| And so it snowed -- 02/06/01 | ||
| Well, I guess I tempted the fates with my last entry because it snowed yesterday. I had been vaguely aware from a weather forecast of a few days earlier that there might be a chance of rain and/or snow this week but I was somewhat surprised to hear the forecast on my way to work yesterday calling for snow ("heavy at times") starting sometime before noon, with significant accumulations inland but probably changing to sleet and/or freezing rain and/or rain before possibly turning back to snow overnight. This is quite typical weather around here... a few inches of wet slush along the coast and a foot or more of snow just twenty or thirty miles inland. I hung around work to see if Hamid had any problems setting up a classroom for a three day class (Tues, Wed, Thurs) he is teaching this week. He got there around noon, saying it had been snowing very heavily on the mainland, but was lighter once he got onto the islands. (Narragansett Bay contains a number of islands... to reach the largest island -- where Newport is -- you have to cross a large bridge to Jamestown -- the second larges island -- and then another large bridge to reach Newport.) We looked outside and it was now snowing very heavily in Newport as well. When I got back upstairs to my desk (around three o'clock) I was thinking about leaving early enough to miss the usual five p.m. traffic... when my manager stopped by my desk to suggest that I should leave early because he had just gotten a phone call from someone who had left early and had called to say the roads were in terrible shape. So I left a bit past 3:30 and did have an "interesting" drive home. I wouldn't call the roads terrible; it seemed to me that the highway dept. was doing a good job of keeping them as clear as they could... but when you get a mix of snow and sleet driving will be sloppy... and even though we have been through a lot of winter weather, some people never do seem to figure out how to drive in this stuff. (Hey, this is Rhode Island; too many drivers here still haven't even figured out the purpose of turn signals!) It was very pleasant to get home and discover that my kids had already cleared our driveway so all I had to do was drive up and park in the garage. (Thanks, kids!) Some schools were closed this morning and some were on a one hour delay... but our local school system (where Sean is in high school) had no delay... neither did the school district where Nancy teaches... I had made sure to bring my laptop home just in case the weather was bad today and I wanted to work from home. Since the storm had moved on overnight I thought I would go into the office, but I did already have my stuff home and Jennifer asked if I would be home in time to look over a term paper she had to turn in tonight (but, of course, did not yet have it finished last night) so I stayed home and worked here. (I looked at her paper around four p.m. and she left for campus around five.) I always find it somewhat strange to be able to connect to the world from home. I needed to do some more work on that mainframe in the United Kingdom, so here I was, using my laptop at my dining room table doing work on a system in Hursley, England. (I was in the dining room because I couldn't find the phone cord long enough to reach the kitchen phone jack from the den, could only find a twelve foot cord, otherwise I would have prefered being at the desk in the den. Why not use the jack in the den? Because that outlet was for the second phoneline we had for computer use but we cancelled that phone when we got cable internet access. Almost seven p.m., just Sean and me at home, everyone else is either in Providence or in Warwick... I know if I ask him what he would like for dinner, the answer would be pizza. I think I'll see if I can get this posted and maybe I'll get us a pizza.... or maybe a pizza and a falafell? | ||
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