When I woke up Monday morning and found out classes were cancelled, I did just what any other college student would do. I promptly went back to sleep.

When my alarm actually went off later, it roused me from what turned out to be only a dreamy illusion, and I grudgingly trudged off to class.

It appeared Jan. 29, 2001, would remain both the last day classes were cancelled at Iowa State and the last snow day I would experience.

Yes, hope springs eternal, even (or especially) in college seniors. Surely the five inches predicted Sunday on top of what we had and the five more looming over us Monday would tip the balance. But it didn’t; it just looked pretty, and as Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes) once said about a lesser amount, “Nobody ever closed a school on account of prettiness.”

Actually, it’s about time we got some prettiness in winter. Too much time during the past few winters was spent looking out at a carpet of brown. It’s nice to look out the window and see what everyone in Iowa takes for granted, yet only gets on a hit-and-miss basis.

But is it news? You might think the newsworthiness of the weather depends only on the snow accumulation (or predicted accumulation), whether snow is a routine winter item and maybe the temperature, but it’s not that simple. There are actually two different sets of criteria.

The weather becomes a local story based on accumulation to date, average weather and how intense the area TV stations’ Doppler radar arms war is. The criteria for making the weather a national story is a complex formula taking into account temperature, potential accumulation, speed of the news day and distance from New York City. Thus, 20 below in Burlington, Vt., with a wind chill of 40 below is fodder for a news story, which is what we got on Jan. 16. A temperature of 31 below with wind chills in the mid-negative-40s in Grand Forks, N.D., as it was for Jan. 29 and the days after, is not. (Snow in places it’s not supposed to be makes the news no matter what. An Associated Press photo of a man kayaking down a frozen street of Spartanburg, S.C., is definitely newsworthy.)

Both of these instances — the Northeast cold snap of mid-January and the frozen Northern Plains of last week — carry some interesting sidelights with their extremes.

Those in the Northeast, for example, might have considered taking a vacation on comparatively warm, sunny Mars. According to a press release from Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., at 1 p.m. EST Jan. 14, upstate New York and New England were in subzero temperatures or single digits. At the same time, the Spirit rover basked in a balmy 12 above in Gusev crater, 1 1/2 times farther away from the sun than Earth. It stayed a little warmer on Earth at night, though, when the Spirit site reached an estimated low of 130 below.

Last week, the Associated Press interviewed a scientist from North Dakota State University who had just returned from a stint in Antarctica, 300 miles from the South Pole.

“Geology professor Allan Ashworth says his visit to Antarctica was like a tropical getaway from his hometown of Fargo,” the article began. January is summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and Ashworth said the temperature at his station never got colder than -15. While he was making this call from Fargo, though, the mercury there was falling out the bottom of the thermometer at -29.

Back here in Iowa, this most recent storm revealed a crack in residents’ hardy lining. The Des Moines Register reported on people stocking up on supplies, afraid of … something, probably the dire conditions that were supposed to happen. I couldn’t put my finger on it, and then it hit me: We’re turning into Southerners, panicking whenever the TV stations tell us to panic. The stations have gotten very good at it, too. We’ve had the Storm of the Century two or three times this century. Adequate coverage of these could be summed up rather easily: It’s Iowa. It’s winter. It snows. Adjust accordingly. The supermarket is probably not going to be unreachable tomorrow.

It’s been a while since we really had a winter to complain about. Take the temperatures in stride; after all, you could have been in Grand Forks. Enjoy the deep snow, which can stir a longing for plastic sleds and/or hot chocolate. Pity those who spend their lives in a monotonal climate, who miss out on the experience of four distinct seasons.

And don’t give up hope on that snow day. Spring break had already passed when Iowa State encountered the April blizzard of 1974.