What's a little snow?

So London has been smacked by a record snowfall. This is unusual. As unusual, say, as palm trees growing in Canada. It's rarity has been documents by the hundreds or even thousands of blog posts, Facebook pictures and status updates, and my favourites, Twitter posts.

Naturally, the storm has brought one of the world's great metropolis' to a standstill. At 3 pm, the Tube is still, for the most part, shut down, and virtually the entire bus network has been suspended all day. Our office closed, as did many others for want of employees who could make it into work.

It is, by any standard, a proper Minnesota snowstorm. But unlike, say, Minneapolis, London understandably just isn't equipped to handle this amount of snow. Minneapolis alone has a fleet of 400-odd snowplows, and would have had the roads plowed in time for rush hour this morning.

I personally enjoyed the snow very much. It brought back to me one of the things I miss about Minneapolis--the natural beauty of winter. And this time, I didn't have to endure two months of unbearable freezing cold to enjoy it.

Late in the afternoon, it occured to me that I would need to shovel my staircase so it wouldn't freeze (thanks Pops, for the knowledge). Like, perhaps, the rest of London, I lacked the one thing I needed to deal with the snow. So I used my dustpan: