personal

Thursday

So it snowed. Quite a lot, actually, and it turns out we suffered more damage last night than during last week’s hurricane. Several large branches fell in the backyard, and the poor little tree in the front yard lost yet another bough. And you definitely wouldn’t have thought I’d shoveled the driveway at all last night.

Some estimates put it at a foot of snow.

That’s pretty unusual for us the first week of November, especially right on the heels of a devastating hurricane. We almost lost power again last night. They still don’t have power across the street. And the Long Island Railroad is still uncomfortably crowded.

It wasn’t so bad this morning. I caught a later train, at 7:28, and even though the LIRR did that thing again when they pretend a train is still coming, it’s just 20+ minutes late, it wasn’t as horribly uncrowded as last night’s. I even had enough room to open my book for half of the trip, which this week has been almost unheard of! And this evening…well, again, still ridiculously over-crowded, but I was on the same train as my father and we both managed to get seats.

And a lot of the show has already melted. I don’t know what that means in terms of power restoration for the rest of the block, or for my train tomorrow morning, but things could always be worse.

At least I didn’t have any webinars to go to today.

Wednesday

So today’s been a day.

I woke up at 5:30. I was going to get the 6:08 train.

That train was delayed, alternating between 23 and 25 minutes, depending, I can only imagine, on which way the wind was blowing at the moment or on some strange whim of the person announcing it. The time would change every few minutes as we stood around in the cold.

The 6:28 train, however, was apparently operating on time.

Does the Long Island Railroad really think they’re fooling anyone with that? Like one train is going to leap-frog over the other, or they’re both going to arrive simultaneously on the same track? “Sure, one train’s towing the other,” my father joked. (This was one of the rare times we were taking the same train. Even a week-plus after Sandy, there are still few trains to choose from.) If the 6:08 train is running twenty-something minutes late, and the 6:28 is on time, then there is no 6:08 train. The LIRR can call it “equipment trouble” and “delays” all they want, but the train’s been cancelled and we all know it.

Of course, the 6:28 was running late, too. Something like 6 minutes.

When it arrived, it was short, which is exactly what you want to do when you’re expecting huge crowds of commuters, crowds so deep down the aisles of each car that, after one or two stations, passengers can no longer even get on board. You obviously want to remove entire cars from that equation. Who needs that space? I mean, it’s not like you’re running a reduced schedule and presumably have other trains sitting around. Oh, it is? And you do? Well then you suck.

The train was very crowded when I got on. It became progressively more crowded, uncomfortably crowded, as it stumbled along. I think today was actually worse than Monday. We had three more stops, at each of which more and more people piled on, then another stop where some got on, some got off. And then “just for today,” we added another stop, in Woodside, which is about halfway between Jamaica, Queens, and Penn Station in Manhattan.

I shouldn’t complain about this stop, though, since a guy who was sitting down decided to disembark then and I got his seat. I did that thing where you hesitate briefly, to see if anybody else is going to take the seat, without directly offering it to anyone else. You know, for fear that they’ll actually take it. But nobody else made a move, and I was really the only one well positioned enough to take the seat. (When I say you could not turn around, I am not exaggerating.) So I got to sit down for the last 10-15 minutes of my morning commute.

I arrived at the office around the same time as I did on Monday, maybe only about a few minutes later. Let’s call it 7:30-ish.

And then I worked and worked and worked.

I had a break for an hour, when I had to sit through a webinar about our new time sheet system. I am not exaggerating when I say it made me miss the train.

Of course, the evening train…now that was awful. Even more crowded, no seats at all, and oh, did I mention it snowed several inches tonight? I managed to get out of Manhattan ahead of the worst of it, meaning I was only on the train for maybe an hour and a half (standing up, barely able to move, pinned in from all sides by other passengers), rather than getting stuck on a train like my father did about an hour later. (He had a seat, though, so there is that.)

Because what we really needed right now on the east coast was a nor’easter and snow.

Election daze

I voted and I worked. In that order. That’s pretty much the highlight reel of my day.

Meanwhile, my sister and her husband are back home in Maryland.

Yep, that was pretty much my Tuesday. I’m making a concentrated effort to ignore the election results (and therefore Twitter) this evening.

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.