work

Travel plans

I woke up this morning at 5:30 and caught the 6:08 train. It was absolutely packed, more so than I think I’ve ever seen a morning train into Manhattan, and I spent the entire hour-long commute standing in the crowded aisle, listening to podcasts.

I got to the office around 7:30 — I stopped to get an iced tea and a muffin, apricot and French vanilla chip, respectively — and proceeded to try and get back into the swing of working. I have a lot of work that needs doing, and in fact could have used an extra week, not a week lost to freak storms and power outages. While I don’t think I got anywhere close to “caught up” today, even with that extra morning hour and a short lunch, I think I’m at least better positioned to tackle what’s left. Now that I know how tall the mountain — or, moreover, have discovered that some paths up it have been blocked or are no longer viable options — I’m better equipped to make the climb.

It’s still a mountain of work, though.

This evening, I get another very crowded train, but at least this time I got on board in time to get a seat the entire ride home. Then it was right back out the door to drive to the airport with my mother, to pick my sister and her husband up from their incoming flight. (They’ve been on vacation overseas and missed last week’s frankenstorm entirely, except via the international version of CNN.) I finally had dinner, a sandwich, around 9:30.

And now I am too tired to even think straight. I’m thankful I don’t have to go back to the office tomorrow. I now have my work laptop again, and I plan to tackle more of that mountain with it, but from home, tomorrow.

For now, though, I sleep.

DST? WTF?

My long, storm-imposed exile from work comes to an end tomorrow. After what was supposed to be a relaxing three-day weekend — and what turned into a considerably less than relaxing nine-day weekend — I go back to the office. I’m just hoping the return to the daily commute won’t be too terrible. Power is still out in parts of Manhattan — and parts of Long Island, including right across the street…and right here, briefly, early this evening. The trains are running on a reduced and modified schedule, and I’ll likely be getting up rather earlier than usual just to catch one into the city.

But there’s a lot I need to do at work. This maybe wasn’t the worst time to have been out, but it was pretty close.

And seriously, we’re going to throw Daylight Savings Time and Election Day into this crazy mix?

I’m not really complaining. Beyond the power going out, and some of the food we had to throw out, we suffered very little damage during the storm. Some siding came off of the house — cosmetic, not structural, damage — and the tree in the front yard lost a bough. Things haven’t returned to normal, not completely. But, for us, they’re getting there. (Lots of people were, and are, not so lucky.)

It’s going to be weird going back to work, but I think weird in a good way.

Thursday? A likely story

There’s no way you’re going to convince me that today was Thursday.

This has been a very strange week, thanks largely to the storm and the devastation in its wake. We suffered relatively little of that devastation, or even too many days of inconvenience, and I’m extremely grateful for that. I still can’t believe the lights, on this side of the block anyway, are back on — although I’ll admit, there’s a part of me that misses having no distractions to keep me from reading all day and night. I am glad to have the heat back on; an autumn that just wouldn’t get properly started for weeks has finally kicked into high gear. With the heat on, you can probably manage short sleeves in the house, but Tuesday and yesterday morning I was thankful for extra blankets and fleeces.

Meanwhile, Tucker, our dog, seemed pretty much oblivious to the storm. Sure, the wind was loud and there was some rain when he went outside, but there was no thunder, which is the thing that usually worries him. In fact, I think he genuinely enjoyed the storm: when the power went out, the house was quiet (except for the aforementioned wind) and we all went to bed at a more reasonable (to him) hour. It was only yesterday, when trick-or-treaters started knocking on his door that Tucker seemed to be at all fazed. Except for the chilliness, and disruption in his schedule, I think he preferred living in a blackout.

Not so much me. I’m really glad it’s over, and that things are (slowly) returning to normal. I won’t be headed to the office tomorrow — I’m taking the vacation day that this past Monday was supposed to be, and I’m sitting out a still uncertain train commute until next week. But I am looking forward to things getting back to normal next week.

Frankenstormageddon

Oh, the days that we’ve had.

As you’ve probably heard, the northeast and mid-Atlantic United States was hit on Monday by Hurricane Sandy, which had already done extensive damage in the Caribbean, particularly in Haiti. My office was closed in anticipation of the storm, but the weather wasn’t particularly bad here for most of Monday, kind of rainy and very windy. I spent most of the day reading through Kaleidotrope submissions, very nearly getting caught up…on August’s submissions. (That still leaves September’s.) However, the storm absolutely picked up with a vengeance in the evening.

We lost power around two o’clock in the afternoon, and the storm raged all night, but honestly, it could have been a lot worse. The little tree in the front yard, only a couple of years old, had one whole bough sheared off in the wind. And we lost a fair amount of siding on the one side of the house. But with all the horror stories coming in — Breezy Point in Queens, for example, not quite an hour’s drive from here, was decimated by flooding and fire — and even the damage some of our neighbors have suffered…well, it could have been worse. No one here, and no one nearby, and no one we know was badly hurt. I haven’t heard from everyone at work, since I haven’t been to work — more on that below — but my immediate co-workers and boss are okay. Yeah, it could have been worse.

My office, like a whole lot of Manhattan, has been closed all week. We’re facing network connectivity issues that might close it again tomorrow, but even if it’s open there’s almost no way I’ll be getting in. Mass transit is struggling to crawl back, and the Long Island Railroad isn’t close to running on my line again. And even if driving in wasn’t a terrible option under ideal circumstances, because so many people have started using it as their only option, most ways into the city will be requiring three or more passengers. I’m pretty much stuck.

I do wish I’d brought my laptop home with me — any other week, when I was expecting to stay home on Tuesday, I would have — but it can’t be helped. Unless the MTA and LIRR announce some spectacular overnight repair work tomorrow, I’ll be doing as much work as I can from right here.

Which I maybe can do, since the power came back on unexpectedly tonight. We’re still worried it will go out at any minute — that’s been known to happen, LIPA will be the first (or thereabouts) to admit — but it’s been holding steady on this side of the block for the past few hours. Heat, lights, wifi — tonight we live like kings!

We’ll see what happens tomorrow. I really do want to get back to work.

Sandy Sunday

If I disappear for the next couple of days, assume it’s probably thanks to Hurricane Sandy. We’re not expecting too much damage or flooding — we’re far enough from the coast to not be any of the handful of evacuated areas — but we might very well lose power. It happened last year, during Hurricane Irene. (That last two weeks, though I was able to sneak away for the second week to Canada. I don’t think I’ll be quite so lucky this time…though hopefully the outage also won’t be quite as bad.)

My office has decided to close tomorrow, which is probably for the best since all mass transit in and out of Manhattan is in the middle of shutting down as I type this. It may be back up sometime tomorrow, but right now even Tuesday isn’t a given. I was going to be off from work tomorrow anyway, but if we’re open on Tuesday and I can’t get in…

I have a meeting I’m supposed to go to on Tuesday, so I didn’t even bring my laptop home with me. I have some access to e-mail, assuming I have power, but…well, we’ll just see. Ideally, everything will be back to normal on Tuesday and I’ll get to work without any problems. Or, barring that, the office will be closed again. Anything in between that — the office open, but problems aplenty — doesn’t sound like fun.

Right now, just enjoying a regular Sunday. I did the crossword puzzle, moved lawn furniture away from the house, watched the okay but kind of disappointing You Only Live Twice, and read a bunch of Kaleidotrope submissions. Right now, it isn’t even raining.

But there’s a storm a’comin’, oh yes.