
3) Clean off the roof of your car. The huge, jagged slabs of ice that fly off the roof of your car can actually be slightly dangerous.
4) If there is a snowbank plowed against the curb, this does not give you permission to park perpendicular to the flow of traffic so that everyone has to merge into a half lane to get around your crap-ass car.
5) To the snowplow drivers: Try plowing all the way up to the edge of the curb. Just clearing a single curvy lane down the middle of a street is not terribly helpful. It makes for a fun driver's ed course, but is not efficient for assisting in the flow of two-way traffic.
6) SHOVEL YOUR SIDEWALK!

Perhaps these various wintry hazards are what have caused all the schools in the area to remain closed for two days. Yes, the weather on the first day of the storm was a little squirrelly. There had only been one snow-day all year, so I guess the kids (read: the teachers) were deserving of one. But today, Baltimore County Schools were "closed all day due to inclement weather."

I'm wondering just what about today's February weather was so "inclement." Was it the low humidity? The moderate easterly breeze? What is the sub 29-degree temperature? Maybe it was the bright, shining sun that beamed most of the day. Or maybe they were waiting for the rock salt to melt all the ice in front of the schools, rather than just shoveling the sidewalks.