I remember the “blizzard of '93”, but in the south, Georgia, that was probably 6-8" of snow. We were out of school for like a week though. I had the bright idea to take the wheels off of my rollerblades and use them as ice skates. That did not work as well in practice as it did in my head.
When I was a kid my house was struck by lightning. It actually struck my bedroom but we were all downstairs watching TV at the time. It was a super loud bang and the power went out, and our dog started yelping like she was dying. We found the dog huddled in the back corner of the yard. She was fine, we think the noise just scared her. The outlet in my bedroom wall where it hit was destroyed, just some charred chunks of plastic and metal that had blown out of the wall and hit the side of my bed. I think we ended up having to replace all the outlets in my room. It knocked off the siding where it hit the outside of my bedroom wall, but i don’t think it even damaged it, we just hung it back up. The fire department came and made sure there were no hotspots, and they were able to trace the path. It hit my room, traveled through the house, and then out to the transformer on the street, which had blown up. Oddly though, I don’t think any of the electronics in the house were damaged, not even the stereo in my room right by where the lightning struck.
We bought my son’s costume for something like $25, he was a Ghostbuster. My wife and I got tablecloths from the dollar store for a couple bucks each and were ghosts. Costumes don’t have to be perfect or expensive!
Well I’m old and don’t really game anymore, but for me it was the original Halflife. The story sucked me in, not to mention the fact that I was running it on my brand new PC, which I believe was one of the first Pentium IIIs, so I could run it at the max resolution and the graphics were amazing!. I think it was 1024x768, on a huge 17" CRT monitor!
If you’re there when the mail is being delivered, talk to the mail person. They’re there every day and can have some good insights you won’t find anywhere else. For instance, once when I did this he told me he gets a lot of mail forwarding notices, and more often than not the boxes are staying empty after that. I didn’t know why that place had a lot of people leaving, but it was enough to make me keep looking.