weather

Sunday

It’s St. Patrick’s Day, and am I wrong that I’m glad it falls on a weekend this year so that I won’t have to push past throngs of green-clad drunks during my evening commute?

It’s been an unremarkable couple of days. It snowed all of yesterday, although you wouldn’t know it, except for strange bits that accumulated some odd places (like around my parents’ car’s license plate frame) and didn’t melt. Otherwise, there was not accumulation.

Last night, I watched two very different movies, Absentia, a very low-budget but fairly decent horror movie, and Wreck-It Ralph, which richly imagines an alternate world in which children still play in video arcades. (The last one I used to visit, Playland in State College, closed down several years ago.) Still, it was cute and sweet.

And today I wrote this, which is neither of those things:

They called her the Bird Woman of Alcatraz, which was kind of dumb, since she’d never even been to Alcatraz, not even as a tourist, and couldn’t have been as an inmate. But nicknames aren’t exactly the most logical of things, so after a while I guess that’s just who she was. It had stuck. That’s how everyone knew her when I first moved to town, at any rate.

She had been imprisoned several times, that much was true — starting with her extradition from France in 1978, after which she was held in federal custody for seven years, for what turned out to be her own kidnapping. That must have been embarrassing, and there’s a wealth of newspaper stories about the bungled case, the supposed evidence of the supposed crime, even in this little town’s underfunded library. If I’d been interested in any of that, I could have spent a weekend digging through microfiche, or combing the archives of court records online. I could have made a dozen phone calls, discovered if I still have any friends left at my old job. But I wasn’t interested in any of that. Those stories had been written already, that well had run dry, and time, as they say, was ticking. It was just dumb luck that I’d been exiled here, and I needed to act before anybody else caught wind of what had happened. A scoop like this could put me back on top, but only if I got to her first.

I could see the headline now: “Bird Woman Kills Superhero.” Or maybe, if something more grisly was needed to sell: “Mr. Impenetrable Eaten Alive.”

It was a work in progress. Obviously he hadn’t been eaten alive. I didn’t have a clue what a post-mortem would show; Impenetrable was reportedly from the planet Klaxos, had fallen to Earth when his home planet was destroyed in a fiery coup, and was reportedly the only one of his kind. (That point was still debatable.) We’d never even seen a blood sample, much less the bloody scene that the Bird Woman had left behind her. But everything I’d been told — a few well-placed dollars in the county sherrif’s pockets — said that Mr. Impenetrable had been eaten.

Was it cannibalism if he was an alien?

Yeah, sometimes forty minutes and three writing prompts can produce gold. And sometimes there’s this.

Work out

It snowed last night, and well into this afternoon, but any hopes that it might lead to a snow day, a day off from work, were dashed pretty quick upon waking up. But it’s okay. The trains were running relatively on time — I think the LIRR officially considers six minutes late or under “on time” — and it wasn’t too difficult getting to work. It wasn’t exactly go-back-to-sleep easy, but at least it was Friday.

I had a training session planned for the second half of the day, one on workload management, but it was canceled. The irony that I was able to use that as an opportunity to actually get some work done is not at all lost on me. The session’s been rescheduled for later this month, and I wonder if that means we’ll get another free lunch out of it. (I’m guessing they’d already paid for the food when they canceled.)

Anyway, that and a lot of work was my Friday.

The long weekend

Today is Presidents Day, and I spent most of it spring cleaning, if only to let myself pretend for a little while that it was spring. And not, you know, bitterly and painfully cold.

I took the dog for a walk at 6:30 this morning, and no amount of layers was keeping that windchill away. I looked at the weather report as soon as I came back in, and I seem to remember it saying 17°F (“feels like” -1°F), but I could have been delirious from the cold. (I also remember dreaming an extensive rendition of some children’s barnyard song in the style of Billy Joel, though I can’t remember the song, and the more I think on it, the less I think it would be amusing if I could.)

I did some grocery shopping, some cleaning, and some more watching of Rubicon. I’m three episodes to the end now, and while I know the show was cancelled somewhat unceremoniously, I’m hoping the rumors that it reached some kind of conclusion are true.

I go back to work tomorrow, although thankfully not back to the office until Wednesday. By then, it’s supposed to be a little warmer — back up to the balmy 40° it was on Friday, perhaps? — and I won’t have to worry about dying from exposure just to take the dog out to pee.

The weekend

Yesterday, I gave blood at the local library. Or, rather, in the bloodmobile parked outside the library. This was my first time donating inside one these things, and while I don’t have any pictures, it was similar to this one, only a little smaller and a little more cramped, especially with everyone wearing winter coats and all.

Afterward, I cam home and re-watched Almost Famous. It’s altogether I napped during a small chunk of it. That’s pretty much the highlights of my Saturday.

Today, my writing group was cancelled, thanks to car troubles — not mine — so I went and had what turned out to be a really great sushi lunch. I’m new to this idea that raw fish can actually taste good — although I usually do still stick to the rolls — but today’s tasted very good indeed.

Then I came home, did a little housecleaning, and shredded some old documents while I watched episodes of Rubicon. I liked it for the brief moment it was on TV back in 2010, then bought the season, then just let it sit there. But today I’ve watched a third of it, and I’m still liking it, so I’m not regretting the purchase. I can see why it didn’t click with viewers, and nowadays it would probably fare even worse on AMC. (I like The Walking Dead, except when I don’t, but it’s hard not to argue that it’s distracted AMC from the path it seemed to be on before this. Even its other powerhouses, Mad Men and Breaking Bad seem a little like legacy shows that don’t quite fit the new model.)

Anyway, I like Rubicon, even if it is, by design, slow. But I figured, political thrillers don’t necessarily age well. (Even if I remember being pleasantly surprised by The Parallax View a few years ago, and that was definitely one of this show’s models. And some forty years old.) Time to give it a shot.

That, plus an incredible amount of freezing cold wind, was my Sunday.

Nemo in snowy slumberland

It has definitely been a weird week.

That picture up above is before the worst of last night’s snow, in the early evening when, out with the dog, I was led to think, you know, maybe this historic world-crushing snowstorm isn’t going to be so bad after all.

Well, we didn’t lose power or heat, but between that photo and the time that I woke up — around 6, and let me just say, on a Saturday? — we gained maybe another foot and a half of snow. It was now fun shoveling and snow-blowing off the driveway this morning. I spent an hour and a half at it this morning, and I still only made a dent. A large-ish dent, granted, but both cars are still covered in snow. I’ll take a look at them again shortly, but I’m really hoping the afternoon sun will do some damage.

I did get to stay home from the office yesterday. We were open, and I spent the day working, but doing so from home. My boss had given us permission yesterday to leave early if we thought the weather and commute were going to be really bad. The Long Island Railroad was already talking about shutting itself down before the early evening. I took my laptop home with me just in case. And then when I woke up on Friday, it was already snowing and I made a judgment call. It was a call to my boss to see if my judgment was something I could follow up on. But I was genuinely worried about getting stuck in Manhattan, especially with a hungry dog at home waiting all by himself.

So I worked from home, and for most of the day actually felt a little silly about it. The snow turned to rain for most of the afternoon, and while nasty and wet, it wasn’t exactly snowmaggedon. Even by around 9 o’clock that evening, I was thinking, is that it? I made myself some scrambled eggs for dinner and settled into the mistake that was watching the 2012 version of Total Recall. You can read all my tweets about the movie here, which is probably more informative than trying to go through it all again, and certainly more entertaining than the movie itself. (Even if you don’t find my tweets entertaining at all, trust me, the movie is lousy.)

Today I’m really just hanging out, since I’m still kind of snow-bound. (Also tired. Did I mention I’ve been up since 6 am?) No idea what I’ll do today, though I promised myself I’d write for at least half an hour. Aside from morning pages, I’ve fallen out of the habit this week. It’s been a weird one, have I mentioned?

Maybe next week I’ll actually go into the office more than one day. That’d be weird.