February 18, 2003

So. Our total was 20 inches at 5:30PM yesterday, and it stopped snowing around 11:30PM, so that means it's probably somewhere aroung 24 or 25 inches. I'd go out and measure, but I've already been outside, hacking away at a three-foot berm of hard-packed, ice-flecked road-snow that Mister Plow graciously deposited at the end of our driveway. Which wouldn't have been so bad, had I not done the same thing yesterday afternoon. Then I flung the car against the high canyon walls of ice that bound my drive, until I was able to shoot out into the street at forty miles an hour, whip the car around in a perfect one-eighty, and speed away, spraying black slush into the faces of gawkers.

Actually, I stalled a bunch of times, got out, shovelled some more, stalled again, and then headed vaguely off in a direction I didn't want to go because I had spilled a big pile of blocky snow into the road in the direction I did want to go. This was all before coffee, and was the cause of much indignation.

The car needed to have a suspicious front-end rattle checked, which turned out to be (of course!) a pair of cracked and broken transaxles. As the prospect of a wheel folding up at highway speeds is less than joyous, the car will stay in the shop until tomorrow, which means still more Snow Days at home! Too bad we've already eaten the cat.

All the same, it's an unexpected but welcome "mishap." Money spent to stave off vehicular carnage is money well spent, and when your reasonably-priced, honest mechanic is a couple of blocks away, the inconvenience level hovers just above zero. The back yard is white and bright, there's food in the house (which, I suppose, we could have eaten before tucking into the cat, but we were panicking), and painting to be done.

Oh, that--yes, I was supposed to have it done last night, but around 5PM or so, when we read on the MTA's site that they would be running one--count it, one--train into New York this morning, making all local stops, we decided that today was a Snow Day. So, I finished the second primer coat, the first semi-gloss trim coat, and the first ceiling coat, then called it a day with my masculinity unimpaired.

The fact that we can even make such decisions without turning on the television is, to me, amazing and fabulous. Using the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's website, I have access to six different local radar displays (static and animated loop), and that's just the radar that covers my house. I also have access to hundreds of other local radars, plus four different color-enhanced national radars. I get to read the very same Hazardous Weather Outlook and Short Term Forecast reports that weather-folks do. In short, I have on my desktop weather services that, ten years ago, most local television weathermen had only recently given their hairpieces to obtain. It is a wonderful thing to look at a radar display, then glance out the window and say with with confidence and authority, "The trailing edge of the storm has just passed Middletown, and we should see the snowfall tapering off within the next hour or so." When the white flakes fade away on cue, I have become master of my micro-climate.

I now return to covering the walls of our abode with pigmented latex.