It's funny to me, as a transplant from California. But, I've been here in MN for 22 years, now, and have seen enough winters to know that this snowstorm is a chump, compared to some others I've seen.

In my suburb and development, I woke up this morning to see all the snow off my driveway and local street. The nearby arterial street is also snow-free, as are the freeways.

So, I'm just shrugging this one of as yet another moderate winter storm and going about my business.

It was inconvenient, to be sure, and you didn't want to be out on a country road where the visibility was terrible, but it definitely didn't live up to the hype. The Halloween blizzard of '91 was spectacular, though. I got around on cross-country skis for a couple of days because you couldn't drive anywhere, even in the city.

I suppose if you had to go out in it, you'd have had reason to worry. But, they seem to overdo this more and more as time has gone by.

I remember coming back in April from California. Maybe 2016. 16" on the driveway when we got there from the airport. A neighbor had shoveled a path to the door for us, and the street had been plowed, so we got back in the house OK. Next morning, I went out, fired up the snowblower, and cleared the driveway, etc. in about 2 hours. It's just snow. Annoying and delaying, but not the end of the world. We got less that half that in this storm.

But in reality, places in the South just aren't set up to deal with any snow at all. There are no plows or salt trucks to clear the roads. No one has a snowblower. Most people don't even have snow shovels, and even if they do, don't have the very specialized muscles built up to do so efficiently. There are levels to the shoveling game, and I got a first look at that here in Michigan when the house next door had people move in who immigrated from Siberia. They had a 12 year old girl living there who was an amputee, she had 1 leg. But shoveling snow in Siberia is like walking apparently, this 12 year old girl with 1 leg would go out after a snow with a shovel and I swear it would look like a cartoon, just a blur of snow flying through the air an an impossible pace, she shoveled snow like Buddy the Elf throws snowballs in Central Park.

And there are different building codes for everything because they don't have to be built to withstand cold and snow. This includes stuff like homes not having their pipes wrapped or ran away from the cold parts of the house to prevent freezing and bursting. Includes things like roads and bridges not having to be built to withstand expansion and contraction of freezing and thawing ice and snow. Utilities aren't built with this stuff in mind. They just don't have to worry about that stuff as a cost of construction.

And yeah, it takes experience to be able to drive safely on snow and ice. Experience that most people in Alabama have no way of getting.

Climate gone crazy.