Snow Day(s)

It’s way too early in the winter for this!
I keep telling people it hardly ever snows in Christchurch, but I may have to revise that.  It seems like the last few years we’ve had several big (for NZ) falls each year, instead of one small one every two or three years.
This latest one started in the early hours yesterday morning, and we woke up to a reasonable dusting.  I went into work anyway, because the forecast was for it to ease off pretty quickly, but by mid-morning it was obvious that wasn’t happening, and they’d started taking the buses off the road, so I told my boss (by email – he lives up in the hills, so hadn’t come in at all) I was heading home while I still could.  I was just in time, too, because the bus driver told me he’d been told to finish the route then to go back to the depot, so if I’d left it any longer I would have had a very cold and wet walk home.   And they closed the campus about an hour after I got home anyway.
The snow kept falling until early evening, when it started to freeze over, so this morning we’ve got a beautiful icy scene outside (not that I’m planning on going out to admire it!), and completely treacherous roads (because snow is such a rare thing in Christchurch (supposedly), the council doesn’t own useful things like ploughs and grit-spreaders).  We’ve been listening to cars attempting to negotiate our intersection this morning, with various degrees of success.  No actual crashes yet, because thankfully everyone’s going very slowly and carefully, but it’s just a matter of time.

The university’s closed until at least lunchtime while they try and clear broken tree branches and shovel some safe walking routes, but the buses still aren’t running anyway, so I’d be working from home no matter what (I’m not walking in on this ice – I tried that after last year’s big snow fall, and it wasn’t a fun experience).
Oh well, a good chance to catch up with some reading for my linguistics paper.
(And needless to say, we totally missed out on seeing the transit of Venus yesterday 🙁 )