Newfoundlanders all across the province share one significant, defining link: we all love to discuss the weather. My gawd! The apocalypse is coming and Premier Williams is in the USA recovering from heart surgery but none of those things even rival the storm of the year which tore through the east coast on Friday.

I stayed home from work on Friday to wait out the blizzard. The wind howled. Fishing sheds in Quidi Vidi village got battered by the waves. Everything shut down, which I found a little odd because the past two winters have been nothing compared to my first two here. I remember spending five hours carving out paths from the door to the road, or having the driveway freeze over before we could shovel and having to hire a plough to dig us out.

You just gotta deal with it. Roll with the punches. Face adversity from Mother Nature. And damn did she ever unleash her fury on our little island in the form of a massive snow dump.

Fortunately, having a boy around the house often leads him to take on the more “manly” roles of the household, like shovelling. But since we have a strong aversion to maturity around here, doing so usually ends up with some creative displays of self expression.

We had planned the entire day to dig out that wall to make a snow fort and drink beer in it, but in the end my roommate felt too great a need to protect his ice dong.

So we did what any other rational folk would do: we had a post-blizzard BBQ, invited over dozens of people, lit up the fireplace and had a blast. And trust me, nothing smells better than walking home from the beer store and inhaling the sweet, sweet aroma of barbecued meat in dead winter.

My favourite story from the storm was the footage caught of people taking advantage of the empty streets in downtown St. John’s to bust out the snowmobiles. Seriously, they went with the traffic. Why haven’t I thought of this?