Falls Like Lard.

Or, you know, maybe not.

There's a "Winter Storm Watch" for the area, starting tonight and lasting through Tuesday night. And if it really does snow, they're calling for as much as 2 to 4 inches - on grassy areas.

Doesn't stop the TV stations from going into their usual headless-chicken panic mode. Crawls across the bottom of the screen every half-hour or so, and occasionally breaking into coverage to show their forecast maps. And the 11:00 news shows trotted out their packaged clips of Department of Transportation trucks filling up with salt and sand to put on the roads and the "crowds" at the grocery stores. (In fact, to my surprise, the grocery store I typically go to had a normal amount of customers and plenty of bread and milk on the shelves at 7 p.m. this evening.)

My favorite part of the TV weather reports was the forecast map of what areas could expect in the way of precipitation over the next 48 hours. Probably too much information to fit into a single map, but Hey! they tried. They had the map of Virginia, split into about 5 different colored bands, from "All Rain" in the band closest to the ocean, through "Mixed Precipitation" and "Sleet" (these two seemed to cover the Richmond area), "Snow" and ending with "Heavy Snow" (in the mountains). The best parts of the map, though, were the other little comments on the map. Most were informative ("4 to 10 inches" near Charlottesville), but over the mountains was this odd little phrase: "Falls Like Lard".

No idea what it means. I can't imagine snow falling so heavily that one might mistake it for lard, and I've seen a lot of intense snowfalls. Even a thunder-snowstorm, once. But lard? Yuk. Although I suppose it would make for much more substantial snowmen.