travel

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!

Take this job and shovel it

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.

Flaking out

They were predicting snow for today, and the snow didn’t disappoint, falling in the most absurdly large flakes I’ve ever seen by mid-morning. If you had glanced out a window or wandered outside, you could have been forgiven for thinking they were filming a movie nearby and somebody had gone a little overboard with the fake snow. It fell fast and furious until the early afternoon, when it stopped, leaving behind nothing much more than a wet, and sometimes icy, heavy dusting. There’s more of it here on Long Island than in Manhattan, but even here this was more of a shrug than another blizzard.

The Long Island Railroad did seem to go overboard themselves in response, though, salting and shoveling and adding extra trains. To which I can only say: good. Their response to our last, heavier snowfall was pretty lousy. Not as bad as the City’s overall response, where some streets in Brooklyn and Queens apparently weren’t plowed at all until some four or five days later, but still bad enough that the railroad was essentially shut down for two days. I was off from work that entire week, so it didn’t effect me directly, but still, it’s nice to see them out and doing something today — even if the snow itself maybe didn’t merit as strong a response.

I’m very glad the weekend’s here.

Signal failure and snow

I arrived at the train station this morning only to discover that my train had been unceremoniously canceled, thanks apparently to signal failure in Farmingdale. Which of course happened on what was the coldest day of the year so far, the first time it has actually snowed — just flurries, but snow nonetheless — and it was much too cold to be standing out on the train platform. There’s a single shelter on the platform, but it’s small and not very effective at keeping out the cold, sometimes missing windows, and this morning it was already full.

Another train arrived some ten or fifteen minutes later — either the train that was scheduled to arrive then, or one the Long Island Railroad squeezed in just before it. Either way, that train was packed, ridiculously packed with people, and I only barely found room to squeeze on. At the next stop, it looked like lots of people weren’t so lucky. The only good thing about commutes like that is, if you happen to not yet have a ticket, you’re riding for free, since the aisles are too full of people for the ticket collector to move from one car to another.

Me, I have a monthly ticket, so it’s really neither here nor there.

The rest of the day was pretty dull by comparison. It promises to be something of a quiet week, with half of our team traveling to the office in England, but also something of a busy week, for those of us who are only in for this and next.

I think tomorrow, though, I need to wear a heavier coat, or maybe a sweater.

Monday it was

There’s no disguising the fact that today was a Monday.

I got to the train station this morning, running, I thought, a little late, only to discover everybody walking up the stairs to the platform on the other side of the tracks, thanks to an announcement of a track change. Of course, after we all got over there, it became quickly apparent — by the train going in the opposite direction on that track, and by our train in the distance on its usual track — that we had been misinformed. Sure enough, just before my morning train pulled into the station, they announced another track change, back to the original, and we all trudged back over. I felt particularly bad for a woman with a cane and her friend, but they did seem to be holding the train for everyone. Heck, we were already well into the “late” portion of what the Long Island Railroad considers “on time,” so why not?

The train got very crowded by the time we got to Queens, but that’s nothing especially new. And the train home was a lot less crowded.

Then again, I invariably fall asleep on the train home in the evening — I did this evening — and get very little reading done. Usually, I only get to read when I’m standing the whole way.

This evening, I’m going to try to finish We Have Always Lived in the Castle, while I wait for my iPad to update. I’m not certain about some of the so-called improvements that come with the new iOS 4.2 — the loss of the lock switch for a pretty needless mute button, or the fact that not everything works as magically as Apple insists — but I decided to bite the bullet for the chance to put apps in folders and actually multitask. I expect the upgrade to take several hours, if not days or weeks, judging from past experience with Apple products.

Hopefully it will be worth it.