Three days of snow
Nov. 28th, 2006 01:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
garranSaturday was my birthday party. The snow began to fall in the early afternoon, and continued for the rest of the day, gentle and picturesque, leaving a light and unworrisome coating on the landscape. I remarked to the people who came how much nicer it was than the torrential rainfall that met my party of last year.
Since so many fewer of my guests showed up, this time, it's possible that the invited parties disagreed with me on the relative merits of the weather, but enough people eventually came that we were able to have a grand time regardless. In addition to those of us who live here, there was Karen, David, Elise, Andrew, and Chona; Cody appeared shortly before midnight to spend an hour or two being our special guest star. My paranoid fantasies that nobody would bring anything to the potluck proved unfounded, trumped by the much more peculiar difficulty that everybody who brought something brought sushi; luckily, the household had prepared some mushroom gravy, several loaves of bread, some apple crisp and a large, sliced pineapple, so I, the one who doesn't like sushi, was not left in the proverbial cold. There was laughter and music and mysterious sleight of hand and a game of Hero Quest (very retro!), and everyone was introduced to my dog, and Elise gave me a new, mostly very laid-back mix, which I'm still learning my way around.
That was my birthday party, and that was awesome, and that was Saturday. I collapsed into my bed (which we finally put back together so that I wouldn't be sleeping in the downstairs room while it was being used for the party) around 2:30, and woke up the next morning sometime after noon to find that at no point yet had it stopped snowing. The view from my house was still very pretty, but rather prouder and intimidating than it had been the day before.
I have just been informed that 'robot' is from the Czech word for 'slave'. That's awesome enough that I'm going to pause my narrative to repeat it here. Okay.
Because of the snow, a number of things went wrong on Sunday. It's difficult to explain to people who live in colder places the amount of nervous awe and genuine disruption that this amount of snow generates around here; it probably sounds like I'm exaggerating, or else like I'm talking about more of the stuff than I actually am. When I was in Detroit in January of 2005, I saw snow that fell as fast as the wipers on J.'s car could push it away; this was nothing like that fierce. As much snow as fell here in the past two days fell there in the first few hours of that storm, and as near as I could tell, everyone just went about their business as usual. But the fact of snow has a fundamentally different quality in this part of the world; it's like an invasion from Fairy. People venture out into it superstitiously, and a little reluctantly, knowing only that the sensible mortal laws they are familiar with no longer apply.
I had an essay to write, for English class, which was due Monday and which I hadn't started yet. It was very short, so I wasn't worried (this entry might actually already be longer than the eventual finished product). I let my ideas for it slowly sort of percolate and spent a lot of the day lying around reading, or hanging out with Andrew, who had stayed the night, and whose mother had been expected to pick him up late morning but didn't show up until about six, having been foiled in her initial plans by the snow. Sometime around 8:30, I settled in to start properly writing.
Shortly after that, the power went out.
Three guesses which element was involved in that. I shouldn't have been taken by surprise by it -- the lights had been flickering, ominously and periodically, all day -- but I was. (I wasn't the only one; the dog ran around barking for several minutes. Thinking of that made me want to go pet my dog, but he's in bed.) I hadn't saved anything. Even if I had, though, it wouldn't have solved the immediate problem, that I needed to finish writing this paper before my English class the next morning; I had no idea whether I'd have power to write with before then. A task which had seemed trivial, with access to the tools designed for it, suddenly presented serious difficulty.
The solution I came to was to call my father and ask if I could come over to his house to write; he was amenable, and so, after about a half-hour of general and precitable power outage scurrying around on everybody's part, I had collected my overnight things and my school things for tomorrow, and set off. The streets were pretty deserted. The journey by bus, which would ordinarily take a little under thirty minutes, took something over an hour; the transit system, already sparse because it was Sunday, was pushed over into 'crippled' by the snow.
(It would have been, for all of this, very difficult to be very resentful of the snow as I was travelling through it; I have the usual mortal yearning for fairy. It did something peaceful and wondrous to the atmosphere it inhabited, even for someone as stressed as I was. I was fascinated by the things I had never really been enough around snow to observe, like the small darting shadows in the streetlamps that the snowflakes still falling cast on the snow already down.)
Nothing further went wrong, once I was there. I finished my essay about 1:30, fell asleep within a few hours after that, and slept somewhat fitfully, finally waking up at about a quarter to 9, prepared to shower, dress, print off my essay and set off for school. After I'd done only the first two of those things, I went to find my dad and discovered from him that -- can you guess? That's right: the universities cancelled their classes today, because of the snow. Laughing deliriously, I fell gratefully back into bed.
At that time, it was still snowing. When I got up again, around noon, it had stopped -- but only because the snow wasn't falling anymore, if you understand me. It remained easily cold enough that any snow that had fallen would have been unambiguously snow, and that still on the ground remains vital and mostly unslushy.
I'm glad that I underwent my misadventure and got the essay done, even though it turned out not to be necessary per se; it was good to have it done, and anyway I ought to start focussing on the two philosophy essays I have to write this week. Besides, I had several really nice conversations with my dad.
Not much extra happened today, relatively speaking. I came home, and the power was back. Word came that the tapwater was finally officially okay to drink again. I registered for my next term's classes; it turns out that I'd formed some mistaken impressions about the days and times of the Astronomy class when I did my previous musing, so my schedule ends up looking, slightly awkwardly, like this. (That English class is taught by Don Wood, another unknown quantity, but he had The Dispossessed on his curriculum, so I thought I'd take a chance.) Word came in that school is off for tomorrow, too, which is actually pretty distressing; I was really hoping we wouldn't miss any more of our Existentialism sessions, and I don't know what will happen with my Japanese monologue, which I was scheduled to recite for my teacher that day.
Now, it's now; still basically Monday. It's still not actively snowing, and everything is kind of holding its breath. I printed off my English essay, did some kanji homework, wrote this entry, and go back to waiting with the rest.
Since so many fewer of my guests showed up, this time, it's possible that the invited parties disagreed with me on the relative merits of the weather, but enough people eventually came that we were able to have a grand time regardless. In addition to those of us who live here, there was Karen, David, Elise, Andrew, and Chona; Cody appeared shortly before midnight to spend an hour or two being our special guest star. My paranoid fantasies that nobody would bring anything to the potluck proved unfounded, trumped by the much more peculiar difficulty that everybody who brought something brought sushi; luckily, the household had prepared some mushroom gravy, several loaves of bread, some apple crisp and a large, sliced pineapple, so I, the one who doesn't like sushi, was not left in the proverbial cold. There was laughter and music and mysterious sleight of hand and a game of Hero Quest (very retro!), and everyone was introduced to my dog, and Elise gave me a new, mostly very laid-back mix, which I'm still learning my way around.
That was my birthday party, and that was awesome, and that was Saturday. I collapsed into my bed (which we finally put back together so that I wouldn't be sleeping in the downstairs room while it was being used for the party) around 2:30, and woke up the next morning sometime after noon to find that at no point yet had it stopped snowing. The view from my house was still very pretty, but rather prouder and intimidating than it had been the day before.
I have just been informed that 'robot' is from the Czech word for 'slave'. That's awesome enough that I'm going to pause my narrative to repeat it here. Okay.
Because of the snow, a number of things went wrong on Sunday. It's difficult to explain to people who live in colder places the amount of nervous awe and genuine disruption that this amount of snow generates around here; it probably sounds like I'm exaggerating, or else like I'm talking about more of the stuff than I actually am. When I was in Detroit in January of 2005, I saw snow that fell as fast as the wipers on J.'s car could push it away; this was nothing like that fierce. As much snow as fell here in the past two days fell there in the first few hours of that storm, and as near as I could tell, everyone just went about their business as usual. But the fact of snow has a fundamentally different quality in this part of the world; it's like an invasion from Fairy. People venture out into it superstitiously, and a little reluctantly, knowing only that the sensible mortal laws they are familiar with no longer apply.
I had an essay to write, for English class, which was due Monday and which I hadn't started yet. It was very short, so I wasn't worried (this entry might actually already be longer than the eventual finished product). I let my ideas for it slowly sort of percolate and spent a lot of the day lying around reading, or hanging out with Andrew, who had stayed the night, and whose mother had been expected to pick him up late morning but didn't show up until about six, having been foiled in her initial plans by the snow. Sometime around 8:30, I settled in to start properly writing.
Shortly after that, the power went out.
Three guesses which element was involved in that. I shouldn't have been taken by surprise by it -- the lights had been flickering, ominously and periodically, all day -- but I was. (I wasn't the only one; the dog ran around barking for several minutes. Thinking of that made me want to go pet my dog, but he's in bed.) I hadn't saved anything. Even if I had, though, it wouldn't have solved the immediate problem, that I needed to finish writing this paper before my English class the next morning; I had no idea whether I'd have power to write with before then. A task which had seemed trivial, with access to the tools designed for it, suddenly presented serious difficulty.
The solution I came to was to call my father and ask if I could come over to his house to write; he was amenable, and so, after about a half-hour of general and precitable power outage scurrying around on everybody's part, I had collected my overnight things and my school things for tomorrow, and set off. The streets were pretty deserted. The journey by bus, which would ordinarily take a little under thirty minutes, took something over an hour; the transit system, already sparse because it was Sunday, was pushed over into 'crippled' by the snow.
(It would have been, for all of this, very difficult to be very resentful of the snow as I was travelling through it; I have the usual mortal yearning for fairy. It did something peaceful and wondrous to the atmosphere it inhabited, even for someone as stressed as I was. I was fascinated by the things I had never really been enough around snow to observe, like the small darting shadows in the streetlamps that the snowflakes still falling cast on the snow already down.)
Nothing further went wrong, once I was there. I finished my essay about 1:30, fell asleep within a few hours after that, and slept somewhat fitfully, finally waking up at about a quarter to 9, prepared to shower, dress, print off my essay and set off for school. After I'd done only the first two of those things, I went to find my dad and discovered from him that -- can you guess? That's right: the universities cancelled their classes today, because of the snow. Laughing deliriously, I fell gratefully back into bed.
At that time, it was still snowing. When I got up again, around noon, it had stopped -- but only because the snow wasn't falling anymore, if you understand me. It remained easily cold enough that any snow that had fallen would have been unambiguously snow, and that still on the ground remains vital and mostly unslushy.
I'm glad that I underwent my misadventure and got the essay done, even though it turned out not to be necessary per se; it was good to have it done, and anyway I ought to start focussing on the two philosophy essays I have to write this week. Besides, I had several really nice conversations with my dad.
Not much extra happened today, relatively speaking. I came home, and the power was back. Word came that the tapwater was finally officially okay to drink again. I registered for my next term's classes; it turns out that I'd formed some mistaken impressions about the days and times of the Astronomy class when I did my previous musing, so my schedule ends up looking, slightly awkwardly, like this. (That English class is taught by Don Wood, another unknown quantity, but he had The Dispossessed on his curriculum, so I thought I'd take a chance.) Word came in that school is off for tomorrow, too, which is actually pretty distressing; I was really hoping we wouldn't miss any more of our Existentialism sessions, and I don't know what will happen with my Japanese monologue, which I was scheduled to recite for my teacher that day.
Now, it's now; still basically Monday. It's still not actively snowing, and everything is kind of holding its breath. I printed off my English essay, did some kanji homework, wrote this entry, and go back to waiting with the rest.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
.
Date: 2006-11-28 09:59 am (UTC)Gah! This is /so/ a sign that I was supposed to come out for your birthday again this year. >_>; Or rather, it would've been /so/ much fun to run around in the snow with you. (Also, being used to the snow in a city that was not would've made me feel slightly invincible, which is always a fun, if foolish, feeling)
Doesn't your laptop have a battery? Not that that gets your printer to print or anything, but still, how come the power outage immediately cost you your work? (My laptop, on the other hand, would've been troublesome, having lacked a working battery for a couple of years now)
no subject
Date: 2006-11-28 04:51 pm (UTC)J's comment makes me hope profoundly that it'll snow some more when you visit next month. :D Play!