Snow is like deer; it’s cute when you don’t have to live with it. The plows do a good job in town, but for the residential streets they take off the top fluffy layer of snow and instead leave the entire road with a solid sheet of pounded ice.
Fall semester is pleasant in Idaho as the finals are usually upon us by the time the snow comes.
Spring semester isn’t very springy. After a relatively mild winter, Jack Frost decided to give us a frosty shocker and lay down knee-deep snow that was cemented hard by single digit temperatures.
It was cold enough to freeze the mucus to your nose and make formations of snot-cicles and snot-actites. Apparently, the capacity to cause frostbite within 20 minutes isn’t enough to slow down NIC.
It seems English professors are magical beings that float over ice and snow with their own internal furnaces instead of hearts to pump fire and molten slag in their veins.
Because I was not born with a silver potato in my mouth, I cannot comprehend how Idahoans trek through the cold in nothing but a hoodie and gym shorts. Probably leprechaun magic.
Instead, I am an ogre with many layers that are now roasting inside the classrooms. And the coughing, coughing, coughing! Students who should clearly not be in class holding an entire classroom hostage to recycling air turning in a gyre of germs.
Eight people in Spokane and 48 people from Washington have died from the flu this season. More than last year, and it could have been far worse, but people were diligent in getting their flu shot.
The best bet to prevents other from getting sick would be to stay home, but attendance requirements gives students little room to not get sick or get a haymaker from life’s many random swings to the groin.
The requirements make sense from one point of view; we don’t want students running off with financial aid after their disbursements.
Unfortunately, these requirements punish those of weaker constitutions and even students who live with the vulnerable members of society. I may not get sick vacuuming up microbes with both nostrils, but my mother with COPD can.
