Month: February 2014

Monday and Tuesday

I’m getting pretty tired of winter. This winter, to be specific, when it seems like we’re constantly under a new major storm advisory. There’s snow predicted for the next three days, with the same number of storms colliding in our area, polar-vortexing us into submission again. Which I suppose means we won’t see a thaw until sometime in 2018. I’m just tired of the snow that doesn’t melt, or melts only a little and then re-freezes later in the day. It’s not the cold or the longer nights. I can handle those. I just wish winter would knock it off for a while.

Meanwhile, the stray cat seems to have left the garage when I scared it out of hiding. The garage is pretty tightly packed with stuff, but I did a pretty thorough search — tripping and twisting my ankle badly in the process, I might add. (The ankle gave me some grief last night, but ice and acetaminophen seem to have done the trick.) If the cat is still out there, hidden in some inaccessible nook or corner, I don’t really want to think about what its lack of movement might suggest. I’d much rather it ran out the other night and discovered a warmer place to hang out.

We should all be so lucky.

Today I was on campus, talking with professors, which is that thing I have to do several times a year. It went well, I think. And I managed to finish reading the last ten pages of William Faulkner’s Sanctuary while I hid out from the cold in the campus library. (I really liked the book, so more on that later.)

Tomorrow, though…well, there might be more snow. We’ll just have to see.

Saturday and Sunday

Last night, I watched a couple of movies.

First there was Escape Plan with Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, which turned out to be surprisingly entertaining despite — or probably because — it was so ridiculous. I felt like Stallone was fighting the silliness a little bit, but Schwarzenegger was embracing it wholeheartedly, and as such was really good in the movie. I wouldn’t call it good, but it was a lot of fun.

After that, it was a real change of pace with Dallas Buyers Club. The movie wasn’t exactly remarkable, but it told its story well, and Matthew McConaughey was very good. So was Jared Leto, who I didn’t recognize until the movie was almost over, and both he and McConaughey deserve the Oscar nominations they got for the movie.

In between the films, I discovered a cat living in the garage. I’d been hearing noises off and on for the past couple of nights and discovered the blinds on a couple of the windows mussed up. But I chalked the former up to the wind, and the latter up to imagination…or more wind. (Well, the rational part of my brain did, anyway.) But I heard the noise again last night and although it was only for a second, I saw a cat creep into the far back corner. The garage is full of stuff, including furniture and boxes I moved back from Pennsylvania a decade ago with, so there are lots of places a small cat like that could hide. I gave up on trying to find it last night, partly because I didn’t want to chase it out into the cold, but I saw it again this evening. I tried leaving the garage door open, coaxing the cat out with soft words and tuna fish, scaring it out with loud noises, and the most I seemed to do was to chase it from one inaccessible corner to another.

It’s not so much that I mind there being a cat in the garage. I got a better glimpse at it tonight, and I think it’s a stray, so I want it to be warm. I just don’t want it to set up shop out there, think it’s a good place to go to the bathroom or have kittens, or get stuck in one of those inaccessible corners with no food to be had. I think I might have chased it out this evening — into what’s unfortunately become a snowy night — but I also thought I’d maybe done that last night.

So hopefully I chased it away and it will find a better place to hole up. Or if it’s still out there, I’ll be able to find and catch it, so that I can somehow take it to the vet. (I say somehow because we don’t own any cat carriers anymore.)

Anyway, that was most of my weekend. Today, after a prolonged absence, I joined my writing group again and wrote this:

“There are no ghosts here,” Jimmy said. I didn’t know which one of us he was trying to convince.

“Sure, there are stories,” Jimmy said. “The old house, the caretakers murdered.” He walked over to the shelf behind his desk and pulled down a book. “That was in 1908, three years after the house was first built. Then there was a fire in the barn, that family who rented the place and went missing in the ’70s.” He handed me the book, which was older than the paperback I knew he’d seen me tuck into my backpack, and was probably a first edition if I knew anything about Jimmy Bell.

“It’s all in Trevor Burnam’s novel,” he said, “if you can get past the lousy prose. And some of it’s corroborated by press clippings — of which,” he added, “there aren’t for that time and this area. But that’s a far cry from saying the house is haunted.”

“Then why aren’t you living there?” I asked. “Your family owns the house, you’ve been living in town for six months, and yet you’re still renting here, in this place.” It hadn’t escaped my attention that there had been a fold-away cot stored in the closet, or that Jimmy had shut the closet door when he noticed me snooping.

“You’ve done your homework,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was pleased. Looking at him from across the desk, I thought maybe he couldn’t tell either.

“I just want to know what happened there,” I said. “Don’t you?”

“’They drank the milk and ate the butter,’” he said. “That’s the first line of Burnam’s book.” He nodded at it in my hands, and although I pretty much knew the thing by heart I flipped to the start of Chapter 1. “’Miss Abigail returned to the kitchen that cold October morning to discover the pantry door unlatched, the fire in the hearth gone out, and the little dead girl waiting for her at the top of the cellar stairs.’

“It’s not great writing,” Jimmy said, “but sure, I can see why people liked it at the time. After the Wilson family ran off in ’76 –”

“Disappeared,” I said. “There were five of them, and they weren’t ever found.” I handed him back the book. “There are press clippings about that.”

“And about Ken Wilson’s drinking problem, too,” Jimmy said. “Look, I like you, Clara, and we went to school together, which is the only reason I agreed to meet. But you’re seeing this from a distance and missing the details. And the details say there’s no such thing as ghosts.”

“I just don’t think you believe that,” I said.

I took the writing prompts from this magazine cover. Imagine if I’d gone with the picture!

Random 10 2-7-14

Last week. That seems so long ago now. This week:

  1. “Ghosts Under Rocks” by Ra Ra Riot
    You soak in one dream
  2. “The Wanderer” by Johnny Cash
    I went out walking under an atomic sky
  3. “Pour Some Sugar on Me” by Emm Gryner (orig. Def Leppard), guessed by Clayton
    Demolition woman, can I be your man?
  4. “Pretty in Pink” by the Dresden Dolls (orig. the Psychedelic Furs)
    Caroline talks to you softly sometimes
  5. “Bumper” by Cults
    Maybe I should start a life with someone new
  6. “Spiderwebs” by No Doubt
    Your words walk right through my ears
  7. “A Piece of the Pie” by Randy Newman
    You say you got two jobs and so’s your wife
  8. “Flowers Never Bend With the Rainfall” by Simon & Garfunkel
    So I’ll continue to continue to pretend
  9. “Handle With Care” by the Traveling Wilburys, guessed by Occupant
    You’re the best thing that I’ve ever found
  10. “Gone Daddy Gone” by Violent Femmes
    Where she is now, I can only guess

Good luck!

Wet Wednesday

So today was kind of terrible.

All day yesterday, up until the point I went to bed, the news was predicting another winter storm full of snow and freezing rain, beginning sometime after midnight and continuing into the morning. I’m here to tell you, friends and neighbors, the news? They were not wrong.

But it seemed okay. It was a little wet and messy out this morning, but boots and an umbrella seemed to handle that. And moreover, the railroad said they were running on or close to schedule.

The railroad? Totally wrong.

My train arrived on time, more or less, but then we sat at the station for about twenty minutes before moving. And when we finally did move, it was incredibly slowly, thanks apparently to a downed train and that frequent favorite “equipment trouble” in Bellerose. We arrived in Manhattan almost an hour later than expected. But hey, it could have been worse: shortly after, while I was still in transit, the railroad shut down entirely, and if I’d been one train later, I probably wouldn’t have made it into the city at all.

I might have been better off, actually.

I arrived at Penn Station only to discover the subways simply weren’t running, thanks to a power outage (and possibly a fire in Grand Central). With the railroad down, it wasn’t like I had the option of turning back and going home. So I decided to walk to work.

It’s a pretty straightforward walk, since Manhattan is a grid of uptown and downtown, but it’s also a walk that’s easily a half hour long. On a good day. And today wasn’t really a good day.

All of last night’s snow and the snow left over from Monday had turned to huge piles of slush and ankle-deep puddles on every street. Luckily I was wearing boots, so I could splash through those puddles — the cuffs of my pants be damned — while keeping my socks and feet relatively dry. Given that it was still raining the entire way, and the streets were only barely negotiable, I made pretty good time. But I still didn’t get to the office until almost 9:30, over an hour later than I’m usually there.

And I was one of the early ones.

At least the rest of my day went by really quickly. In part because the office closed early at three o’clock.

I finished revising a development plan for a new project — the one I’m working on with the young woman I’ll be mentoring — and I had a couple of meetings. Then I put my boots back on, tucked my work laptop back into my bag, and I left for an early train home.

Which, actually, proved to be no trouble at all. They were still reporting delays on the subway, but I hit none, and I was home by about a quarter after four. I had to do some snow-blowing and shoveling when I got here, but the afternoon was significantly less terrible than the morning.

The evening has been positively uneventful, which is actually sort of nice.

I’ll have to see what the weather is like tomorrow. There’s no storm predicted — the next one will have to wait until the weekend — but all that slush and melt is going to freeze, and if mass transit imploded under the weight of today’s weather…well, there’s a reason I took my laptop home again, just in case.

Oh, not to worry, Heather, I didn’t encounter any of these on my travels. You know, yet.

Snowy Monday

Sometime in the middle of the night, it started snowing. The weather reports had warned it was going to happen, but I Was kind of hoping there would be less on the ground already by the time I woke up.

I worked from home today, which would have meant no venturing outside and no worries, but I had to pick up the dog from the kennel this morning, which meant shoveling and driving on messy and slippery roads. It wasn’t so bad — and I’m quite sure he’s happy to be back home — but I’m tired from the shoveling I might not otherwise have had to do.

And to think, there’s supposed to be another big winter storm headed our way later in the week. I suspect tomorrow, the snow will just be enough to make my commute difficult, not enough to keep me home.