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Feets of snow, or so we're told. At the moment, the landscape here looks pretty Normal Late November:
Just over six inches atop the Lamppost-o-Gauge™, the plows have done street and driveway, but we may be a little slow on my One Job of getting the sidewalk cleared.
I have a note, though:
Dear Neighbors,
Ray can't come out and shovel the sidewalk this morning. His quads are still hanging from meat hooks in the freezer from the Incline-a-palooza workout Coach Stephanie put them through almost 48 hours ago.
Signed,
Epstein's Mother
Yeah. That was the beginning of my past 48 hours or so, back when the first flakes hadn't even fallen. My second chiro appointment was confirmed and reconfirmed for 4:40 Wednesday afternoon, and exercise right after a treatment is not recommended, so I headed in for 60 minutes of fun first thing Wednesday morning. Usually the soreness from a workout is gone within a day. Not yet, not this time. It was, as they say, a "good class."
The foot treatment went much better. Despite leaving in plenty of time for a 4:40 appointment at the other edge of Buffalo's everything-in-20-minute zone, 4 PM is early afternoon rush hour most days and even earlier and crazier when they're predicting an OMGSNOWPOCALYPSE. I got there barely on time, just in time to wait another 20 minutes because, doctor's office. The treatment went quickly and seemed to help (the feet, anyway- quads not included). I then drove home in the dark past two nasty accidents on the other side of the 90. First, one near the 290 split with at least four fire trucks, then a smaller one just onto the 290 that was still backing up traffic the other way probably back to Grand Island. And this without a stitch of snow around here, yet.
We had a quick dinner and I headed out again, this time to my first appearance at a live poetry reading on Elmwood in probably over three years.
----
Another friend usually hosts, but that night had a number of other arts-related events going, so our friend Brittany stepped up and took over the hosting duties, plus reading several of her own poems:
(The honeydrippers you see from the thorax down have little ghostie sheets over their heads that you can't see behind her poems, hence the BOO BEES joke.)
First up was Brin, or possibly Bryn, who I hadn't met before:
And finally, Lissa, who we have seen at these many times:
Oh, and in between? Me. When only four people are at one of these, yer all reading and yer all LIKING IT. Which, eventually, I did.
I thought Britt made me look pretty angelic in that. Somebody else saw that picture and thought I was doing a Mr. Spock hand salute. (Well, I always do that on the 190 passing the Vulcan Street exit while intoning Live Long and Prosper.) My five minutes were closer to stand-up than poetry, with a recitation of my Two Word Hall of Shame piece from Tuesday and an extended riff on the Bank Sex Line story from earlier Wednesday.
This gentleman, at least, appreciated the work. He was also the only one who remembered having a phone number starting with two letters (GR for GRant).
Then home again, home again, jiggety jog, for another day of Calm Before the Storm. Or possibly, the Crime.
----
I started out yesterday working from home while waiting for the forecasting and reality to develop further. All the night before, on electronic signs on the various 90s, were impending doom warnings:
This, before barely a flake. The best part, though, was the bit about it ending at 1 PM Sunday. For that, sports fans, was when the Bills were scheduled to kick off their weekly game at home against the Cleveland Browns, in the center of the usual county snowbelt that is Orchard Park. My reaction: I knew the NFL was powerful, but wow.
This will be important later.
I divided my Work at Home between actual productivity and fighting with a west coast website which my favorite record shop had contracted their mp3 download business to. Eleanor was looking for an old folk album from her Ute, and they had it for ten bucks. Three different browsers refused to download the tracks for security reasons, I eventually got all but two through the checkpoints, but the final two resisted. Other sites with "free" options were either too skeevy or circled back to the same stupid "legal but stupid" server, so I put in a support ticket with them and maybe they'll show up someday. Meanwhile, not a single flake had fallen, though schools and events and public buildings were already announcing closings. But I think the cats knew what's coming, because they began acting more squirrelly than usual.
About this time yesterday: I’m at my desk, fighting with three different browsers over the download, when Bronzini appears, comes behind my computer and hauls off one of the toys I keep on my desk. I let it go, but about a minute later, the desk starts shaking. The little shit has returned for more. His paw is reaching up from behind the back edge of the desk like a hand reaching out of a grave, and he grabs my Funko Pop Jim Henson and tries to haul HIM off.
Don't mess with my Muppet merch, boy:P
I eventually made it into the office on the snow-free roads, left a little early to make a pre-storm Wegmans run, screwed up a phone conference with a court but eventually got through and recovered, and then got a weird email from another court that looks, by all accounts, to be evidence of a crime.
----
I'll get into the weeds of it in another post, but the short version: Bankruptcy Court has an unclaimed funds depository. It's similar to the ones that state governments run, and occasionally publicize (usually right before elections) with smiling State Comptrollers handing out oversized checks to happy finders of abandoned property. When you apply for such an amount in bankruptcy, the court sends everybody in the case an electronic notice and a copy of the application. This debtor was not my client; I represented a creditor. And the 2020 case was dismissed in 2021 and my client (only recently) got his property back.
From the debtor's widow.
And here he was, supposedly making application for "his" money over a year after he died.
Maybe that paw coming out from behind my desk was his.
Anyway, I've reported it to the appropriate authorities. It'll be interesting to see what they do to catch the guy. Maybe with one of these:
----
Made it home after that on clear highways- although a number of other idiots got into a 4-police-car accident just the other side of Sheridan Drive from us- and, fittingly enough, we started the final season of Dead to Me as the evening entertainment. Portends of doom got worse, though:
* The Bills moved that Sunday 1 p.m. game to the snow-free city of Detroit, where they moved a game the last time such a Sno-vember event hit. Then they play as the road team against the real Detroit team four days later as the early Thanksgiving game. Maybe they'll never come home.
* The county announced an all-out travel ban for all of Erie starting at 7 last night, before a flake had even fallen in our entire town. His tweet about it got the usual vitriol about "Mandate Mark" from all the complainers on Eight Buck Musk- most of whom are the same ones who will be the first to whine that Poloncarz doesn't plow the roads on time.
* And, of course, there will be memes. This old chestnut quickly surfaced, funny since I was just riffing on that album cover a few days ago:
My only two-word addition to it was retitling the album for the local color:
Abbott Road.
----
That area remains much more heavily hit than ours, though the Worse is promised to head this way and stay over like an annoying weekend guest through all of tonight and tomorrow. One of my besties lives in East Aurora and posted this report 'Round Midnight:
Spectrum weather forecaster just called East Aurora the “meat” of this storm burger. That’s lingo I can relate to as I possibly throw 4 feet of meat snow off the Mini this weekend.
Thundersnow. Meatstorms. This is the upside down. Someone play Kate Bush asap.
I replied during my 3 AM weather check with just three Bushy words, from a duo of hers just covered in another great streaming show:
Don’t Give Up.
Just over six inches atop the Lamppost-o-Gauge™, the plows have done street and driveway, but we may be a little slow on my One Job of getting the sidewalk cleared.
I have a note, though:
Dear Neighbors,
Ray can't come out and shovel the sidewalk this morning. His quads are still hanging from meat hooks in the freezer from the Incline-a-palooza workout Coach Stephanie put them through almost 48 hours ago.
Signed,
Epstein's Mother
Yeah. That was the beginning of my past 48 hours or so, back when the first flakes hadn't even fallen. My second chiro appointment was confirmed and reconfirmed for 4:40 Wednesday afternoon, and exercise right after a treatment is not recommended, so I headed in for 60 minutes of fun first thing Wednesday morning. Usually the soreness from a workout is gone within a day. Not yet, not this time. It was, as they say, a "good class."
The foot treatment went much better. Despite leaving in plenty of time for a 4:40 appointment at the other edge of Buffalo's everything-in-20-minute zone, 4 PM is early afternoon rush hour most days and even earlier and crazier when they're predicting an OMGSNOWPOCALYPSE. I got there barely on time, just in time to wait another 20 minutes because, doctor's office. The treatment went quickly and seemed to help (the feet, anyway- quads not included). I then drove home in the dark past two nasty accidents on the other side of the 90. First, one near the 290 split with at least four fire trucks, then a smaller one just onto the 290 that was still backing up traffic the other way probably back to Grand Island. And this without a stitch of snow around here, yet.
We had a quick dinner and I headed out again, this time to my first appearance at a live poetry reading on Elmwood in probably over three years.
----
Another friend usually hosts, but that night had a number of other arts-related events going, so our friend Brittany stepped up and took over the hosting duties, plus reading several of her own poems:
(The honeydrippers you see from the thorax down have little ghostie sheets over their heads that you can't see behind her poems, hence the BOO BEES joke.)
First up was Brin, or possibly Bryn, who I hadn't met before:
And finally, Lissa, who we have seen at these many times:
Oh, and in between? Me. When only four people are at one of these, yer all reading and yer all LIKING IT. Which, eventually, I did.
I thought Britt made me look pretty angelic in that. Somebody else saw that picture and thought I was doing a Mr. Spock hand salute. (Well, I always do that on the 190 passing the Vulcan Street exit while intoning Live Long and Prosper.) My five minutes were closer to stand-up than poetry, with a recitation of my Two Word Hall of Shame piece from Tuesday and an extended riff on the Bank Sex Line story from earlier Wednesday.
This gentleman, at least, appreciated the work. He was also the only one who remembered having a phone number starting with two letters (GR for GRant).
Then home again, home again, jiggety jog, for another day of Calm Before the Storm. Or possibly, the Crime.
----
I started out yesterday working from home while waiting for the forecasting and reality to develop further. All the night before, on electronic signs on the various 90s, were impending doom warnings:
This, before barely a flake. The best part, though, was the bit about it ending at 1 PM Sunday. For that, sports fans, was when the Bills were scheduled to kick off their weekly game at home against the Cleveland Browns, in the center of the usual county snowbelt that is Orchard Park. My reaction: I knew the NFL was powerful, but wow.
This will be important later.
I divided my Work at Home between actual productivity and fighting with a west coast website which my favorite record shop had contracted their mp3 download business to. Eleanor was looking for an old folk album from her Ute, and they had it for ten bucks. Three different browsers refused to download the tracks for security reasons, I eventually got all but two through the checkpoints, but the final two resisted. Other sites with "free" options were either too skeevy or circled back to the same stupid "legal but stupid" server, so I put in a support ticket with them and maybe they'll show up someday. Meanwhile, not a single flake had fallen, though schools and events and public buildings were already announcing closings. But I think the cats knew what's coming, because they began acting more squirrelly than usual.
About this time yesterday: I’m at my desk, fighting with three different browsers over the download, when Bronzini appears, comes behind my computer and hauls off one of the toys I keep on my desk. I let it go, but about a minute later, the desk starts shaking. The little shit has returned for more. His paw is reaching up from behind the back edge of the desk like a hand reaching out of a grave, and he grabs my Funko Pop Jim Henson and tries to haul HIM off.
Don't mess with my Muppet merch, boy:P
I eventually made it into the office on the snow-free roads, left a little early to make a pre-storm Wegmans run, screwed up a phone conference with a court but eventually got through and recovered, and then got a weird email from another court that looks, by all accounts, to be evidence of a crime.
----
I'll get into the weeds of it in another post, but the short version: Bankruptcy Court has an unclaimed funds depository. It's similar to the ones that state governments run, and occasionally publicize (usually right before elections) with smiling State Comptrollers handing out oversized checks to happy finders of abandoned property. When you apply for such an amount in bankruptcy, the court sends everybody in the case an electronic notice and a copy of the application. This debtor was not my client; I represented a creditor. And the 2020 case was dismissed in 2021 and my client (only recently) got his property back.
From the debtor's widow.
And here he was, supposedly making application for "his" money over a year after he died.
Maybe that paw coming out from behind my desk was his.
Anyway, I've reported it to the appropriate authorities. It'll be interesting to see what they do to catch the guy. Maybe with one of these:
----
Made it home after that on clear highways- although a number of other idiots got into a 4-police-car accident just the other side of Sheridan Drive from us- and, fittingly enough, we started the final season of Dead to Me as the evening entertainment. Portends of doom got worse, though:
* The Bills moved that Sunday 1 p.m. game to the snow-free city of Detroit, where they moved a game the last time such a Sno-vember event hit. Then they play as the road team against the real Detroit team four days later as the early Thanksgiving game. Maybe they'll never come home.
* The county announced an all-out travel ban for all of Erie starting at 7 last night, before a flake had even fallen in our entire town. His tweet about it got the usual vitriol about "Mandate Mark" from all the complainers on Eight Buck Musk- most of whom are the same ones who will be the first to whine that Poloncarz doesn't plow the roads on time.
* And, of course, there will be memes. This old chestnut quickly surfaced, funny since I was just riffing on that album cover a few days ago:
My only two-word addition to it was retitling the album for the local color:
Abbott Road.
----
That area remains much more heavily hit than ours, though the Worse is promised to head this way and stay over like an annoying weekend guest through all of tonight and tomorrow. One of my besties lives in East Aurora and posted this report 'Round Midnight:
Spectrum weather forecaster just called East Aurora the “meat” of this storm burger. That’s lingo I can relate to as I possibly throw 4 feet of meat snow off the Mini this weekend.
Thundersnow. Meatstorms. This is the upside down. Someone play Kate Bush asap.
I replied during my 3 AM weather check with just three Bushy words, from a duo of hers just covered in another great streaming show:
Don’t Give Up.