Bring it on...

... the snowplow confronts the snow head-on!

It's been snowing hard, like a heavy downpour, since before sunrise. What a sharp contrast to the lovely "T-shirt weather" on Sunday, that was but just a sneak peek of warmer things to come... later! For now, it's still very much winter, and officially so for the next 17 days. And this snowfall, coming so close after temperatures plunged back to below freezing yesterday, is probably the biggest one we've seen while here. And I was wrong to have thought there wasn't going to be any significant accumulation before the season ends.

Vern is on campus, the boys with me at home. They want to go outside and play, but no way with how the white bits are being swirled all about, the winds must be blustery, too! And no, not while the snow is beating down so incessantly, and relentlessly! But you understand why schools have declared a Snow Day, because it's still better to stay indoors.

By the time the snow peters out, around evening as the forecast predicts, the accumulation will be between six and as much as 10 inches! Tomorrow, hopefully, the weather will be OK enough to give the boys some time outside after school.

What else is bizarre...
If you think this drastic weather change is strange, separately, in other news, the third and last part of a newspaper story about fugitives "free to flee", made headlines today. The reporters' findings revealed that suspects fleeing St Louis can pass police checks elsewhere because authorities didn't issue warrants for their arrest!

It's just a coincidence that I'm reading this here, while the mad manhunt is going on in Singapore for JI fugitive Mas Selamat. But how odd is what the investigation by the St Louis Post-Dispatch (the major newspaper here) found? That, "St Louis is one of the few major metro areas in the nation that rountinely decline to issue arrest warants for fugitives. Of all the cases of St Louis suspects sought for felonies, a third(!) lack warrants."

In other words, police elsewhere don't know when they've stumbled on one of these fugitives, for the very reason that without warrants, their names are not allowed in a database police check nationwide. And even if police find out they are suspects, the arrest can't go through without warrants.

Should it come as no surprise then, that the St Louis city is infamous for having the second highest crime rate in the country? This, besides that its weather swings from one extreme to another! I'll never forget the "joke" (or more like, well-meaning advice?) told to us by the locals, when we first got here:
Don't like the weather? Wait a day or two... erm, no, just hang around for an hour or more!

I hope the Singapore authorities find their fugitive soon! Our home country is after all still one of the safest in the world (yes? no?).