I am officially done with winter. Even though it’s still autumn. And I live in a much milder climate than I used.
I will have more substantive things to say later today, but it’s work/dentist/work/work/work day, following a day and a half in Alexandria and NorVA for meetings, meetings, and party (with even some work thrown in).
Janet and Chris and I had a late Chanukah latkes party on Monday to make up for Janet having missed a few days the week before. I may be able to squeeze in one more excuse to make latkes before the end of the year. That would be my cooking them three times, and eating someone else’s latkes once. Score.
Ah, poor Meryl.
Yesterday I shoveld 12 to 24″ of snow out of my driveway. Then, after the snowplow went by, I had to remove a 2′ high plug of hard snow that had been shovelled back into the foot of the driveway.
For today, another few inches and a freezing drizzle.
I understand. I did what Harry did. Now it’s raining and refreezing here in my metro NYC suburb. I guess that I’ll be salting the walk and driveway at 5am so that it will be clear for the carpool at 7-ish.
chsw
After the 17 snow and ice storms in Jan 94 in NJ, I had had it and made plans to move to AZ, and did so in Feb of 95. I have not had one second of regret. It gets cold where I am (24 tonight) but there’s no shoveling necessary. When it snows it melts the same day, at least on the roads. And it’s not very frequent at all. I love it here.
Maggie45, I worked in Manhattan that year. The ice storms nearly always seemed to hit when I had freelance editing at Soap Opera Weekly. During one particularly nasty ice storm, I walked a pregnant co-worker to the subway station that was about a block away. It took us half an hour of incredibly slow, careful walking, and I was furious with her for coming to work during an ice storm when she was five months pregnant. I made her swear she would never do that again.
I also made her swear she’d stand at the train station in Long Island and wait for her husband to come get her.
I had the most interesting weather when I worked for SPW. Remember that rainstorm that flooded out the subway, knocked down power lines on Route 3, and made the commute home nearly impossible? I worked that day. I had a feeling it was going to be bad when I woke up from my morning doze on the bus and saw a van up to its wheel wells in water in a parking lot on Route 17, then realized, hey, we’re on Route 17, not Route 3.
There’s a TV on every editor’s desk, and we never did get to watch the soaps that day. Al Roker was on with the weather around noon. (This was when he was on NBC New York, not NBC nationwide.)
I wound up going home in a hired limo with some of the editors. We had to go through Jersey City to get to Newark, where I directed the driver to Montclair, and then to the Parkway. We told him not to worry, that New Brunswick was only ten or fifteen minutes away. If we hadn’t, we didn’t think he would have taken the other editor home.
We have ice storms regularly in Richmond. And they just as regularly cut the power. One hit during Christmas weekend. I was driving here from NJ to visit Heidi. It took me four hours to get 90 miles once I finally got into Virginia. I had my Escort back then, and the heat sucked, and the ice just collected on my windshield wipers and had to be scraped off from time to time.
Wow. That one sucked. 24 hours without power, too, and no hot water. We cooked our food on the fender of the wood stove and on grills.
Oh, well. Weather happens. And then I get to gripe about it.
Yikes, Meryl, you are bringing back nightmare memories! My neck is tensing up just thinking about it. LOL. I missed 3 days of work that month due to weather. NEVER before had I stayed home due to weather. One day I couldn’t even get to my car which was in a row of garages at the apartment complex, but there was a drift that covered practically the whole garage door. I have a picture of my nephew, who was two at the time, dressed in a red snow suit, standing on the sidewalk in front of his house in South Orange, TOTALLY dwarfed by the piles of snow on either side of him. He has a look of sheer delight on his face. We adults were NOT so delighted after all that shovelling. Ahhh, memories. ;)
Are you also remembering the blizzard from ’93? That was the year that I went onto my friend’s roof and shoveled the snow off, because I was small enough to stand on the roof and not crash through. He was 6-3, 250 lbs. easy. I weighed less than half of that.
I also couldn’t believe how hard it was to walk through hip-high snow. Wow, NJ practically shut down for that one. When they finally got the roads clear, Tad and I (big guy friend) went to Willowbrook Mall just to get the hell out of the house. We had cabin fever, big-time. Apparently, all of Passaic and half of Essex county had the same idea–the mall was mobbed.