weather

Friday? Wasn’t yesterday Friday?

Much less excitement today, although only because it didn’t snow again overnight. (More snow showers are predicted over the weekend.)

But, possibly worried that we might feel bad about that lack of snow, and perhaps thinking us already nostalgic for yesterday’s belated, half-assed job of clearing the station platform, the LIRR still hadn’t fully cleared my station. Everywhere one had to walk was cleared, but they’d quit without touching a whole length of track, which in the mornings is usually where I want to be. (I head uptown from Penn Station, so it’s better to be at the back of the train.)

But they finally finished clearing that by the time I got home. And the rest of the day was mostly just more of the same.

I’m glad the weekend’s here!

Take this job and shovel it

I’m not sure there’s any sane world in which it could have snowed again last night, a good twenty-four inches on top of everything we’ve already had, much less one in which my office would still be open for the day. But that, apparently, is the world I live in, because that’s exactly how it happened. It snowed all night, enough to make the commute a slippery slog, but not enough, apparently, for the powers that be to shut my office down. (I’m not sure that said powers were in the office themselves, of course, but that’s another story.)

The Long Island Railroad had not shoveled at my station at all this morning, and when I saw the state of it, I knew I had to be crazy not to turn around and take a vacation day. My father, who is apparently just that much crazier than me, had been up at 5 a.m., using the snow-blower to clear a path down the driveway. I didn’t realize this is what he was doing until about 6 a.m., when, still only half-awake, I spied him from my bedroom window, nearly finished. If he hadn’t done that much, my mother, whose employer did close, joked that she would still be shoveling. If he hadn’t done that, I probably would have stayed home.

I tell you, the LIRR could have used him this morning. They were only just getting started clearing the platforms when I got home around 5:30 tonight. Which is a nice way to not at all beat the peak hours, while also extending a hearty “screw you” to everyone else. Lots of other stations along the way — and believe me, this morning my train was making all local stops — were cleared, but I guess ours didn’t rate. I guess ours, unlike the next one on the line, didn’t have a CBS news crew filming the morning commute, no doubt to see if the railroad botched this big snowfall like they did the one after Christmas.

It was almost pretty in Manhattan, with the snow clinging to the trees, but that was only if you ignored the fact that there was almost nowhere to walk. Shovels and plows had been pretty hit or miss, it looked like, and crossing streets became an exercise in single-file, slushy danger. When I arrived at the office, making surprisingly good time despite the slow going of first the train and then my feet, it was a little anticlimactic. Oh sure, there was that brief moment of panic and aggravation when I found the fourth floor reception door was locked, and I wondered if they’d decided to close the office after all. But I went downstairs to the third floor and used our internal staircase to walk up. And by mid-morning, almost everyone had made it in.

This evening, as I said, the LIRR had finally started clearing the snow from my station’s platform. Though they had still not cleared a lot of it, where I needed to walk, at least, you finally could. The same couldn’t be said of all the sidewalks between there and home, of course — like in Manhattan, a lot of places had shoveled just the bare minimum, maybe a path from parking lot to door. But I made it home in one piece, safe and sound. And today I was wearing my boots, so I didn’t come close — well, as close — to slipping, like I almost did yesterday.

We had one last interesting thing happen this evening, shortly after I got home. A small dog, sans collar or tags, was lost on the street. We could neither coax her in, out of the icy, snow-clogged street, nor figure out where she had come from. We couldn’t even tell for sure that she was a she. She kept barking, running away, running back. My mother went door to door, to our likeliest neighbors — people who might either have a dog or know whose she was — and a few people, my father and I included, tried to get her to follow us. Since that, at least, seemed like something to do, rather than stand around in the cold worrying about her getting hit by a car or freezing to death. (All of this, of course, while dinner was cooking in the oven.) Luckily, someone eventually came for the dog, coaxed her into a car with a leash, and took her home.

So at least the day has a happy ending.

Although, seriously, it feels like it ought to be Friday already.

Is Obama in Big Salmon’s pocket?

After the excitement of yesterday evening — which, in retrospect, was perhaps not terribly exciting to an outside observer — I spent the rest of the night with the thrill-a-minute that was President Obama’s second State of the Union address. I don’t make a habit of watching the speech, which can sometimes make me feel like a bad citizen, but I happened to be on YouTube a few minutes before it started at 9 o’clock, so I decided, on a somewhat guilty-conscience-ridden spur, to watch it there. And you know what? It was fairly boring and kind of ridiculously long. And, considering how much of the speech I spent making jokes about it on Twitter, I’m not sure how actively my citizenry was engaged.

Most of my silly comments were directed at John Boehner, our new Speaker of the House, and Michelle Bachmann, the Senate’s resident Crazy Lady. I think the former might deserve it — with an Oompa Loompa tan like that and such a quickness with the tears, it’s hard not to poke a little fun — but I know the latter does. And I didn’t even watch her deer-in-the-headlights, dictated-to-invisible-elves response to Obama’s speech last night. (Can someone please tell me how the Republicans get two televised responses? Say whatever you will about the Tea Party and their connection to the Republicans; they still are Republicans.)

Anyway, more snow today, though I managed not to oversleep or miss my train. I had a busy day at the office, and seemed to be mailing out more things out of the country in one day than I usually do in weeks, or months. We had one of our “Brown Bag Lunch” speakers again, but I decided to skip it. Instead, I grabbed a quick bite and ended up mostly working through lunch, since the weather was bad enough I couldn’t really go anywhere.

And the weather was very icy this evening, on my commute home. The snow had stopped, but it had been replaced by freezing rain and sleet, which made walking very treacherous. I was turning a corner in Manhattan and had to grab onto the side of a building to keep from falling to the ground. And then at home, I found myself wishing people hadn’t shoveled the sidewalks. I don’t love walking through snow if I can help it, but I’d rather than a thin sheet of ice I can’t really see.

I made it home safely, though, and we’ll see what the weather ends up being like tomorrow. More snow is predicted, and in fact it’s snowing now. I’ll tell you this much: whatever happens, I’m wearing boots tomorrow.

If it’s snowing, it must be Tuesday

I allowed myself to sleep a little late this morning, which of course meant that I missed my (already later) train by perhaps just a minute or two. And then they announced that, “because of a police investigation,” the next train, due fifteen minutes later, was running nine minutes late. There was no sign of police activity on the train when it did arrive — not too late, I thought — but the car I was on was rather crowded. And crowded in that “you know, if you’d just move over a tiny little bit and maybe act like we’re living in a civilization…no? Gee, thanks” kind of way.

It was also snowing, although that ended well before noon. The snow seemed to be coming down fast and flurry-ous for awhile there, and I had dreams of them sending us home, but, not unexpectedly, it was not to be.

On the train ride home this evening, the car I was in had almost no light. Luckily I was one of the first couple of people on, so I managed to snag a seat where there was enough light to read, but the rest of the car behind me remained fairly dark. One of the ticket collectors tried flipping a switch to see if that wouldn’t help, but it just turned off the two or three bulbs left in the car. He quickly flipped it back.

But it was a pretty normal train ride, and I had enough light to read by, so that’s enough for me.

I got home, then, only to discover that the street was blocked off by a work crew a little up the block. I was able to get to our house, but I had to walk our dog in the back yard, rather than to the corner like usual. I’ll do that sometimes — sometimes even often — in the summer, but that’s when there isn’t snow on the ground and there’s still light in the sky. Luckily the morning’s snow hadn’t done too much damage, added too much to what was already on the back lawn, and I grabbed a flashlight and we went out in the back.

Around that time, my mother came home from work, and we tried to figure out what had happened, and after that what to do about dinner. All evidence pointed towards a water main break up the street — giant puddles across the street, our own tap water a little iffy and sputtery for a while — and that was later confirmed by a phone call to the local water district.

(Sadly, they had finished their work up the block before I could snap any photos. There also wasn’t any way to do so inconspicuously. So I’m afraid the habits of southern mants will have to remain an undocumented mystery for some time. Mant headquarters, though, does assure us that the water should be fine to drink.)

Right around then, my father called, needing to be picked up at the train station. (Fewer trains run to our station, so sometimes, at night especially, it’s easier or even necessary to stop at the station one town over.) I had an hour to kill before that, so I decided to actually go get dinner. (Quick takeout at Boston Market, should you wish to keep score at home.) Of course, I managed to run over some of the recycling we’d put at the curb for tomorrow’s pick-up on my way out of the driveway — the snow has left significantly less room for maneuvering, and we haven’t had a recycling pick-up in a couple of weeks — and dragged a cardboard box full of paper half a block before I realized. I pulled over, then pulled it all out from under the front wheel, then tossed the mess of paper in the trunk and went to get the food.

I got home, with maybe twenty minutes to spare before I had to go pick up my father, only to be startled out of my mind by a cat racing from the garage. We don’t have any cats, though occasionally a neighbor’s will take up residence on our front step, or sometimes the garage. At least, I’m pretty sure it was a cat. Maybe it was a tiny mant.

Anyway, then I went to pick up my father. And all of this makes the evening sound much more exciting than it really was.

Or maybe not very exciting at all, I don’t know.

The common cold

It was not lost on me that if today was, in fact, the coldest day in New York in six years — a factoid I heard repeated more than once leading up to the day, and then again later confirmed — then it was also the coldest day I’ve ever walked to work in Manhattan, since I started at my current place of employment in October of 2004, just a few months before that winter of 2005.

I have no trouble believing that today was the coldest day in several years, much less the coldest day so far of this year. It was bitterly cold in Manhattan, well around zero degrees all day, and made even more so thanks to the faulty heating in our office building. The heat wasn’t off, exactly, but it also wasn’t circulating much. We spent some time fondly remembering that one time, a couple of years ago, when it was the air conditioner that was busted, and the office was so hot they had to let us go home. And although I never thought I would be, I found myself strangely nostalgic for our old photocopiers. They weren’t very good, breaking down more often even than now our frequently-in-need-of-service current models, but they sure could pump out some heat. I think this, the last few hours that I’ve been home, is the first time I’ve been genuinely warm all day.

Though it could be worse, I suppose. Apparently I got out of Manhattan this evening shortly before a train stalled in one of the tunnels, causing all sorts of delays. I may have escaped the city mere minutes before the trouble started. My father, who usually works later than me, wasn’t so lucky — and he lost his scarf somewhere in the shuffle. And believe me, this is definitely scarf kind of weather.

It’s supposed to be considerably warmer tomorrow, but I think only because they’re predicting more snow.