We finally got to celebrate “snow watch” here at the Bellevue Reporter this week. Did we ever.

Not surprising, it was a skeleton staff on Thursday when everyone awoke to a world that turned white. So much for us missing the storm.

The good news (or is it bad?) for me is that I live close enough to work to actually get here. Not so for the rest of the staff. In addition, I’ve finally come to the conclusion that if it’s going to snow, it’s going to snow. I can’t do anything about it anyway.

This doesn’t mean I dismiss the thought of snow. Far from it. I’ve lived here long enough to know how little it takes to really mess things up. And it’s not because we’re snow wimps.

Yes, I’ve driven in “real snow” – and in Chicago at that. Snowplows make mini-mountains of the white stuff (OK, in Chicago, it’s gray), along both sides of the streets.

But the snow doesn’t really affect traffic.

Why? Well, no hills, for one reason.

Chicago is flat. From the top of the John Hancock tower in downtown Chicago you can see a spotlight in St. Louis on a clear summer night. That’s flat!

Contrast that with the terrain here where we have hills – lots of them. When you grow up in Seattle, as I did, you learn that hills turn into sled runs when it snows. That’s true both for the sleds and the cars.

Yes, Chicago gets much more snow in any winter that we do, but it always provides a crunch under the tires. There’s not the kind of slipping and sliding like we have here when our light snowfall turns to ice when it hits our frozen streets.

If there’s any bright spot with our fixation with snow, it’s in listening to transplants from the Midwest or Northeast poo-poo our concerns. Come snow season they are the first to slide their cars and trucks into the ditch – on just that little dusting of snow.