work

I can’t believe it’s only Thursday.

Yesterday, I was on back on campus again, at the second of three schools for the semester. The weather was quite cold, but all of my meetings went well and it was a good day.

Then sometime in the middle of the night it started to snow.

Actually, before that, the third school I was planning to visit today preemptively cancelled all its morning classes and office hours, and it was already looking fairly likely that the afternoon classes and hours would follow suit. Most of my scheduled appointments were in the afternoon, but still, I didn’t much like my chances. The school’s an hour away, on what promised to be icy roads, and I went to bed last night pretty secure that come morning I’d have to e-mail all my appointments to cancel.

You know, for the second time. Oh yeah, this was the school I was originally planning to visit a couple of weeks ago when I got sick.

For a while after I woke up, it still seemed really uncertain what was going to happen. I knew I probably wasn’t driving out to the campus, but did that mean I’d have to go into the office? The trains were running, or at least the network news and MTA claimed they were, but it seemed like things were just getting worse. The snow really started coming down — I joked a little later on Twitter that the flakes were as big as birds. At least I think it was a joke — and even if it turned to rain, any commute seemed like a wet and sloppy mess waiting to happen.

So I decided to text my boss about working from home. And maybe five minutes after that, I got an e-mail saying that the office had closed because of the weather. So the whole thing was kind of moot.

I managed to re-schedule all of my appointments save one, which will just need to be moved from morning to afternoon, and I’m going to try again in another two weeks. Of course, after sickness and a foot more of snow, the universe may be trying to tell me something. (Then again, I thought that last year when I contacted over a hundred faculty at one school and got no appointments. And that place turned out to be my very successful Tuesday.) Hopefully the third time will be the charm, and the school (or I) won’t catch fire or something.

I didn’t do a whole lot today. More shoveling and snow-blowing than was probably wise, especially since there’s more snow predicted on the way. Actually, there’s a chance of snow and rain from now until well into next week, so I don’t think we’ve escaped this just yet. I read a little, did a little work — I mean, I did have my laptop up and running already — and that’s about it. I have no idea if tomorrow’s snow will be enough to close the office again, or even just to keep me home. It’s been a long enough week, and I’m tired enough, that it seems strangely unfair that today wasn’t Friday.

Basically, I’ll do what I did today: figure it out in the morning, I guess.

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.