The plural of bus of course is bui. Just ask Vanilla Ice.

In any case, we had the first snow of the year here today. There were lots of schools closed or delayed, though our schools were not affected. The roads were not very bad IMO at least in our part of town. While at the Y this morning there was a lady talking to the people at the front desk and she was saying how she was from Arkansas and if they got snow then everything was just shut down and she was all freaking out and the rest of us were just looking at her weird like mmmkay.

So while I was at work, I was talking to a co-worker when she got a call on her cell phone. It was from a friend of hers who was talking loudly so I listened in :-). Friend was saying how she was going to pick up my co-worker’s daughter from school because she (friend) was definitely going to pick up her own daughter because “she did not want her riding the school bus today”

I assumed because of the snow and how she was worried about the bus getting in a wreck and her kid getting hurt or dying. I pointed out that school buses are by far safer than taking your kid yourself. She pshawd me of course.

And, of course, because that’s the kind of person I am, I looked up some good ol’ facts and sent them to her. Including:

• Riding the bus has become the safest way to get to school, even safer than walking. Researchers looked at the ways children get to school and found that school buses account for one-forth of all trips but only 2% of children’s deaths in school related traffic accidents, making them the safest form of transportation.
• “In fact, it’s 87 times safer for your child to take a school bus than driving them yourself, letting them ride with friends, or even walking and bicycling,” LeMon said.
• There are 48 million school children in the United States. Half of them ride school buses and on average there are ten occupant fatalities a year. The other half get to school some other way and 600 of them lose their lives as a result.
• An average of only 10 children are killed each year as school bus occupants, and most of the deaths involved very severe crash circumstances that often were not survivable.
• Most of the 600 school-age children killed each year during normal school transportation hours while riding in a passenger vehicle other than a school bus would be alive today had they taken a school bus.
• Each year about 800 children are killed in motor vehicle crashes during school consisting of: 450 students die by teenage drivers, while 5 students die riding in a school bus, 15 are killed getting on or off the bus by passing motorist.

Caveat of course that I got all of this stuff randomly off of the Internet so “it must be true”. I assume that the one site that said 600 deaths and the one with 800 deaths were just using slightly different methodologies for counting, or different years, or something.

So to try and top Carolyn’s kale smoothie pictures, I searched for school bus crash, just for fun and found

That came from this USA Today article which reiterated some of the same stats I gave above.