Re: Snow

Memo
From: Me
To: The weather

Please stop with the goddamned snow immediately. There's no place left to put it.

Thank you.

Daylight!

Just now I was trying to figure out what time tonight our latest wintry-mix-turning-to-snow storm is going to start and I discovered that I have made it to the darkest afternoons of the year. Sunset is supposed to occur at 4:23 for the rest of this week, and then on Sunday it will be at 4:24. Woohoo! It will continue to be dark later in the mornings, but I don't care so much about that because it's always light out by the time I walk to work.

And while I'm on a related subject - the high temperatures here haven't been above 30 degrees for more than one or two days since Thanksgiving. In fact one morning when I left for work it was supposedly -5! Since I was expecting to freeze my ass off and couldn't find my face mask anywhere I decided to compensate by wearing a hoodie under my jacket with its fleece liner. Then I wore a hat, my hoodie hood, and my jacket hood. I should mention that this was also the day after I got myself boots because of the incessant snow, so my feet were not losing as much heat as I was used to either. Needless to say I stayed toasty. In fact I felt slightly sick upon reaching work because I had overheated and dehydrated from sweating. So now I'm almost looking forward to February because I want to see how cold it has to get before the above layering scheme fails to prevent me from freezing. My guess is that I'll be fine down to the -20s as long as I can insulate myself from the wind.

In which the protagonist realizes she hasn't been to the gym in six months

We got around four inches of very heavy, icy snow this weekend. Of course, in some places (like my driveway) it was considerably deeper. Also, in some places (like my driveway) it fell on top of six inch piles of leaves (which our property management company was supposed to deal with... but didn't). If you've never tried shoveling snow that's fallen onto a pile of leaves, you have no idea how much fun your missing. The snow gets in between the leaves which become wet and stick together and then getting a shovel to go through the whole mess is practically impossible. I think it took me slightly more than an hour to shovel out most of the snow/ice/leaf crap from the side of one of cars in the driveway (an area about four feet long and two feet wide). It was also fun because the neighbors driveway is immediately next to ours, and the house is on the other side so there's no good place to put the snow without carrying it all the way around to the front of the house. Gah. So now my back and shoulders are really angry.

In which the protagonist enjoys Thanksgiving (again)

Today, one of my friends returned from New York and, like last time, brought me bagels. So while I'm incredibly jealous that he's been back to the city twice since I left it, I did get a good bagel for late breakfast after picking him up from the airport and another for late lunch when I got hungry again mid-afternoon.

Then, one of my roomies made another turkey and more stuffing (or technically, dressing) and another pie because we were beginning to run out of leftovers from Thursday's festivities. Now I'm completely stuffed again, but I will have to get up to go to class tomorrow instead of hanging around all day recovering (at least this time there won't be a mildly irresponsible combination of wine and cider and hot-buttered rum with brandy to recover from in addition). And, while I'm on the subject of Thanksgiving food, certain readers may be interested to know that bourbon sweet potatoes were a hit with my roommates.

WI not too bad: In which the protagonist contemplates Thanksgiving

In spite of the facts that I have classes five days per week instead of four (or three last semester), was not given the Monday before Election Day or Election Day itself off, have to sit in several hours of meetings every week, and have been occasionally (i.e. twice) confronted with the horrifying thought that I could spend *one* weekend day not doing work but have nothing else to occupy myself... there's snow sticking to the ground before Thanksgiving. So I'm forced to conclude that Wisconsin cannot be Hell; it's too cold.

Anyway, I get tomorrow and Friday off for Thanksgiving and some grad students are coming over for food/drinks/board games tomorrow. So things really *aren't* that bad. But about the weather - if you're in the NY area and are thankful for nothing else (bagels, pizza, hangover brunch, a reasonable population density, etc.) the forecast high temperatures there are currently 30 degrees higher than here so you can go outside without gloves and not get frostbite. :-)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Oh man...

Why do I have to miss everything exciting? While I've been stuck under a rock in the Midwest, there have been a multitude of exciting Columbia mini-scandals. First the president of Iran was invited to speak, which led to most students skipping class to watch/protest. And more recently several students have gone on a hunger strike. Why are they on a hunger strike, you ask? I haven't the foggiest notion - but apparently they've convinced the administration to change the major cultures requirement and to add more layers (or to expand existing layers?) of the ever-amusing Columbia bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, I've been busy with classes and work and more classes and more work. In fact, the funniest campus semi-protest I've seen was in response to a bunch of rabid evangelical Christians of some fundamentalist variety who spent several days standing out on Library Mall yelling (literally) about how we're all (everyone except these people, apparently) going to hell for tolerating homosexuals, among myriad offenses. So the following week, some kid stood around yelling: "Everyone sucks except me! I'm always right! I could be raising money for charity, or going to class, but I want everyone to know how awesome I am!"

Gah...

It sucks when you finish midterms on the morning of half-price margarita day, only to call off afternoon festivities because of vertigo. WTF? On the plus side, I don't feel like being far from my bed/couch again today, so I get a nice vacation day (as long as I don't move). I'm not going to write anymore in this post though, because my computer screen is giving me a headache.