Broken Records.
Feb. 28th, 2014 06:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogThirty days hath September yadda yadda, February, which has 28 alone....
I blogged here on each and every one of them. Until yesterday. That wasn't happening after the day it was.
It was a perfect storm of stress starting with, what else?, a perfect storm. Not a lot of snow, but enough to muck up the roads, and the bitter cold and biting wind made plowing ineffective and created whiteout conditions. I could not even get out of our subdivision in the direction I needed to, resorting to a roundabout entrance to the 90 that added a good half hour to the first usual half hour of the drive. From there it got somewhat better, but was still slow going.
Then, the point of it all. Points, rather. Five appointments and two in-person court filings in a five-hour window in five different places. By the midpoint of that range, the snow/cold/wind vortex had caught up with us to the east and I got bombed by it all over again.
I was so overprogrammed for the day, with the bad weather and failed technology at many turns, that I got more than a little grumpy. People were coming up to me in the office and offering chocolate as peace offerings. It certainly helped.... as did the knowledge that, somehow, I got done everything I needed to and got filed everything needing filing, as well.
Today was much less ambitious and much better, but I'm still pretty beat. The weekend and Eleanor's Second Surgery Day Monday (which, this time, I'm taking completely off from appointments) will help.
----
Somewhere in the middle of that hideous morning commute on this end, February brought with it a milestone. Or millstone, depending on your point of view: Buffalo finally passed the 100-inch mark for official seasonal snowfall, by no means close to a record, but far more than any recent winter has brought for its entirety, and a psychological barrier being broken as well as, for us, a minor financial one.
For our snowplow contract has a 10 percent kicker if the seasonal total goes about 100 inches. I've always hated this for the principle more than the actual damage; I liken it to the longtime Chinese Communist practice of penalizing the families of firing-squad executed criminals by sending them an invoice for the bullet.
The weird thing, though? Other than a day or two of genuine blizzard in early January, we haven't really been blasted by any one substantial accumulation of snow. It's just been relentless, ruthless, dogged- rarely a day going by with no accumulation, and most weeks featuring a couple inches here, another couple there, still several more the day after that. It adds up about as quickly as it gets old. Add in the usual accompaniment of near-Polar temps and winds, and the false hopes of near-weekly thaws lasting only a day or two, and March can't get here soon enough. No, make that May.
----
On the bright side, we're both home after both working today, we have a final half-hour of the BBC/PBS 1999 broadcast of David Copperfield to watch (Daniel Radcliffe making his pre-Potter debut in it as the younger version of Trott) and even more clear vision for Eleanor to look forward to after 7:40 Monday morning.
I blogged here on each and every one of them. Until yesterday. That wasn't happening after the day it was.
It was a perfect storm of stress starting with, what else?, a perfect storm. Not a lot of snow, but enough to muck up the roads, and the bitter cold and biting wind made plowing ineffective and created whiteout conditions. I could not even get out of our subdivision in the direction I needed to, resorting to a roundabout entrance to the 90 that added a good half hour to the first usual half hour of the drive. From there it got somewhat better, but was still slow going.
Then, the point of it all. Points, rather. Five appointments and two in-person court filings in a five-hour window in five different places. By the midpoint of that range, the snow/cold/wind vortex had caught up with us to the east and I got bombed by it all over again.
I was so overprogrammed for the day, with the bad weather and failed technology at many turns, that I got more than a little grumpy. People were coming up to me in the office and offering chocolate as peace offerings. It certainly helped.... as did the knowledge that, somehow, I got done everything I needed to and got filed everything needing filing, as well.
Today was much less ambitious and much better, but I'm still pretty beat. The weekend and Eleanor's Second Surgery Day Monday (which, this time, I'm taking completely off from appointments) will help.
----
Somewhere in the middle of that hideous morning commute on this end, February brought with it a milestone. Or millstone, depending on your point of view: Buffalo finally passed the 100-inch mark for official seasonal snowfall, by no means close to a record, but far more than any recent winter has brought for its entirety, and a psychological barrier being broken as well as, for us, a minor financial one.
For our snowplow contract has a 10 percent kicker if the seasonal total goes about 100 inches. I've always hated this for the principle more than the actual damage; I liken it to the longtime Chinese Communist practice of penalizing the families of firing-squad executed criminals by sending them an invoice for the bullet.
The weird thing, though? Other than a day or two of genuine blizzard in early January, we haven't really been blasted by any one substantial accumulation of snow. It's just been relentless, ruthless, dogged- rarely a day going by with no accumulation, and most weeks featuring a couple inches here, another couple there, still several more the day after that. It adds up about as quickly as it gets old. Add in the usual accompaniment of near-Polar temps and winds, and the false hopes of near-weekly thaws lasting only a day or two, and March can't get here soon enough. No, make that May.
----
On the bright side, we're both home after both working today, we have a final half-hour of the BBC/PBS 1999 broadcast of David Copperfield to watch (Daniel Radcliffe making his pre-Potter debut in it as the younger version of Trott) and even more clear vision for Eleanor to look forward to after 7:40 Monday morning.