Yep, snow’s here. The above photo was taken just four hours into it, so you can still glimpse asphalt peeking through the tire tracks. Two hours later and safely at home, I’m guessing the coverage is thicker by now.

I expected worse, to be honest, but the great and powerful snowstorm of January 2014, which should be trending shortly on Twitter as #snowpocalypse2014 unless anyone has a clever idea, launched six hours behind schedule in our vicinity. “Better late than never!” said no one I’m ever speaking to again.

Blizzard conditions frighten me a little less than they do the average Indiana driver, but that doesn’t mean I should push my luck. I left home this morning for early church service and encountered almost zero traffic in either direction. As you can tell from the back of the parking lot, we hardy souls who showed up had plenty of spaces at our disposal.

Our nearest commercial/shopping area likewise left me a wide berth for traveling and not having to worry about dodging other vehicles. Last night I heard so many locals had panicked that a few gas stations actually ran out of gas. I had no such trouble today.

When I stopped for my weekly bagel ‘n’ Bible study, I was one of six customers in the entire restaurant, possibly an all-time Sunday low for them. The managers on duty were discussing labor costs, the previous hour’s paltry dollar intake, and which employees to send home early. I couldn’t help having flashbacks to the restaurant management days of my youth, in which heavy snowfalls meant half the crew would call in and ¾ of the customer base would stay home, so the proportions worked themselves out.

Eventually I had to convince myself to do the responsible thing and go home. In my two-mile return trip I saw two cars wedged into ditches, each of whose drivers had already abandoned ship and were nowhere in sight. But hey, such lovely greeting-card scenery along the way.

On the advice of my father-in-law, I went ahead and spent a few, eventually futile minutes on shoveling our sidewalks. Theoretically this means I’ll have slightly fewer pounds of accumulation to shove aside when I go back out there later this afternoon and repeat the same steps, like a duty-bound Sisyphus. If I wait till the entire snowfall has run its course — and our meteorologists keep waffling on the projected time of snow cessation — I’d have to be prepared to lift and toss all the pounds at once. Compromising my principles for the sake of my recurring back pain seemed the sensible way to go.

As of this writing the snowflakes are still plummeting, faster and heavier and whiter, ensuring the city remains ground to a halt while we all stay inside and take bets on whose workplaces will be closed tomorrow. Activity cancellation announcements are infiltrating my Twitter feed, and everyone else I know has converted Facebook into a short-term Snowpocalypse photo album, complete with pets and value-added Photoshop captions. I expect the rest of Sunday will be more of the same, but with more TV.

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Meanwhile, on a site bookkeeping note: this, then, is how I chose to spend Midlife Crisis Crossover’s 600th entry. Thanks ever so much for dumping on my celebration, Old Man Winter. And, well, thanks for the nice party decorations. I guess. Hmph.