Welcome home. Make yourselves comfortable.

I’ll admit it: I’d be happy to never see another snowflake in my life. After all, the District has been socked by the white stuff this winter, watching 55.9 inches of it fall in the last week alone.  And on a more personal note, my car has been stuck in a snow bank in an unplowed alley for the past 2 weeks.  Cabin fever doesn’t even begin to describe how I feel.

I suppose, then, that I’m one of those people that Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin – who hails from the snowy lands of Chicago – made fun of last week. The senator spent valuable time on the U.S. Senate floor last week to mock us in the District. He said, among other things, that D.C. residents treat snowstorms like nuclear attacks. He also had some thoughts on our newborn babies, saying that our tiniest infants must be immediately taken from their mothers’ arms and shown videos of snowstorms that are accompanied by the sounds of screaming and shrieking.

That, Durbin said, is the only way to explain the District’s seemingly irrational fear of snow. You can see video of Durbin’s own blizzard of words here on the Huffington Post Web site (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/17/sen-dick-durbin-mocks-dc-_n_465340.html).

I’ll concede one point to Durbin: We do tend to overreact to some snowstorms. But I’d like to see how Durbin’s native Chicago would have reacted to receiving more than 50 inches of snow in one week. That’s a mighty wallop. Considering how much snow we did receive, I’d say that the residents of the District handled themselves quite well.  Although, one of my neighbors thought yelling at me would get the alley plowed, which isn’t even close to my responsibility.  He is just another stressed out lawyer, mad he can’t get his Benz out of the garage.

I had my own concerns about the snowstorm. I sell houses for a living. Not many people wanted to tour any old Victorians, brownstones or high-rises in the District during the snowstorms. Who could blame them? Most people wanted to wait out the storms in the comfort of their own residences.

But DC, like most of the rest of the country, is in the midst of a real estate recovery in the housing market. Would a major snowstorm slow that recovery? After all, not much house-selling business was taking place last week thanks to the blizzards.

I’m happy to report, though, that my clients, though slowed by the storms, are still eager to get out there and look through the many listings currently on the DC market. To me, this is a good sign: It means that our housing recovery is a real one, and not one that a couple of inches – or even 55 of them – of snow are going to derail.

So take that, Durbin! And good luck landing at O’Hare Airport next time it snows in Chicago!  And here’s to getting my car out of the snow bank by the weekend

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