Stone Cold....

Today is an interesting day in Nashville. When I woke up this morning it was a balmy 9 degrees. All of the school systems in the area are closed because the buses won't start in the cold. This is Nashville's response to cold, don't get me started if there was actually snow or ice on the ground.

A lot of times, I hear folks from other parts of the country laugh about Nashville or other cities in the mid-south and how we react to winter weather. It's usually not pretty, the forecast of snow means hours of long lines at the grocery store. We panic, that's for sure.

In mid-South's defense, we really don't get enough winter weather to invest in the equipment to handle it. We don't get enough for people here to get used to driving in it. When it hits, things go nuts.

Years ago, I used to spend a week every year in Chicago. I was amazed at the size of the city, but I was also amazed at how it was prepared for cold weather. Every building downtown had revolving doors to keep the cold out. Every restaurant has a coat check closet, some of the hotels even had heat lamps installed under the entrance canopies. They had street sign designating 'snow routes'. That's a city built for cold weather.

On the flip side, I remember one summer, it was blazingly hot here and I was scheduled to spend a week in Detroit. I was looking forward to it, thinking it would be a lot cooler up there. As it turns out, the heat wave was nationwide. I was more miserable up there than I was in Nashville. Please understand, here we deal with more hot weather than cold. Our air conditioners are high-powered, the cooling systems in cars are more effective. Nashville is built for hot weather. In Detroit, the air conditioners couldn't cool, cars were overheating and breaking down on the interstates.

So....go ahead and laugh at us in the winter...it's cool. But when a heat wave comes and your cars breakdown....just remember....we are laughing at you too...