weather

Wet Wednesday

So today was kind of terrible.

All day yesterday, up until the point I went to bed, the news was predicting another winter storm full of snow and freezing rain, beginning sometime after midnight and continuing into the morning. I’m here to tell you, friends and neighbors, the news? They were not wrong.

But it seemed okay. It was a little wet and messy out this morning, but boots and an umbrella seemed to handle that. And moreover, the railroad said they were running on or close to schedule.

The railroad? Totally wrong.

My train arrived on time, more or less, but then we sat at the station for about twenty minutes before moving. And when we finally did move, it was incredibly slowly, thanks apparently to a downed train and that frequent favorite “equipment trouble” in Bellerose. We arrived in Manhattan almost an hour later than expected. But hey, it could have been worse: shortly after, while I was still in transit, the railroad shut down entirely, and if I’d been one train later, I probably wouldn’t have made it into the city at all.

I might have been better off, actually.

I arrived at Penn Station only to discover the subways simply weren’t running, thanks to a power outage (and possibly a fire in Grand Central). With the railroad down, it wasn’t like I had the option of turning back and going home. So I decided to walk to work.

It’s a pretty straightforward walk, since Manhattan is a grid of uptown and downtown, but it’s also a walk that’s easily a half hour long. On a good day. And today wasn’t really a good day.

All of last night’s snow and the snow left over from Monday had turned to huge piles of slush and ankle-deep puddles on every street. Luckily I was wearing boots, so I could splash through those puddles — the cuffs of my pants be damned — while keeping my socks and feet relatively dry. Given that it was still raining the entire way, and the streets were only barely negotiable, I made pretty good time. But I still didn’t get to the office until almost 9:30, over an hour later than I’m usually there.

And I was one of the early ones.

At least the rest of my day went by really quickly. In part because the office closed early at three o’clock.

I finished revising a development plan for a new project — the one I’m working on with the young woman I’ll be mentoring — and I had a couple of meetings. Then I put my boots back on, tucked my work laptop back into my bag, and I left for an early train home.

Which, actually, proved to be no trouble at all. They were still reporting delays on the subway, but I hit none, and I was home by about a quarter after four. I had to do some snow-blowing and shoveling when I got here, but the afternoon was significantly less terrible than the morning.

The evening has been positively uneventful, which is actually sort of nice.

I’ll have to see what the weather is like tomorrow. There’s no storm predicted — the next one will have to wait until the weekend — but all that slush and melt is going to freeze, and if mass transit imploded under the weight of today’s weather…well, there’s a reason I took my laptop home again, just in case.

Oh, not to worry, Heather, I didn’t encounter any of these on my travels. You know, yet.

Snowy Monday

Sometime in the middle of the night, it started snowing. The weather reports had warned it was going to happen, but I Was kind of hoping there would be less on the ground already by the time I woke up.

I worked from home today, which would have meant no venturing outside and no worries, but I had to pick up the dog from the kennel this morning, which meant shoveling and driving on messy and slippery roads. It wasn’t so bad — and I’m quite sure he’s happy to be back home — but I’m tired from the shoveling I might not otherwise have had to do.

And to think, there’s supposed to be another big winter storm headed our way later in the week. I suspect tomorrow, the snow will just be enough to make my commute difficult, not enough to keep me home.

The snow must go on

So today took a hard left turn into suck.

For Christmas, Heather very generously and unexpectedly bought a gift card for Telecharge, which I decided to put towards a Broadway show. Specifically Waiting for Godot, starring Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan, which is running between now and then and end of March and is supposed to be very good. I bought a ticket several weeks ago, and had decided upon tonight. I had my ticket in hand, was traveling light, and eager to see the play.

And then it snowed.

I knew the snow was coming since at least yesterday, but I thought it would start later than it did, and I hoped it wouldn’t be so bad. Then it just kept falling, and the wind picked up, and it got a little difficult and messy to walk outside our office, and then our announced that it was closing early, letting everyone go home if they wanted by 3:30. The MTA was recommending that people not stay in the city if they could help it; if you were traveling on the Long Island Railroad, you were encouraged to do so before the weather got worse and they started suspending service.

I didn’t much feel like getting stuck in Manhattan overnight, getting out of the play around…well, around now, actually, between 9 and 10 o’clock, only to discover that the trains home had stopped. Was I supposed to try and get an overpriced hotel room then? Find someplace open late at night to buy clothes so I’d at least have some clean underwear the next morning? I hated doing it, but I decided, better safe than sorry, and I headed home.

The commute wasn’t all that bad, hardly bad at all, actually. I’ve had better, but I’ve certainly had much worse. It’s still snowing, and they did suspend some service after 8 o’clock, reporting delays on the lines that are still running. But honestly, I don’t know if I made the right decision. I may never really know. It was a judgement call. I’m sorry it lost me the show — and much more the opportunity to make use of the thoughtful gift — but it seemed like the best bad decision to make at the time.

And I have actually seen Patrick Stewart on Broadway once before, so it’s not all bad. (I thought that show was kind of lousy, but I don’t think he or his co-star there were to blame.) There will be other shows and other opportunities and better decisions to be made.

It’s funny, any other day all of this wouldn’t have been so terrible. In fact, it would just be the fun story of how I got to leave work an hour early, which is pretty good, since my hands were starting to cramp up from typing up my conference notes all day. (Eight hours and ten sessions led to a lot of notes.)

I don’t know what the weather or commute will be like tomorrow. At my boss’ recommendation, we all took our computers home with us in case it’s too difficult to get in. Of course, I had to borrow a bag from her having left mine at home. I’d decided not to bring it with me today, because, see, I was going to the theater…

Oh well. Best laid plans and all that. It’s disappointing, but that’s okay.

Wednesday

It was incredibly foggy this morning, which surprised me a bit, and a little icy on the ground, which actually surprised me a bit more. I guess it warmed up just enough for yesterday’s rain, then cooled down just enough to slick the sidewalks in invisible ice.

It seemed to be gone this evening, though the fog had rolled back in. Not quite ghost pirate weather, but somewhere in the neighborhood. Frankly, a part of me just wishes winter would let itself be winter again. (This obviously is not the part of me that just a week ago though the earth was trying to kill him with cold.)

Meanwhile, January, or at least this week of it, has marked the return of Year of the Meeting at work. Busy times that aren’t likely to let up until the spring, or at least until I get a few of these books handed over to production.

But I finished the report I’ve been working on, the one that ate up several hours of my weekend, so that’s good.

I also finished reading Jonathan Carroll’s The Bones of the Moon, which was odd in all the sorts of ways you expect a Jonathan Carroll novel to be. I don’t know that I loved it, necessarily, but I found a lot in that I really liked, these (spoiler-free) passages included:

Sometimes dreams bite like fleas and leave little itchy bumps all over your skin.

We want to be loved for what we are, but also for what we want others to think we are.

Our actions and responsibilities are our own: what later returns to either haunt or applaud us is neither possible to predict nor always completely understandable.

How far was a dream allowed to trespass into real life, before it was caught and sent back to its proper place? Could it go haywire and take over everything you knew? Was it permitted to live wherever it wanted? Or had I reached a point where laws and distinctions, rules of the game, had disappeared? A point where everything in my mind, in my life, was up for grabs?

It’s hard convincing yourself that where you are at the moment is your home, an it’s not always where your heart is.

And that’s that.

Wednesday

It was a little warmer today, in that I didn’t necessarily feel like the Earth was actively trying to kill me with cold. Even the lows today were actually in the (low) double digits, and it could even get back up into the fifties by the weekend. (By which of course I mean lots of poodle skirts, malt shops, and Arthur Fonzarelli. Weather is weird.)

Anyway, it was otherwise a pretty ordinary day. I realized, midway through the afternoon when I reached up to scratch the back of my neck, that I’d been wearing my sweater inside-out all day. I was naturally nervous about reaching down to scratch my knee later on. I spent the rest of the day pulling together a report, though unfortunately only the one that really needs to get done, not the report that really really needs to get done. That second report is longer, and I’m still waiting on a couple of reviewers to disappoint me by failing to deliver their reviews despite promising to do so.

Oh, and I wrote this, which by several metrics is the most popular thing I’ve ever written on Twitter:

I was also going to wish “Elvish” a happy birthday, but I couldn’t figure out the right runes for “Love Me Tender.”