long island

Can’t trust that day

Sales meetings at work today, mostly for acquiring editors and the marketing team, but at least I got a free lunch out of it.

Of course, they’ll tell you there’s no such thing as a free lunch. And maybe I paid for it with my evening commute, which was pretty dreadful, thanks to the Long Island Railroad’s complete inability to deal with the weather. I’m still not entirely sure what happened — I’ve heard hail storm, I’ve heard lightening strike — and I’m still amazed that none of the bad weather made it to Manhattan.

Of course, I very nearly didn’t get out of Manhattan. I rushed to make a 4:54 train, only to discover it had been canceled, along with many other trains. I finally squeezed aboard the today-only 5:22 and made decent enough home, home a little over an hour later. Except that’s an hour of standing in very tight corner on a train that only proceeded to pick up new passengers as we went along. There was one woman, who seemed perfectly nice, but whose hair kept brushing into me. And there was the gentleman who suddenly decided to share with us his love of Creedence Clearwater Revival (or crappy headphones). Basically, we were packed like sardines for an hour…if sardines were packed standing up and fully conscious.

I was very happy to get off the train.

Oh, and I should note: I did not finish writing my short story over the weekend. It was due today, but I hit a brick wall around 10 o’clock last night, after which my brain just stopped working properly. I wasn’t entirely pleased with everything I’d written leading right up to that, and it felt like the story was going to need at least another full scene, one that was going to take me more than a couple of hours (even with a working brain) to write. I like the story enough that I want to put the effort into it, not rush it just to meet the deadline.

But, you say, isn’t that exactly what you’re going to be doing with the 3-Day Novel Competition? Well, yes, in a way. But there, that’s part of the experience, the mad rush to finish, to just keep writing. I’m almost certainly going to have plenty of terrible writing in whatever I manage to come up with over the course of those three days, lots of work that will need lots of editing, but I’ll have time for editing after. (Well, unless it’s so good that it wins the competition.) With this story, I only had that crazy rush to finish because I didn’t know about the deadline earlier.

This was good practice for that, and the 3-day competition is a good (if crazy) writing exercise, but not every story benefits by being written that way.

Tuesday various

Slushy, then sunny, Thursday

I could swear it was still snowing a little this morning, and slushy in the streets on the way to the train station. And the station platform itself was, of course, neither shoveled nor salted. (For all their incessant reminders to “mind the gap,” the Long Island Railroad doesn’t seem to care if you slip and crack your head open before the gap is even in your sight.) But then something happened during the day. I don’t know what they call it in your parts, but around here, I’m pretty sure we call it the sun.

So the snow — what little there was — all but melted, and the weather warmed up considerably. March has that whole “in like a lion, out like a lamb” business going on, but you don’t usually expect to see it over the course of a single day. I woke up this morning to winter, and came back home this evening in spring.

Which is nice, and I hope it continues. I’m taking off tomorrow, not for any particular reason, but just because I thought it might be nice take a long weekend around my birthday. I have a couple of things planned, but none of them much more stressful than sleeping late and maybe doing some reading. You know, real wild and crazy stuff.

Taking off on Wednesday is just weird.

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.

Friday? Wasn’t yesterday Friday?

Much less excitement today, although only because it didn’t snow again overnight. (More snow showers are predicted over the weekend.)

But, possibly worried that we might feel bad about that lack of snow, and perhaps thinking us already nostalgic for yesterday’s belated, half-assed job of clearing the station platform, the LIRR still hadn’t fully cleared my station. Everywhere one had to walk was cleared, but they’d quit without touching a whole length of track, which in the mornings is usually where I want to be. (I head uptown from Penn Station, so it’s better to be at the back of the train.)

But they finally finished clearing that by the time I got home. And the rest of the day was mostly just more of the same.

I’m glad the weekend’s here!