Snow = Chaos in the District

So apparently snow makes people in Washington, DC crazy.  Everyone has been telling me how much they want snow around here.  Then, it comes and fires break out downtown, the UNDERGROUND subway is reduced to using one track (I swear...the red line is cursed) and Starbucks has no line at 8:30 in the morning.  I thought Seattle was bad about snow, but they shut the schools down here the minute a forecaster says we might have snow.  This is hardly a reason to stay home from school.  I say: send those punks out there with their boots to get an education while we still have some remanent of a public education system left in this country!

One of the strangest local colloquialism's here in the East is "wintry mix."  The weather people keep telling us that we should expect a wintry mix over the next several days.  After some investigation with the locals, I've discovered that this means some form of mix between rain, snow, ice and sleet--not a new brand of Chex mix, as I had originally thought.  Are ice and sleet the same thing?  How does it rain ice?  isn't that just hail?  Dear god, the reliable sunshine of Southern California baked any sense of weather dynamics right out of my head.  Would someone please explain all of this too me!