Winter in Kansas is a bleak, cold, gray, desolate time of year enjoyed possibly only by Manson-addicted gothic teen poets who sleep in their closets. You have to shovel your driveway. There are traffic accidents. Winter wonderland my foot! And even after a snowfall, the landscape is a beautiful, serene white - for about five seconds. Then the sand trucks and litter and oil turn your lawn into a scene from a Mad Max movie.

    So students pray for that day off due to horrid weather conditions. They start to hear murmuring in the hallways - "Psst...It's supposed to snow tonight." "Hey! Didja hear? They're expecting four inches by midnight." "Blizzards of Biblical proportions..." So by the end of any given day, a thousand Lansing students are sitting in front of the ten o'clock news with their fingers crossed, waiting for the weather report.

    "And we may have up to seven inches of accumulation by tonight..." And because they have been so confident that their faith in the snow gods would pay off, all these kids go to bed not having done a lick of homework. Alarms aren't set the night before. Cars get left out of the garage. And that poor bookbag that never got unpacked is still lying on the backseat.

    At six comes the knock to end all knocks. The student wakes up to the sound of his mother's knuckles on his door. "Time to get up!"

    "No way, it's a snow day!"

    "Nope, Lansing hasn't been announced yet. Get up and get dressed."

    "Awww, man..."

    So up and at'em! A thousand kids get up, shower, and get dressed. They then immediately plant themselves in front of the television, ignoring the story of the president's assassination, just snapping back and forth from one morning show to the next, watching the names of schools scroll across the bottom of the screen. Finally the L's come on.

    "Labrynth, Labamba, Lactose, Lafayette..."

    "C'mon, Lansing!"

    "...Lalaw, Lamas, Lambada, Landel..."

    "Lansing, Lansing, Lansing!"

    "...Leavenworth..." And then it's too late. Mighty Casey has struck out. That's all she wrote.

    So a few odd hundred high school students clean off their cars and drive to school on treacherous roads, cursing all superintendents and their ilk, past and present. And as they pull into the parking lot (which is totally devoid of cars), they are met by an administrator.

    "Go on back home. School just got cancelled."

    So home they go, watching for those idiots driving to the office on seven inches of snow while reading the paper, drinking coffee, and talking on a cell phone all at the same time. Now they are cursing superintendents, news anchors, weathermen, and those idiots who talk on the phone, read the paper, and drink coffee while driving on seven inches of snow.

    Back home, the attempt to regain sleep is a futile pursuit. The student is much too awake now. So he turns on the TV, only to realize that it's still seven hours until something decent like Springer comes on. So they decide to go to a movie. But the snowplows have buried the foot of the driveway.

    "Why don't you shovel the driveway?" Great idea, dad.

    So all these teens shovel their driveways and get in their cars to go, but the cars won't start. Back inside, they learn that the phonelines are down, the cable went out, and Pizza Hut can't get up the hill to your house to deliver the pizza.

    Hundreds of kids with nothing but time on their hands and a bag full of homework.

    Aren't snow days great?