February 11th, 2013 Five Days After the Blizzard:
As the fifth day goes by after the blizzard officially came, trucks and plows are still trying to dig people out. By now many of the students are out of their mind with boredom, hoping something will happen that doesn’t have to do with classes or snow. We all thought it was going to be great to get a snow day or two then go back to classes, admiring the Sleeping Giant Mountain in all of its snowy beauty. But what we didn’t expect was over three feet of snow to land on our campus. The first night we got snow, it came down hard and it got the point where it was hard to see outside. Each hour added a couple of inches to the ground as everyone was hoping the school would cancel classes for Friday.
That night everyone stayed in, there was no night out at Toad’s Place or just walking around campus to find places to be because the snow kept getting worse. But there were some students who took advantage of the deep snow and empty campus as they jumped off walls and out of windows into the piles of snow below. When everyone woke up on Friday morning we got a text from the school saying there weren’t any classes. You could here the cheer around campus as the he piles of snow were up to some peoples’ waists as they threw snowballs or made snowmen. The kid came out in me as well as my roommates and I found a sled and some cafeteria trays so we could sled down hills and staircases around campus.
As many professors know, our attention spans soon ran out as the snow day bliss ended by late Friday afternoon. Everyone who had spent the day in the snow wanted to rest their cold bodies and dry their snow caked clothes while figuring out what to eat since the dining halls weren’t open. On Saturday morning we didn’t realize how bad the storm was until we found out how hard it was to get around in more than three feet of snow even just around campus. Soon, two days of being snowed in turned into three, then four, with nothing to do because nothing was open. The roads were impassable and the stores were either closed or hard to get to so there was no way there were shuttles to grocery stores. So we ended up locking ourselves in our rooms watching movies and catching up on television shows until even that became boring.
By the Tuesday after the storm, the University told us we would be having classes, and even though we were not happy to have to go back to class, we were happy to have something to do. Soon the snow will be cleared, and everything will be back to normal in our quiet college town of Hamden, CT. But I had my fun and even took pictures of the aftermath for The Quinnipiac Chronicle, trying to capture as much detail as I could to show how much this storm really affected us. Even though there have been other blizzards in the past, this is the one we will all remember especially since we spent it with friends in college instead of family at home.
