Shoveling Out from the Storm

Let me give you winter-haters some depressing news this morning. 

This is only the 33^rd official day of winter and it’s another 56 until spring arrives on March 20,^th which means there is plenty of time for more snow, ice and cold weather.  However on a positive note...actually I can’t find anything positive right now.

Well that’s not completely true because for most of us in Ocean County the snowstorm did not bring the accumulations we were originally looking at.  The band of heavy snow moved a bit north which is why places like Manalapan and Colts Neck got slammed while areas in and around Toms River received only about six inches of the white stuff.

Young people hate when adults start a sentence with “when I was your age” but I’m going to do that now.  When I was a young teenager and we got snow the last place you would find us was inside, which my guess is where many will be today playing Xbox, PlayStation or the like.

We couldn’t wait to get outside and break out our sleds regardless of how cold it was.  However before we got to play we usually had to shovel our own driveways and walkways and would then work in groups and hit as many homes as we could.  You could make yourself $10 or $20 when that was a lot of money.

Flash forward to today and see how few kids will knock on doors and offer to shovel and earn some extra dollars. Just too lazy to do so.

I’m sure many of you have heard the term “March Madness” which refers to tournament time in college basketball.  During that time many fill out bracket pools to compete in office and online contests and trying to predict the winners of 63 games in advance is a challenge to say the least.

It’s so hard that this year it could earn you a billion dollars.  Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway and Dan Gilbert’s Quicken Loans announced yesterday their “Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge.”  Anyone who enters the free online contest and fills out a perfect 68-team bracket will win $1 billion which will be paid out in 40 annual installments of $25 million.

If there is more than one winner then they will share the jackpot and if nobody enters a perfect bracket Quicken Loans will award $100,000 to each of the contest’s 20 most accurate entries.

By the way according to a math professor the odds of getting all 63 games correct are 1 in 9.2 quintillion. However if you have basketball knowledge then the odds are lowered to 1 in 128 billion.