February 17
[ Taken February 6, 2010 | snow | Dayton, OH ]
It has been an odd couple of weeks at work, what with the weather and the snow and the ice. It was almost like being back up in Ann Arbor.
However, at this point, I have to admit that the snow novelty here is south west Ohio is starting to wear a bit thin.
Last Monday it started to snow heavily in the evening and through the night.
I went to work as normal on Tuesday. Not a lot of other people showed up (even though the office stayed stubbornly open) and after a morning of alternately doing work and eyeing the steadily worsening conditions outside, I went home just after lunch to finish out the day. I couldn’t even get up my driveway. I had to stop in the street while I shoveled my way in.
Shortly after that, an email went out informing everyone that the office was closing due to the weather.
I took the rest of the day off to finish shoveling the driveway.
The next day, Wednesday, I checked my work email at about 6:30am, and noticed that there was a 2-hour delay for the office. (This basically means that you can assume that the work day starts at 10am rather then at 8am.) Since I didn’t think that the roads were too bad (and they aren’t once you get out of my neighborhood, which was still barely plowed) I figured that I would just disregard that little note, head to work as normal, get in a couple of solid hours of work in a nice quiet office, and then knock off a bit early.
That was the plan anyway.
My car does not have the best ground clearance. My car got stuck on the hump of packed ice and snow at the base of the driveway. I was hanging half-way into the street and the hump of ice and snow was wedged up under the engine block and preventing me from going either forward or backward.
At that point I wished that I had just decided to hang out and go in later. Though if I had done so, I might still have gotten hung up and John wouldn’t have been there to help dig me out.
It took about a half hour of shovel work, rocking the car side to side and back and forth, poking at the ice lump with a piece of wood, and just waiting for the warmth of the engine block (helped along a bit with the liberal application of a bottle of anti-freeze) to soften the ice lump so that I could move.
An hour after I got to the office another email came out that the office was in fact closed for the day, thanks for playing, and you can all go back home now.
At that point I really wished that I had just stayed home.
Thursday and Friday were more normal, though still very quiet at the office.
Over the weekend, John and I went up to Kalamazoo, MI, for the ValDay Tournament and to visit his folks. Contrary to expectations, it did not snow while we were there. Usually we can count on there being a good snowstorm for ValDay.
My office was closed Monday for the presidents day holiday, and a new storm system had rolled in, so I stayed home and watched the snow slowly pile up over the course of the day. I didn’t bother to shovel. I figured that there was no point in doing so until it stopped snowing. And it didn’t stop snowing all day.
The snowplow didn’t make it through the neighborhood until around 5, just after John got home from work. (We are not in a very high priority neighborhood as far as plowing goes, and when the plow did go through, it only plowed. We didn’t get any salt.)
John’s car only made it half-way up the driveway.
Tuesday morning my office was on a 2-hour delay (again), so John and I dug his car out, and then I finished shoveling the driveway (again) after he left.
After last week I wasn’t exactly hot to trot to get to the office despite the delay… I wanted to make sure that the delay didn’t turn into a closing first. (It didn’t, and I eventually went in.)
There comes a time, when you are chipping at the ice crust at the base of the driveway with a garden spade, and you start to think that a snowblower would be nice right about then, that you think that you have had about enough.
(Of course, one solution to the “had about enough” feeling when it comes to shoveling the driveway is to persuade someone else to do the shoveling.)
February 7
[ Taken February 6, 2010 | snow | Dayton, OH ]
The new site design is (obviously) up.
The heavy-lifting bits of the change are done, but I sill have some stuff that I want to do, and I still need to go through and make some style and code tweaks here and there, and I also have to re-vamp large swaths of the static content. In other words, the slow drift of change will continue over the next several weeks.
All in all not bad work for a semi-snowed-in weekend.
We were supposed to get a piece of the storm that slammed the mid-west to the mid-atlantic Friday and yesterday, but we did not get nearly as large a piece as I had hoped for. I think that we got maybe 4-5 inches all told. Quite a disappointment since my co-workers were speaking in hushed tones on Friday about the 12-16 inches that the weatherman said we were supposed to get.
It didn't really start to snow on Friday until after lunch, and then it was not so much snow as it was slush falling thickly out of the sky and smothering everything. I ended up leaving work a little after 3, since I decided that I didn't want to deal with the slush and the idiot drivers and Friday rush hour all at once. I was actually one of the last people to leave the office. My co-workers all started to take off as soon as the first flakes started to hit the ground.
I didn't think that it was that bad, but what do I know? After all, I grew up in the Cleveland snowbelt, and then lived in Ithaca and Ann Arbor, and tend to view everything short of an actual blizzard white-out as "not that bad". Speaking of actual blizzard white-outs, I would like to have one very much. That, or a good ice-storm.
Today is the Super Bowl, and John and I will celebrate it in the usual way - by making and eating nachos, drinking beer, and not watching the game at all. Not even for the commercials. Niether of us knows when it actually starts, and we only have the vaguest idea of who (The Saints and some other team) is playing in it. We are not sports fans.