way behind

A little illness, a bunch of work, some house guests, and other miscellaneous chores, and you'd think I was too busy to write in my blog. My prerogative, I guess.

It's raining. Again. And windy. Again. Payback for a significant decrease in snowfall this winter?

i had an excuse, part ii

I would have blogged last night, but my computer was otherwise occupied. And I had planned to write tonight about the events of the last day, but my evening got away from me. So instead, a mere acknowledgement of the fact that we had a storm, it knocked out power, and I'm still not to the point where I'm dedicating a specific amount of time and a real determination to write creatively. Good night.

still snowing

It's cold out here in the living room, and I don't want to turn the heat up. I also need to wake up early to (once again) brush snow off my car and shovel out around it. I know we've had it relatively easy this winter. But that doesn't mean I'm not going to complain when a foot of snow finally falls. Cranky in my old age.

So, off to bed to solve both those issues. Good night.

appreciative

The last two winters were hard. For '07-'08, the first year we were in New Hampshire, it was the second snowiest winter on record. In '08-'09, it wasn't much better with blizzards Every. Single. Weekend. This year, however, has been refreshingly less brutal. At least, in our little band of the region. Other New Englanders have been digging out as much as usual. And we have still had more than a few bitterly cold and/or windy days. But in the grand scheme of things, I'm finding myself regularly happy by things like not needing to wear boots for a couple weeks at a time. And so I thought I should offer up my gratitude to The Universe, Mother Nature, and the blogosphere.

By the way, this photo is one I actually took myself. LAST winter when we lived in The Shoebox. This was the sidewalk in front of the house after a blizzard. Don't miss it.

carried away

I nearly forgot to blog tonight, so busy was I reading a book and searching online for a lamp replacement for our projection TV. OK, so I hadn't planned on reading a book. I really wanted to hunker down on this brutally cold evening with an afghan and a few cats to watch a movie or two. But the burnt out bulb in the TV ended that pipe dream (although I did still have afghan and cats while reading).

We ignored the "replace lamp" warning for a couple weeks. The picture started getting a little darker and a little less clear. When it exploded last night, we could ignore it no longer. Ted searched around town today, and was stunned to find out that this bulb, uh, I mean lamp assembly costs about the same as a Toshiba 26" flat panel LCD TV with a built-it DVD player. But a mere couple feet can't replace the 10' behemoth that we call television. So, I shopped around online, found a more reasonably priced lamp assembly, and it will arrive early next week. Until then, we go without. Or we finally get around to setting up the little TV in the bedroom. I vote for [A] because I really like having a television-free bedroom.

Time for bed. Need to see if I can get the blast furnace to actually shut off for a little while. It's so windy and cold that it's been running all evening. Gmail's got it wrong again, by the way. It may be clear, but at 11:30pm at night, it's just not sunny.

filler

The settings on my Gmail account are configured to display a background reflecting current weather conditions in my area. I've always thought this was cute, if not wholly necessary, and it makes the interface a little less drab. Lately, though, it's been wrong a lot. Despite two nearly solid days of sunshine, blue skies, and precipitation-free weather, the Gmail page has shown driving rain, wind, and now, snow. I just looked out my window. No snow. I checked Weather.com. No forecast of snow for at least 24 hours. Is it showing snow to indicate that the temperature has dropped? Is it referencing another zip code for some mysterious reason? Who knows.

Nothing else to talk about. Good night.

feels like negative eight

and still, i won't turn on the heat

mmm... warm

swinging shingles

It's not snowing at the moment, though it has snowed a couple times earlier today. In fact, it's snowed (to some extent) pretty much every day in the past week. There was some "wintry mix" too, and one whole day of rain. We haven't had the monster storms like the ones in December. So no giant new snow banks or parking bans. Just perpetual, daily precipitation.

The Weather Channel advises us that, although there will be a little more snow overnight, the real story now is high winds and bitter cold. I hadn't really perceived it before peeking out the curtains about 20 minutes ago, when I discovered that the lawyer's sign across the street was nearly horizontal for the wind. It's really the only swayable item in view from our front window (no flags, no trees), but it does a fine job of indicating just how much the air is moving out there.

When the wind blows, our apartment gets very cold, very fast -- especially when we set the thermostat to 60°F at night (neither of us sleeps well if it's too warm). The building is old, and the brand new, double-paned, winterized windows only partially make up for what seems to be a complete lack of insulation in the walls. Bonus, the whole building shakes in the wind. Sometimes, it shakes even if it's not windy.

The forecast says that it will be below zero in the morning when Ted leaves for work. Not below freezing: that would be a balmy 31°F in comparison. Below 0°F. I'm tiring of winter tremendously. Oh, Phil, why do you curse us so?

enough, already

When we moved from the amazing-wonderful-incredible-beautiful-perfect-except-for-the-earthquakes Seattle to Connecticut, Ted's best friend laughed out loud (literally) for five minutes. Ted, who grew up in Arizona, said he'd never live in the Northeast. His rationalization became that we would be living in the "tropics" of New England -- so close to the Southwestern border of the Southwestern-most New England state that it was really more like a part of New York. And there was some truth to that concept. Yes, we got snow, but were never as hard-hit as the interior of Connecticut and certainly everything above it.

Then, we moved to New Hampshire.

We got here just as September began. It was beautiful. Warm and summery, open windows and breezes, sunshine. "Isn't it great being in New Hampshire," we thought? Fall was everything it should be: crisp, clean air with the aroma of wood-burning fires. Incredible foliage. "We're so lucky to live in New Hampshire," we mused. Then, November rolled around. There was a dusting of snow the first week. "Wow, that's freakish," we speculated. When I was growing up in this state, it was usually a safe bet that the first snow would fall sometime around Thanksgiving. So it was weird to get even very light snow so early.

But then there was another light snowfall. And another. And another. And, you guessed it, yet another. Five light snows in November and early December.

Then came the heavy stuff. Three full-on blizzards, two earning the dreaded "Nor'Easter" title. The kind of weather that convinces the TV news to run a perpetual scroll at the bottom of the screen, even during the commercials. The kind that closes down 600 schools state-wide, and makes a 4.9-mile commute take nearly an hour (those are not hypotheticals, by the way... both of those things happened during the first of two storms last week).

Saturday's storm made for mad plow-scrambling on Sunday, and a crazy accumulation of the white stuff overtaking every corner of the city. By Monday, what was visible of the road was passable, but the snowbanks has crept into the lanes and obliterated the sidewalks. Snow emergencies and parking bans were implemented, and by Monday night, dozens of plows, front-end loaders, and massive dump trucks were in full snow removal mode. I heard that the city of Manchester was trucking theirs to a facility in Bedford where it was dumped into a giant melter, and the resulting water was simply "poured" into the sewer system. I don't know where they're taking it here.

Our personal parking situation -- already a delicate balance of timing and choreography -- took on bizarre, haywire, and often laughable proportions over the course of four days. We weren't quite back to normal yesterday, when the unfortunate people who decided to pursue careers as meteorologists informed us that another storm watch was in effect.

For the fourth time in less than two weeks.

It started right about sunset last night, and has already left a couple inches of snow, topped with a layer of freezing rain, now being covered with more snow. They say we could end up with as much as additional 9" before Friday morning rolls around.

And it's not even technically winter yet.

My husband thinks he's been tricked into moving here. All those reassurances that winter is milder on the seacoast ring very empty to him when he's bundled up to the teeth in heavy coats and nerdy hats.

Maybe I should re-think Arizona after all.

Maybe I should just go to bed.

cars as murder weapons

Usually, I think I'm pretty accepting. At a very basic, golden rule level, if I want people to accept me as I am, then it is an absolute must that I accept people as they are. That said, people can be amazingly stupid.

I can pretty much brush off the jerkwad who nearly crashed into me by changing lanes without looking over his shoulder to see me in his blind spot. I slammed on my brakes and the horn at the same time, and everything in my car went flying forward. Thankfully, it was just my purse (and all its contents, individually), a couple of letters, some paperwork, and a shower curtain liner. Oh, and my not unsubstantial body being herked ahead while simultaneously being restrained by a insta-magically locking seat belt. An unpleasant experience, but no paint exchange.

That pales in comparison to the idiotic woman who left her dog in her car while she went shopping at a non-essential store (the kind of place where you only shop when you have spare money). It was 85 degrees Fahrenheit today with incredibly high humidity. She cracked the windows, but that doesn't make enough difference. The poor dog was panting, barking, and scratching at the door and window to get out.

I called 911.

Yes, I did.

I explained that it was an animal emergency but I didn't have the number for the SPCA. The man on the line was very understanding and patched me through to the local police. I explained to him, and he also did not chastise me for calling about a dog. In fact, he asked for the license plate number and wanted to know if an officer should call me to follow-up.

The woman came out of the store while I was on the phone with the police. She opened the car door, bent down and petted the dog, closed the car door again, and went back into the same store.

Is it just me? Or doesn't every person on the planet know that a hot car -- even one with its windows cracked -- can literally fry/bake/cook the brain of a dog (or any other living creature)? Who are these people who don't have any good sense whatsoever? And why are they allowed to have pets? I think all people should be required to take a test which includes questions about leaving animals in cars on hot days with the windows cracked, and if they get the answer wrong, they are not allowed to have any pets.

Rant over. I have work to do.

Stupid people. ::mumble, mumble::

rise up singing

A mere two days into the season, and a couple weeks after an uncomfortable and premature heat wave, Summer is here. Ahhhhhh.

On Tuesday, with the windows down while driving back roads (to avoid traffic jams), I realized how much I enjoy my hair blown in the breeze. It can get in my eyes if it wants, as long as it brushes my cheek and tickles my neck. If it were any longer, it would be an inconvenience: any shorter, and it wouldn't even be an experience. The fact that I must tend to it post-tousle is mildly disappointing, as if I were required to erase the inelegant delight from existence. Once home in the evening, the hair had its freedom and enjoyed even the artificial breeze of the fan. Summer exerted its first day power by illuminating the sky past 9:00pm.

On Wednesday, I had a lunch that tasted like summer -- baby spinach and radicchio salad with pine nuts, shaved parmesan, and balsamic vinaigrette. Mmmmmmm. A series of rainstorms scrubbed the air clean and made everything feel new. Worries about not having an umbrella came only after the notion of going outside to splash in the puddles. I thought about all the thunderstorms I've watched with my Mom on the front porch swing, and how our family found fun in cars, tents, or recreation halls when rain thumped its camping song on the metal, canvas, or wood roof overhead.

Today, the temperature was perfect, the sky was a rich blue, the trees were vibrant green, the sun was mighty, and the everso-slight breeze was just enough to animate it all. A bird outside my office window sang joyously for hours on end, never taking a break or flying away for even a moment. I escaped at noon (second day in a row!) to have lunch with my husband, a lovely thing to do made more special by the loveliness of the day.

As seasons go, I've always tended to favor Autumn with its crisp air and outburst of color. I've known so many people for whom Summer is the hands-down winner. But for me, Spring's invigorating, newborn bounty follows closely on the heels of Autumn, and the tabula rasa of Winter has always been appealing despite the cold. If I were to rank them, Summer would be dead last. An interesting notion considering the depth to which I am enjoying it this week.

Ask me again when the temperatures and humidity go triple digits, and I'll reiterate Summer's last place finish (despite central air conditioning).

Verlyn Klinkenborg had a piece in the New York Times this week, one which waxes rhapsodic far more eloquently than my ramblings above. It is here in its entirety (because I fear future access to the link will require payment to read).

The Reward of Good Weather

Weather is not primarily a moral affair. We do not deserve a long, slow patch of hot weather, like the one that sat on the city in early June, any more than we deserve the extraordinarily beautiful evenings that have come with these longest days of the year. Deserving has nothing to do with it. The weather comes, it goes, and sometimes it's occluded. The days of seeing the wrath of God in a prolonged drought or a heavy windstorm - believing that bad weather chastens our bad actions, in other words - are pretty much past. One sobering irony of global warming is the thought that it threatens to make weather moral again in a very different way.

But these are thoughts too puzzling for the fine weather of these last few evenings, when it is almost impossible not to feel that this has come to us by right - as our due after a run of sticky days and as the best of what the month of June has to offer anyway.

These are the nights for stoop sitting, not in long-suffering, as though we felt the curse of Cain on our shoulders, but like the young man and his dog I passed the other evening. Both sat quietly, watching the street. You could tell that what they were really doing was feeling the shape of the cool air around their bodies. It would have been a pleasure in itself, but it was all the more pleasurable for the memory of that hot spell.

On a long, horizontal evening, when the whole sky seems to have slipped westward, New York becomes a different city. The weary tension embedded in a heat wave has slipped away, and a kind of expansiveness comes over the neighborhoods again, as if people could suddenly see and hear each other again now that the stale air has been dispelled.

I took a taxi up Central Park West the other night, and at every block, a small colony of neighbors from the buildings nearby had settled under the trees and on the benches in the park. The temperature was in the mid-60's, and the sky in the west was breaking up in a way that was part Remington and part Turner. A pair of schoolgirls playfully slapped each other on a bench while the boy next to them stared at his cellphone. The light from the streetlamps drifted down upon them.

This is a city of stone and metal, but it's softened by the fact that we live in a world of probabilities, not certainties. When the hot weather squelches us, and New Jersey disappears in the brown fug, it's easy to become grateful for the simple fact that the earth revolves, setting up currents that will eventually blow this stuff away.

Of course, the long, cool nights will blow away too, much as we would like them to linger. And when they do, we will wake to a different city yet again.

A fond farewell this third late evening in a row. Sleep awaits. Zzzzzzzzz.

august in june

It's been hot and humid here for several days now. But do I worry? No! Why? The joy of central air conditioning.