Remember those days growing up when you wished for snow? When you hoped and hoped and hoped and hoped for a blizzard to close the schools and open up the sledding hill and allow for snow angels on the lawn and snowmen in the yard? When you'd bundle up and go outside into the 20-degree weather all wrapped up and bundled, then come in hours later and take off all that wet clothing and sit down by the fire or under a blanket with a cup of hot chocolate?

I loved those days.

Now I think I'm being punished for it.

I'm here at work, in New Jersey, with one eye on the computer and another on the Weather Channel, watching this advancing storm to see what it's going to do to us tomorrow.

You see, I'm flying out of Newark Sunday morning, headed for Phoenix for New Year's and the Fiesta Bowl on Monday night.

I've never been inconvenienced by a snowstorm, and now I think it's my time. There was that Blizzard of '96, the one that hit just after New Year's, when I was at my roommate's house near Boston and had to spend two extra days because there was no way I'd be able to get on the road and come home. I remember watching Letterman one of those nights, and he had only three rows of people in the studio, because nobody could get into the city.

Now, when I've got plans to get out, the storm may slow me down. It's supposed to start around midnight tonight, and be over sometime Saturday evening. It's meant early deadlines -- by an hour -- both tonight and tomorrow night, meaning an earlier exit from work both nights, which is nice. And I'll probably go out, if the roads allow.

Before leaving for work today, I took care of some things at home. I put a shovel in my car, because if it snows a lot and they plow the parking lot here at work while we're parked there, I'll have to dig my car out. I also through in a few bottles of water, a bag of peanuts, a flashlight and a blanket -- provisions should I slide off the road and fall into a ditch or something, only to be covered by snow and not rescued until February. I also grabbed a cell phone, something I rarely take with me anywhere. I've never worried about it before, but after reading about that military man who was stranded in Oregon for 6 (or was it 16?) days -- and might have been AWOL, but that's, apparently, another story -- I decided to throw a few extra things in the car.

I just hope the roads are passable on Sunday. At least enough to get to Newark. A friend is driving his parents up for a 7:30 flight to Yellowstone, where they'll spend a week cross country skiing. I'm planning on hitching a ride with them, getting there hours before my 10:45 flight. I'd hoped to get on one of the two earlier flights, perhaps getting to Phoenix by lunchtime.

Now I'm going early just to be sure I'm at the airport and checked in, so that they don't give my seat away to someone else. And if I do manage to get on an earlier flight -- if there are earlier flights -- then all the better.

The storm passed over the Midwest today and sits somewhere between here and there now -- perhaps Ohio or Pennsylvania. By the time I leave tonight, sometime after 11 p.m., it may be over my head.

And I'll still think it's beautiful, the softly falling flakes and the hushed sounds of a winter storm at night. And I'll wake up tomorrow morning and marvel at it all, watching it continue to fall, and be happy.

Then I'll hope for it to book its way out to sea so I can enjoy New Year's in the desert.