"Puppet wrangler? There weren't any puppets in this movie!" – Crow T. Robot
Today was a pretty ordinary Thursday. The weather and the railroad were much more cooperative today, so I didn’t have a problem getting into the office. I spent the day mostly getting in touch with potential reviewers and mailing out chapters to the reviewers already on the hook. Nothing too taxing, too exciting, but a big part of what I do.
I woke up at six this morning, only to learn that, yes indeed, we’d had a freezing rain overnight, and it had played havoc with the morning commute. The Long Island Railroad was running weekend hours all morning — albeit at the regular, weekday morning peak fares — and at my station, weekend hours means no more than one train every hour. They were also predicting ten to fifteen-minute delays, which itself usually means twenty to thirty-minute delays. So, after much deliberating, I decided to send an e-mail around to my group at work and take a vacation day.
After that, the day was actually fine, especially after I discovered that Groundhog Day was available for streaming over Netflix. It just seemed like the right choice for today. I spent the rest of the day mostly reading, finishing a couple of graphic novels (The Alcoholic by Jonathan Ames and Dean Haspiel, and A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge by Josh Neufeld, both quite good). I also watched last week’s episode of Community, which I hadn’t seen yet, and the first episode of Quantum Leap, which I haven’t seen in years. It was really just a random, lay-about-the-house kind of day.
That said, I’m really kind of sick of snow at this point, particularly snow that ruins my morning commute. (Enough snow to close my office and keep me home without taking vacation? Well, we can talk.) I’m actually kind of looking forward to going back to work tomorrow. Taking off on Wednesday is just weird.
I went back to work today, as one is often wont to do on a Monday. It was a fairly typical day, capped by a trio of conference planning meetings, including one for a conference I’m actually attending in Boston, in March. Nothing really out of the ordinary.
I note with some amusement that today, according to my Forgotten English desk calendar, is the Feast Day of St. John Bosco, “a 19th-century Italian patron of editors.” The calendar page goes on to talk about so-called inkhorn terms, “pedantic expressions which ‘smell of the lamp.'”
The extreme inkhornism, “honorificabilitudinitatibus,” a monstrosity unleashed in Thomas Nashe’s Lenten Stuff (1599) meaning “worthiness of honor,” was once considered the longest English word. But in the late 1700s it was surpassed by the abomination, “floccinaucinihilipilification,” deeming something to be worthless.
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.
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.