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Digging out

No work today. The public transportation system is completely shut down in my area. The residential streets in my neighborhood are mostly covered with packed snow and ice, though the main streets are clear.

I saw a small city truck with a plow driving along with the blade set so high that it only shoved aside a few loose chunks of snow which had fallen off passing cars. The truck was not big and powerful enough to effectively clear the street, but still. The object of plowing is to remove the snow, not to plane it smooth.

I walked to the little Giant this morning and found apples. The gaps in the produce section are not surprising: lots of cauliflower and Brussels sprouts, no bell peppers or mushrooms. I did find fresh jalapenos for my chili dinner. The egg section was completely empty except for egg substitute products. The dairy section was almost entirely clear of shredded cheese, but there was plenty of block cheese. I'll know when folks are getting desperate: they'll be shredding their own cheese for egg substitute omelettes.

My landlady and I moved the supercan into a better location; now we can take out our trash without plunging through the snow or wrestling with tree branches. I remembered where I last saw her bag of ice melt and dug it out from under the snow. I must remember to place it in a protected spot so I won't have to repeat the operation after the projected additional foot of snow arriving tomorrow and Wednesday.

Still low on Parmesan, I walked over to the cheese boutique and they were closed! (Just like my employer.) The ice cream store was open, the Mexican restaurant was open, the coffee shop was open … What's with the cheesemongers? They expect us to weather the storm without fancy cheese? Which we'll have to shred ourselves?

Tomorrow my employer is closed again, but there will be limited service on my bus line. I may go visit my car in the office parking deck. It won't be coming home any time soon. I would have to shift a car-sized volume of snow to have somewhere to park and there's nowhere to put the snow.

I wish I were snowbound down in Richmond, where I would be snowbound with Oz, the cats, and much less snow.

Buried

"Two feet of snow" is an abstract concept until you try to move it around.

I did a little shoveling today with my landlady's ergonomic snow shovel, which is harder on every joint in your body than a plain old-fashioned snow shovel. I suppose it might be good for pushing small quantities of snow around, but the curved handle makes it murder for heaving mass quantities of snow out of your way.

I nibbled a couple paths clear: my entrance to the gate, my landlady's front steps (drifted thigh deep) to the sidewalk which had already been shoveled out by some saintly soul. I then took a break and waited for the guy with the shovel whom my landlady had engaged to do the shoveling.

A few hours a later, a kid with a shovel accompanied by his mom, also with a shovel, turned up and shoveled the path from my gate to the sidewalk. Like me, my landlady hadn't expected all that much snow and had selected her shoveler accordingly. So often in Virginia the winter storms never live up to the hype and we adjust our expectations accordingly. Our adjusted estimates of accumulation are usually pretty close. Not this time.

In the afternoon I used my Swiffer to knock the snow off Southern Lady's station wagon. Her car is now embedded in a waist-deep snowbank. (Where could I put the snow except beside the car?) Better beside it than on it. At least it's clean snow and will provide some protection if a salt truck comes through.

Tomorrow, seeing as how the Office is closed, I can do more shoveling. Maybe a little path back to the supercan so that we can take out the trash. (If I'd been thinking, I would have moved the supercan closer to the front of the house so we wouldn't have as far to shovel.) Maybe I'll start shoveling out a space for my car, which is still tucked away in the parking deck at work. I've got plenty of time to work on that. I can't even get to my car until the buses start running again.

Yes, my clever plan to avoid the vacuum cleaner continues apace. Shoveling is ever so much less work.

Snowbound

Today I saw a few neighbors digging out their vehicles, but most of them only got about halfway through before they gave up. A few people shoveled their walks while the snow was still falling. Futility: at least it's something to do.

Last night it didn't look like the storm would measure up to the hype.

By morning it was another story. And by afternoon it was looking pretty Snowpocalyptic.

My landlady's holly trees lost their tops and then some, but the junipers just took a bow.

Of course, I live in the basement, so I have a ground level view of the situation.

I hope the guy with the shovel shows up tomorrow. The snow is deeper than my boots are tall and while I'd like to get out, I don't think it would be worth the freezing of my knees. In the meantime I am keeping amused, but getting low on trashy novels and Parmesan cheese. A slog through the snow to the cheese boutique and the drugstore might be just the thing to make me appreciate the great indoors even more. A slog through the snow to the sidewalk might be more than sufficient.

Monkeypants

Well, we didn't get a whole snow day, but we got four hours early dismissal. That news prompted me to cancel this afternoon's hair appointment because it would have put me on the beltway in early Snowpocalypse rush hour.

I'm now back at the apartment, not doing chores and watching the snow fall. Wearing my flannel monkeypants because I'm certainly not going out. I'm doing laundry. What with the exodus of the rest of the house, I have the laundry machines to myself till Sunday. It's too bad I don't have more laundry to do. Maybe I should dirty up some stuff.

It's a good thing I left my car at work, because otherwise I'd be tempted to go out and buy Nutella now that I've been informed that it's World Nutella Day. (I should put Nutella on my list of real true snow emergency supplies.)

So far this Snowpocalypse has been desultory, to say the least. The forecast three to five inches by sundown was more like one or two inches. The weather report as of 6:00 had the snowfall estimate revised downward by a factor of four. That's the reliable weather report. The radio people are still freaking out and the National Weather Service all-caps warnings and "Special Weather Statements" (BLIZZARD WARNING! WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!11!!) are still up.

It's a few hours later now and it's looking a little more Snowpocalyptic outside. My reliable weather source has revised their accumulation estimates back up. Drat. I'm running out of ways to avoid running the vacuum and cleaning the bathroom.

Snowpocalypse!

Northern Virginia is in the path of the biggest winter storm ever. It is so virtually fearsome that the city of Alexandria announced that schools would be closed tomorrow. Closed even before the snow is due to fall! The teenagers at the physical therapy place all said, "Woot!" when that was announced on TV this afternoon. Or maybe they said, "Yeah!" or "Score!" I wasn't paying such close attention because I was listening for announcements that might relate to me.

My employer is on the "you can use vacation time to make up for missed hours without prior approval from your supervisor" schedule which means that I am going to work tomorrow. My clever plan is to leave my car in the parking deck and take the bus home so that I won't have to dig my car out from under the twenty inches of snow they are forecasting.

After I left the physical therapy place, I figured I'd swing by a supermarket. All I wanted was a half gallon of milk and a few apples. I've got plenty of food in the house, but I'm low on milk and out of apples. I'm low on Parmesan too.

The parking lot of the big Giant was filled with cars, both parked and circling like vultures. I swung up one row, down the next, and decided to try the little Giant closer to home. At the little Giant, same thing. I parked across the street in the empty parking lot for the dog run and baseball field. Looking in the front window of the market, I saw the lines ten or twelve deep, laughed, and walked back to my car. The lines are long, the shelves will be bare. Very Soviet Union and all, but I didn't feel like investing the time.

Back at home, my landlady came down to tell me that her employer would be putting her and her coworkers all up in hotels downtown so they wouldn't have to send out commando teams to collect staff. The dog is going to puppy camp for the weekend. She's arranged to have someone shovel out the front walk and the walk back to my entrance (which I hadn't even thought about). Her housemate left today to spend a week in New Orleans. The real Southern lady has excellent timing. (I will be sure to knock the snow off her car, thereby returning the favor she did me after the last snowpocalypse.)

We exchanged supermarket stories and she offered to let me raid her housemate's milk carton.

I told Oz about the coming snowpocalypse and we discussed which of the four horsemen comes for a snowpocalypse. He said Famine and that's why everyone runs to the store. I think it's Santa Claus picking up a little extra work after the holidays.

I still wanted to get some apples, so later I went for the full pre-snowpocalypse experience by making a fruitless (literally) trip to the organic market. Sure enough, the parking lot had a couple orders of magnitude more cars than usual and I saw people loading a week's worth of groceries into their SUVs. Under normal weather conditions people rarely get more than a couple bags of groceries at the organic market.

Inside, the produce section was bare except for ginger (quite a lot of ginger, actually) and a few other things. They did have citrus fruit (I'm mildly allergic), coconuts (hard to eat out of hand at the office), and red delicious apples (why bother?). The milk section, also bare. Not even buttermilk, which I figured I'd get a quart and do some baking this weekend, but that was not to be.

I found this really entertaining, but some people did not.

One woman was pacing around the frozen case, saying, "I'm really stressed. There's nothing left but fake shit."

"That stuff's okay." Her husband pointed to the shelves of soymilk and kefir.

"So it's organic fake shit. I don't want fake shit!"

Tomorrow I plan to walk over to the Whole Foods near the office and check out their empty dairy section (and the frazzled shoppers freaking out over the prospect of soymilk).