So when they started talking about snow on the news, we paid just cursory attention to it. Snow in December? Yeah, we did that on Christmas a few years ago—it was gorgeous! But when we get snow it's usually in January and February. And they were only talking about a dusting. Or maybe one inch. Well, except for that one computer model that said we might have almost three inches. But that was just one model!

So I had a little late sleep this morning, and then had to hustle eating breakfast and walking the dog. I'd spent about three hours yesterday wrapping the out-of-town gifts and boxing them. They were ready to go to the post office. Now, when I'd gotten up it was raining. When I walked Tucker and left the house for the post office, it was snowing briskly, but just forming a light frosting on grass and bushes.

At the post office I heard that Cobb County had just canceled school for the day, and when I went past Campbell High I could see students already heading home. I was worried about James: he had a doctor's appointment at one and would have to drive all the way to Glenlake near Perimeter Mall. With schools being released, people being allowed to go home, and the snow continuing, traffic would be very bad. But by the time I got home, he'd already called Kaiser, and discovered all the afternoon appointments were labeled "reschedule." So he did, and teleworked the rest of the afternoon.

I took the opportunity to vacuum downstairs and sweep the hall, wash some old towels so we could take them to the pound, give Snowy fresh water, run out on the porch and fill the bird feeders (should have done it while it was dry yesterday!), and install the new all-in-one I bought on Black Friday. The snow ranged from large flakes to small, sometimes to sleet, and there was a spell of freezing rain, and then it went back to snow again. I put on my Christmas cassettes as James worked and later on baked some gingerbread in a nod to Sook Faulk's "fruitcake weather" (I despise fruitcake). I prefer gingerbread weather.

Since future dog walking was imminent, I went looking for my boots. Now I haven't seen them since the last time it snowed, which was a few years ago, but they have to be in the master bedroom closet somewhere. There's no other closet they can be in and they wouldn't be in the garage or any other bedroom. Darned if I can find them! So where the heck...

I ended up taking Tucker out at 5:30 wearing my usual dog-walking rubber-soled canvas shoes. My feet weren't that cold—I put my boot socks on this morning and they are toasty warm—but it was funny walking on the snow in them. It is just, just at freezing, so the snow is very wet and there is wet slush under the snow, but it's still cold and once the snow started sticking to the pavement (about three o'clock), "all was lost," so to speak. The "crump, crump, crump" of the creak of the snow was very loud in the silence made by the accumulation.  If I stopped for any appreciable time the soles of the shoes started to freeze to the ground! Tucker had done "all his good dogs" in the morning, but you should have seen him squatting; he did not want to touch that snow and was hunched in a funny-looking manner and didn't seem to care to be outside. At five he just pee'd, but seemed in much better spirits about the snow.

It was so pretty outside that I brought him back in and then ran outside with my phone to take some pictures. The white snow and the darkening bluish-grey sky was so very striking, and the net lights shining through the snow of the bush they were on made me smile.

We had tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches for supper. Believe it or not, this is the first time I've ever had that "classic" combination. We didn't eat tomato soup and I don't like it in general; it's just that the Trader Joe's soup we sampled was so good. James, though, didn't like the low sodium version we got instead. I have to admit it's a little sweeter than the full sodium version, not quite so savory, but I still enjoyed it. We had gingerbread for dessert, and later on watched A Very Merry Cricket and A Charlie Brown Christmas. The DVR never started to record Hawaii Five-0, so we missed the beginning, but were able to catch up. The satellite dish must be coated solid with snow. That's funny because we've had snow before, but never lost the signal this long.

But then we've never had this much snow. I don't remember this much snow ever. We ended up with five inches on the deck, even with having had some rain tamping down the snow. We're supposed to get more overnight, and it will be about 30℉ as a low.

Labels: dogs, food, snow, weather

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 11:11:00 PM

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So we slept the night away to the beating of rain on the roof, listening to it patter through unavoidable delay and turning over in bed. It was still gloomy and raining when we got up at 9:30, and colder than a witch's you-know-what when I took Tucker for his morning airing.

This morning we had breakfast at Trish's Place. The crowd was sparse, and we talked to Trish herself, an older lady who told us the restaurant is moving in February, a little closer to town, where she can run the place as she did here in Cosby, but get a salary. She'll also be doing catering for a Christian conference center. She sounds pleased with it. Good to know all this good food won't be going away. Anyway, I had a hugh bowl of oatmeal, toast, bacon, and baked apple with milk.

Since it was supposed to get colder as the day went on, we did some things with our eyes on the thermometer built into my car dashboard. To start out, we drove to Sevierville via our favorite back road so that we could go to the Tanger Outlet. I needed some things from the Hanes store, and also got a couple pair of fuzzy socks to wear when I telework (can't wear slippers; it makes sparks--I've killed at least one computer mouse and don't want to kill the computer proper). Checked at the Reebok store, but they didn't have classic black in my size; alas, will have to buy online. Also stopped at the Yankee Candle outlet and got more cafe au lait and christmas wreath tea candles. Picked up some cookies for dessert at the cookie store, and looked around the Disney Store.

Nipped over to Books-a-Million to have a hot cocoa and check out the magazines. Found a lovely "Crazy" (British cross-stitch magazine) with cute Christmas designs. I also found a new Doctor Who book, Inside the TARDIS: The Worlds of Doctor Who and Rudolph!, a very strange looking fantasy that starts out with Santa hacking into the Vatican's website. And, because James simply left me alone too long, I got the two Melody Carlson Christmas compilations that were on remainder.

Now we headed back to the cabin via "Glitter Gulch." Did find a parking space at The Incredible Christmas Place, but James stayed in the car, so I just did a half-hour of Christmas immersion. They had a live singer and there was the coolest Christmas tree with fiber optics making it turn into a rainbow. I wanted to see the new Department 56 Downtown Abbey building. It is huge; you would have to have a big table to put it on. It comes with a stone wall and gate with a Maggie Smith figure out front. There is also a gazebo with two figures.

I bought two car magnets and a gift for Nicki; they had the handsomest cashmere scarves and I bought a plaid one for James because his other wool scarf died an ignominous death in the dryer.

Stopped briefly at Dixie Darling, the cross-stitch store (too many beading kits!), and at Cracker Barrel to see the Christmas things, but only bought two adorable Pilgrim sparrows, and James bought me a light-up maple tree for my birthday which will go perfectly with the light-up turkey we bought there in 2009.

As we drove, the temps were still dropping; it was about 35 as we headed up the East Parkway and little ice pellets started appearing. We made one last stop, at a combo convenience store/deli to get a cigarette lighter so I could burn a candle tonight, and James found a lined hat.

By the time we pulled into the cabin five minutes later, the pellets were snowflakes.

James warmed up the soup while I took Tucker for his walk. It was that silent it gets before it snows, one where there's almost a faint ringing in the air, and we walked up the gravel road to the last cabin. I had barely registered that there was a road behind the cabins when in the failing light I saw a big canine shape, pricked ears, greyish, long-legged. It was standing staring at us, but, unlike a dog, it did not bark. In my dark blue hooded jacket, I wheeled Tucker around and booked it out of there just as animal began to lope. I suppose it could have been a dog, but it didn't lope like one, either.

Well, that was exciting.

Had hot chicken soup with oyster crackers for supper with a chocolate cookie dessert. We watched the news and the usual games (Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy) and an hour of TVLand before switching to tonight's Sleepy Hollow (looks like Tom Mison took the episode off) and finally Castle and Beckett "honeymooning" at a Western reinactment town. A bit lightweight, next week looks better.

Of course just as The Tonight Show was starting, Tucker needed to go out (yes, we were back in time to see Benedict Cumberbatch!). The car was covered with a light blanket of snow, and Tucker trotted through the white stuff preoccupied with the cabin lights in the distance. Or maybe he just still smells the coyote (wolf?) that we saw. Because of the snow, I didn't need a flashlight at all as I did last night: the snow on the ground glowed, as did the white-grey sky, and I could see the driveway and the trees and everything very clearly. We even went out to the gravel road and it was all distinct.

After I finished with Tucker, I just tossed my pash back on, went out, started the car. My dad used to do this with his cars on very cold nights, start them up again before bed. I cleared the glass on the car, but left a "blanket" on the hood to keep the engine a bit warmer. The windows are already frozen shut.

Well, we have food in the cabin; if we need to stay in tomorrow, so be it.

Labels: Doctor Who, dogs, events, food, shopping, snow, television, weather

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 11:57:00 PM

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Well, it's been an interesting three days. Not quite "interesting" in the "may you live in interesting times" sense, but it had its moments.

Over the weekend they started talking again about wintry weather coming our way. As the days progressed it went from "alert" to "watch" to "warning." By Monday night it was at "possible catastrophic event" phase. Atlanta's one of the places where three inches of snow is "catastrophic" only because it always has a nice layer of ice underneath it. As I've said before, Rhode Islanders are crazy, but not that crazy. I don't go out in ice because my car has not yet learned to ice skate, especially 26 miles. In any case, the state took that decision out of our hands; on Monday night they declared a State of Emergency and ordered anyone who didn't have to be out not to be out. By Monday afternoon, the supermarket shelves were stripped by human locusts. Friends kept sending photo posts to Facebook of empty bread shelves and empty milk cases at the supermarket. Eggs vanished, and meat was spirited away. If it were closer to Christmas all that would have been left would have been the fruitcake.

James' company, no fool they after being on short commons two weeks ago during "SnowJam," sent everyone home with a laptop. This James set up Monday night; he had a couple of setup bobbles, but those were normal. As things would have it, Tuesday was mostly harmless, with heavy skies. The fact that we were both teleworking, however (CDC was closed for the day, but teleworking was in full force), provided several problems, mostly to my connection. He has some sort of AT&T network program, essential for connecting to his work, that does not work and play well with others, which threw Citgo for a loop. A lot of times I was connected both on 4G to CDC webmail on James' tablet and through my desktop to keep up with everything. (Wednesday I actually couldn't connect at all, DSL or 4G.) Tuesday evening the freezing rain started; you could hear the hiss of it even through the door to the deck. Then it snowed for a while, long enough to put a white coat on everything.

Then it turned back into freezing rain.

Wednesday was a long, cold day. I'd try to get online every half hour, but I kept getting either a 403 or a 500 error from the web page. In between I should have washed the kitchen floor, but I felt just enough up to sweep it. I cut coupons. James worked steadily, and Snowy shrieked every time he spoke on the phone. I finally started to laugh and told him that no, he couldn't help Daddy work. It was either sleet or freezing rain all day.

Wednesday night it started to snow.

This morning I woke up to a brilliant white world. You remember that scene on Christmas morning in A Christmas Story, where Ralphie wakes and finds there's been snow in the night and every branch of every tree is white? That's what it looked like, and I should have taken a picture of it then, because even though it didn't get up above freezing until nearly noon, the snow started melting the minute the clouds parted. By late afternoon, even the driveway, which had been a sheet of ice covered with snow covered with ice yesterday, was completely clear, as was the street. I could actually go outside and refill all the bird feeders, which I couldn't do on Wednesday during a break in the precipitation because the post holding the three feeders was frozen solid in its socket and I couldn't turn it enough to get all three feeders near me to refill. I was able to do only one. I was rewarded by seeing more birds than I had in a long time, including an eastern towhee (that vanished when I tried to photograph it) and a yellow-rumped warbler who kept moving when I trained a lens on it.

Through all of this we were anxiously watching Willow. On Tuesday we figured This Is It. She was miserable. She wouldn't eat, she was wandering, and she looked all in. On Monday night we had started watching Westminster happily; on Tuesday I finally gave her a pain pill to make her fall asleep and I was crying as I was petting her and watching the sporting dogs prance into the arena. By Friday, when everything had cleared, I knew, we were going to have to make a decision, and James morosely agreed.

But as she's done before, she rallied. Since there is now a long list of things she won't eat, we threw desperation to the wind. James mixed some of the mild chili he was eating into some rice, which she now hates like poison, and some cheese with it, and she ate that. Not all at once, but she finished pretty much everything he gave her. At the rate she's eating, she's going to starve to death. If we give her something bad for her, she's still going to die because we won't put her through the pancreatitis treatment again, but at least she will have eaten something and enjoyed it. Even the condemned get a last meal!

Been watching Olympics tonight, really for the first time since opening ceremonies. Saw several people take terrible tumbles during the new sport, slopestyle, which is snowboarding on an obstacle course that looks more frightening than Dracula. Aieeeee!

Labels: birds, dogs, events, Olympics, pets, snow, weather, work

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 10:49:00 PM

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So Thursday I coughed and sniffled, and Friday I felt wiped out—and early Saturday morning the bug apparently migrated south. Which is how I found myself sick in the wee hours of the morning. It would have been a good reading opportunity, but 80 watts at 4 a.m. might as well have been laser beams burning out my eyeballs. Instead I watched "Captain Kirk v. the Giant Amoeba" (ooops, "The Immunity Syndrome") via TV.com on my Droid. (Let's hear it for technology!) I didn't get back to bed until 5:30, and then couldn't get to sleep because I was so cold, despite having been bundled in fuzzy bathrobe and slippers.

So when the alarm rang at 8:30, I'd had about three hours sleep. So I sent James off to Hair Day on his own, had oatmeal and yogurt and milk, and then crawled onto the futon and slept for 2 1/2 hours. He brought me back a roast beef sandwich and some fresh fruit (and a small slice of key lime cake), which in total left me feeling human enough to go with James to the hobby shop where I sat reading The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt as James and the guys model-neeped.

We also went to MicroCenter, where I got a little case for the Flip.

We had supper at Fresh2Order, which was just what my tummy ordered; I had the big bowl of creamy chicken vegetable soup, with lots of chicken chunks, some celery and onions, and many still-crunchy carrots. Then home to relax and get on chat, and, after that, a lovely night's sleep.

We did some stock up shopping today, from bath soap to bread to chicken legs for tomorrow's supper. Once that was put up, I did a quick scan through the newspaper ads and found two different places with TurboTax on sale (yes, it's that time of year again). So we went to Office Max, and brought Willow with us. There was a method in our madness—after I picked up the software (after bumping into the Butlers exiting the store as I was going in), we went to the new Petsmart a few doors down to get Willow a new collar and leash. Her purple leash was her original (almost 14 years old) and the collar was a few years younger. Surprise! Purple is not a popular dog-collar color any longer!

So we got her a spiffy new red collar, a matching 6-foot red leash, and a new red ID tag. The engraving on her five-year-old tag was mostly worn away due to it clanking against her rabies tag, and the new tags make provision for this: there is a clear plastic protector you now put over the info after you have it engraved.

Came home to read the paper and discovered we were just in time to watch the broadcast of Monday's Castle on WSB, since it had been pre-empted for snow coverage. The DVR picked it right up, thankfully. We also watched two episodes of This Old House that GPB is frantically catching up with after spending what seemed to be half of November and most of December doing fundraising. I looked at This Old House's website and we've still missed at least two episodes out of this sequence due to multiple repeats of Celtic Women, Celtic Thunder, Wayne Dyer, old music specials...and we still never saw the Masterpiece presentation of Framed with Trevor Eve (or if they showed it, they squirreled it away somewhere where I couldn't find it). Play the regular programming, guys! Yeesh!

Then we watched some figure skating, and had meatballs for supper.

The newspaper had an eight-page photo section about the snow and ice, and there were numerous articles and editorials in the paper about the ice, the problems with the streets, people who didn't know whether to go to work or not, business lost, etc. Look, I had it easy: I got to telework. James and others like him had to go to work, inching over ice-coated roads that were mostly never sanded and which remained ice-coated for days. Buses didn't run, the airport and the Greyhound station turned into dormitories, grocery stores didn't get deliveries, it was hard to get ambulances to the hospitals.

With all these big things going on, I was absolutely astonished by news reports about people who after two days were "going crazy," "getting cabin fever," etc. Say what? Granted, I had work to do, and when there wasn't work, Christmas decorations to take down and put away. I also wasn't home with kids who were out of school. But don't people have hobbies? Sewing? Cross stitch? Reading? Doing crafts? Board games? Heck, if I was home in a storm that long my mom would have put me to work. There was daily dusting and dust-mopping to do, making (or changing) the bed, clothes to iron, bureau drawers to clean out...she would have been doing the same thing, plus washing clothes and dishes, cleaning the bathroom, etc. I would have kept my mouth closed about being bored. I had books to read, stories to write, pictures to draw, paint by numbers, word search puzzles...if nothing else, there was the idiot box with Jeopardy and Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin, Lassie reruns, and "Talk Back" on WJAR (later on WHJJ) radio with Dick Pace and Jack Comley and Sherm Strickhauser. Mom might have done some sewing, or crocheted, knitted, or tatted. Heck, had I not had to work and divest last week, I could have read, cross stitched, worked on some crafts, and, by Wednesday, picked my way around the slick patches to take a walk. Can't imagine "cabin fever" unless I was confined to bed.

There were also people complaining about the roads, not because they were having difficulty getting to work or due to emergencies, but because they didn't have enough food in the house and couldn't get to the supermarket. Er? Didn't you stock up before the storm? Don't you have emergency food? I grew up in a house less than 900 square feet; we did have a basement, and one corner of it was used for extra groceries and paper products, and the kitchen closet was crammed with cereal, bread, rice, etc. When I first moved to Atlanta, I was living in a tiny studio apartment, but I had at least two weeks' worth of soups and other canned goods, pasta, spaghetti sauce, and a small freezer compartment packed full of meat. Yeah, I would have been out of milk after a while, which would have made me loopy, but I wouldn't have starved. There are all sorts of places to stash food even in tiny apartments: under the bed, behind chairs, in back corners of closets, etc. What if you get sick? What if you can't get out of the house for any reason? You should always have a small stash of food.

Labels: dogs, food, shopping, sickness, snow, television

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 6:32:00 PM

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It started raining last night, early in the evening, and then rapidly turned to a steady snow. Most of the time when we have snow, the flakes are either uniformly large or small, but last evening the flakes were mixed, tiny, medium, even the large blowsy ones all together, swirling with what must have been bits of sleet or ice, as it looked as if large bits of glitter were flashing and sparking. Under the porch lights everything sparkled. And it accumulated quite quickly; by the time we went to bed at midnight, there were at least four inches on the deck (measured onsite via ruler!).

Just before I took my shower I called the CDC Emergency line, and learned today was a...

...snow day!

James had also taken one look at the forecast and called in to work. I would like to say we spent a productive day, but we took that at its word: it was lazy and wonderful. We slept until ten, then James took Willow outside and she refused to go near the back gate. Instead she made random little paw-prints in the snow as if she were Billy in the "Family Circus," then just did her business out front. James disposed of the evidence. :-)

Last night when he realized we would be home today, he started some oatmeal in the slow cooker. The recipe called for steel-cut oats and cream, but we didn't have the latter and he couldn't find the former. He used rolled oats instead, and butter with our skim milk, and it was still soupy this morning, so he had to make another batch of oatmeal to make it thick enough. It was pretty good, nevertheless, and I had a nice bowlful, maybe even a little more, but he had put dried cherries in it. I really don't like fruit in my oatmeal; I prefer the real thing. Plain maple would have done me just fine.

Animal Planet seemed to be having an "Animal Cops" marathon, so we had that on most of the morning and early afternoon. I read Albert's Tale of Applebeck Orchard and was endlessly entertained by the birds at the feeders. Yesterday before it snowed I mounted the window feeder I bought before Christmas. I didn't expect any of the birds to find it with the feeders full, but the two titmice spotted the black oil sunflower seeds in it and were flitting back and forth all day plucking them one by one from the tray and then flying away. The feeder is almost all clear lucite and at one point the titmouse tried to get the seed from the bottom, frustrated by being able to see them, but not get them!

At one point there was a chipping sparrow on each perch of the squirrel-proof feeders, plus two more hopping on the ice-coated mounded-snowy railings, so we had fourteen out there, plus a pine warbler. We saw the yellow-rumped warbler at the suet, and also had the usual contingent of nuthatches, chickadees, the red-bellied woodpeckers, the male cardinal, and even a couple of bluebirds. Ground-foraging on the snowy grass we saw more of the same, at least one blue jay and what looked like a female Eastern towhee (brown on the head and wings, the very center of the chest and torso white, surrounded by red).

There was nothing on television except for snow coverage. There was one perpetual accident with 18-wheelers after the other, jackknifed in the middle of the road, against concrete abutments, at the edge of the road. Very few cars, but of the ones that were out, many of them were sliding backwards down hills, even big heavy SUVs, or skewing off sideways over curbs and into bushes.

About three o'clock I pulled on a hat, shoes, and another sweater and went out to refill the bird feeders. By the time I did the second one my hands were in massive pain; I had to chafe them continually to finish. I thought about replacing the suet, but I couldn't have managed it.

A little after four I went into the closet and rummaged until I found my boots. I tried putting these on last year and couldn't pull them on because of my damn instep. This time I tugged and grunted and actually did get them on. So I bundled up in my heavy hat, James' scarf, and my nice Rhode Island-weight winter coat and took Willow outside, grabbing the nice ski-pole-like walking stick Juanita bought for James back when he had his knee surgery.

This worked pretty well. As I discovered when I went out on the deck, the 4-plus inches of snow is now covered by an icy crust. Using the pole I didn't have any trouble getting to the gate, and James had covered the lock with heavy-duty foil, which worked nicely. But poor Willow, tramping behind me, had hard slogging. She was just heavy enough to break the crust on the snow, and she insisted on going to the very back on the lot to do her business. The expression on her face as she broke through and stepped, broke through and stepped, broke through again, was comical and sad at the same time.

I let her back in and then tried a short walk of my own, from our driveway to the edge of the cul-de-sac, a distance of two homes. The stick helped, but I still almost fell. The top of the driveway was literally a skating rink, and it was slick all the way up and back. Some of the young adults further down were sliding on the gradual slope of the street, and I saw two kids up on the corner taking pictures of the cars sliding their way down the main road.

James made some chicken for supper and we had that while watching the Nature special about Born Free and the impact it had on the world and people's concept of lions (and other predators). I remember seeing Born Free at the Majestic Theatre when it came out in 1966. I had the Bantam copy of the book which I carried to my fifth-grade classes for weeks and read so much that I eventually had to get a new copy of the book as an adult; the pages were falling out. I had all of Joy Adamson's sequels, and watched the television specials, including the now-famous Christian the Lion, and there is of course an "Elsa" on the library Christmas tree.

Labels: books, dogs, snow, television, weather, winter

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 5:36:00 PM

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That is all. :-D

Labels: snow, winter

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 10:25:00 AM

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This was 1:40, just as the snow had started—those poor woebegone goldfinches. About an hour later when snow was accumulated on the deck, I heard a bird scolding outside. Sure enough, it was one of the goldfinches, holed up under a deck chair.


Out in the snow, of course! Delayed shutters are great things. All the rest of these photos were taken about 3:15 p.m.


Willow is not a snow bunny; a true "Dixie chick," she spent half the entire five minutes I tried to take photos of her in the snow trying to get back inside. :-)


Facing south:


Facing north:


Back yard:

Labels: birds, dogs, snow, weather, winter

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 3:44:00 PM

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After a winter of temperatures that went up and down, including one freezing weekend and a couple of 67°F days, now that it is almost spring and the trees and flowers are blooming, we were flabbergasted to hear a forecast of snow for today.

Sure enough, after a night of rain, about eleven o'clock it began to snow.

James needed shoelaces, so we went to Walmart. Either everyone was still in church or folks saw the snow and didn't go out, because there were remarkably few people there. We both got new windshield wipers for our respective vehicles (I figure after almost five years, my car could use some new wipers...LOL). We were only in Wally World about a half hour, but by the time we got out the truck had nice little caps of snow and the rain-sodden parking lot was getting slushy with the new snow and approaching slippery.

James needed something at Lowes, so he dropped me off at Borders. Found the new Yankee and used my Borders Bucks—result: free Yankee. Yay! Then we went to Kroger to pick up James' prescriptions. Found paper towels on sale and also a new fleece throw of a good size for less than $4. It's pink, but so what? It will make a nice blanket for the futon.

Since we had nothing to do for the rest of the day and the snow was coming down steadily, we stopped at Publix to pick up some of the twofers.

Once we were home and had the groceries put up, of course I grabbed my camera and went outside to take pictures! I took several dozen and also some movies of the snow and of the birds at the feeder. As expected, we had quite a crowd at the "seed restaurant."

Home, home in the snow:



Looking up the street—you can see how the wind was blowing at this point:



The deck all frosted:



The view from the deck:



Mr. Cardinal takes a bite:



Two, two, two brown-headed nuthatches for one:



Here's a handsome chipping sparrow in the snow:



Two for the price of one: a chickadee and a pine warbler:



White-breasted nuthatch:



Peekaboo titmouse:

Labels: birds, snow, weather

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 3:23:00 PM

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(as referenced in previous post)

My mother went with me to my first science fiction convention, in February of 1978 (Presidents Day weekend), in New York City. Just before we left I discovered the fanzine sales room and purchased a fanzine called "The Vaslovik Archives," devoted to Gene Roddenberry's The Questor Tapes. I loved this second issue (and ended up writing a story for the third) and sent the editor, Mary Bloemker, a letter of appreciation. Mary lived in Boston, and very soon I was invited to visit her apartment and make acquaintance of some of her friends.

The next February, instead of going to the convention with Mom, I went with Mary and four other friends; we all shared a room. We had a grand time—went to various panels (one of the guests was James Doohan ["Scotty"]), wedged our way into a taxi and went down to Jerry Ohlinger's Movie Material Store in Greenwich Village, ate at the ubiquitous Chinatown Express, talked Trek and other fandoms. Our roomies were Gail Paradis, who was only several miles away from me at that time, in Johnston, RI; Rosie Badgett from Covington, KY; and Ann Hester and Alice Newsom from Warner Robins, GA. (It was through Ann and Alice that I eventually ended up in Georgia.)

The convention was held at what then was the Statler Hilton. It had started life as the Hotel Pennsylvania, across from Penn Station on Seventh Avenue and made famous by the Glenn Miller song "Pennsylvania 6-5000" (still its phone number). Several years after my first trip there it became the New York Statler, then the Penta Hotel, and is now back to being the Hotel Pennsylvania once more and has been strikingly modernized, according to the pics I saw online not long ago. Back in 1979, though, it was comfortably down on its heels, with wallpaper curling at the corners, a typical 1970s lobby, and the occasional silverfish in the bathroom. The rooms were shabby and often had little connecting rooms that had once been used as...I dunno. Nurseries? Maybe dressing rooms? Our own room this time had a little room off the side that was a little larger than the bathroom and totally empty.

Conventions now start on Fridays and go through Sundays unless it is a holiday weekend; back then they started on Saturdays, usually on holiday weekends, running through the Monday. So on Sunday night we went to bed totally prepared to spend our last morning at the convention next day and then Ann, Alice and Rosie taking the subway to the airport, Gail and I boarding the train to Providence, and Mary heading back to Boston via bus at the Port Authority Bus Terminal uptown late that afternoon.

We were awakened about eight a.m. by a phone call from Holly, whose last name I don't remember, telling us to look out the window.

It had snowed during the night. Boy, had it snowed! Not just "some snow," but a full-fledged blizzard-clone, with the cars in the streets already blanketed into anonymous piles. There was eighteen inches of snow on the ground already and it was still snowing hard. Ann got on the phone to the airport and found out all planes were grounded and their flight had been cancelled, as had been Rosie's. We later went across the street to the train station and found out the trains were delayed by at least six hours, some more. Gail's and my train, which I think was supposed to leave about four, had been indefinitely pushed back. We were welcome to sit around the train station all day and wait for the next one. Mary figured the bus probably wasn't going anywhere fast, either.

At this point, the Statler notified the convention guests that, because of the storm, anyone who wanted to stay another night was welcome to do so at the convention rate. My dad was incredulous when I called him to tell him I couldn't get home due to the snow because all they had had in Rhode Island was a light dusting.

Well, we said, what can we do? We eventually did what many people did: we had a room party. Under the Statler were not only entrances to Penn Station and the subway, but a whole warren of little shops. We bought some chips, sodas, and cups, and that night people wandered the corridors going from room party to room party. We even made "Snowcon" badges which Mary drew and then we had copied in the copy shop downstairs. (We had "Snowcon" reunions at that particular February convention for several years afterwards, but the snow never obliged us by showing up again. <g>)

(Oh, yeah, and we went for ice cream in the storm. My mom used to tell me stories about how she and her best friend Dora used to go out in snowstorms and get ice cream, then walk home eating it to the shaking of heads by their neighbors. I was determined to have ice cream in the snow, too, so we went across the street to a little ice cream stand that was right on the Seventh Avenue side of Penn Station back then, "Peppermint Place"—or something like that; it was "Peppermint," anyway.)

Gail and Rosie actually weren't present for the party; Mark Gonzaga had invited them out to dinner. Eventually Ann got a bad headache and Mary wanted to work on some artwork, and our room was just too crowded. Holly offered them her room, a few doors down and across the hall, and Alice and I were left until we both looked at our watches and realized it was almost time for the miniseries we were both following to come on. So we went down to Holly's room and watched it there, leaving the door open to keep tabs on who came and went to our room. (Yes, you heard that right. We were giving a room party and none of us were there. LOL.) Alice and I both vividly remember loud chattering crowds coming by and calling out to them "Shhhh! Have some respect--Maggie's dying!" and hearing the message passed to the people in the hall and voices dropping.

All this, of course, was running through my mind Friday when I picked up that "third book" I mentioned, Lillian Rogers Parks' memoir My Thirty Years Backstairs at the White House, basis for the miniseries Alice and I were watching, Backstairs at the White House. Parks' mother, Margaret "Maggie" Rogers, was one of the first African-Americans chosen to be a servant in the White House along with the butler, John Mays, back in the days of the Taft Presidency. Lillian, handicapped by polio, wore a brace, and sometimes accompanied her mother to the White House when Maggie could not find a caretaker for her, and her first encounter with a President was with William Howard Taft, who found her sitting in his bedroom while Maggie was out getting clean sheets for the bed. She made him promise not to tell anyone that he saw her there, and Taft never revealed the confidence. Later Lillian, who became an accomplished seamstress, came to work at the White House in that capacity during the FDR administration, retiring at the end of the Eisenhower years and writing this book soon afterward, which covered her mother's stories about the Taft through Hoover years as well as her own years of service.

Incidentally, when we all got back to our room we found out James Doohan had come to our party! He and his escorts had had been wandering from room party to room party and came in to talk to the people who were there.

Eventually, that little room came in use, too. Mary's friend Rich Kolker, who was one of the founded of the "August Party" convention down in Maryland, and two of his buddies, Malcolm and another fellow whose name I have forgotten, stopped by the hotel on their way home from Boskone, which was also the same weekend. They got trapped by the blizzard as well and slept on the floor, supplanted by whatever extra blankets and padding we had, in that tiny back room.

Labels: books, conventions, friends, snow

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 10:10:00 PM

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Not that I'm complaining, mind you! :-)

The ice they were afraid of never materialized, although it was still cold (it never got over freezing on Sunday) so we were able to go out to Fry's. Our DSL connection had just crashed for the fourth time in three days and I wondered if it were the modem. The old one has a bad "habit" of the connection light staying green even when the modem is not connected. We bought a new one, but James never could get it to work. It turned out we didn't need to, because after being unplugged for 20 minutes, the old one decided to work again.

Although there is a modem already in my computer, we could never get it to work after we upgraded to Win2000. We had a disk that was clearly marked as a driver for the modem, but Windows could never find any drivers for it. So I did buy an adorable USB dial-up modem for emergencies. It looks like a large pencil eraser and set up and worked in less than ten minutes. Wow.

I spent most of the day sick to my stomach; we suspect it was the last of the old turkey soup we ate last night, as James had some problems as well. This carried over into Monday: I had not intended to go out, but wanted to get various housework chores done, read the paper and cut coupons, maybe do some cross-stitch and watch a couple movies. Instead I was miserably in the bathroom a lot of the day. I did get the vacuuming and sweeping done and watching the 1994 Little Women because I had just finished reading Geraldine Brooks' March.

There was still some snow left this morning in areas of high shade, especially under the trees and on lawns that faced east, but rain is forecast by today and soon it will all be gone.

Labels: computers, movies, sickness, snow, weather

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 12:30:00 PM

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Well, you might think there was a March wind out there right now; the trees are tossing and bowing, the wind pushed the chairs on the deck over again, the shades in the bedroom are flapping, and even from inside you can hear the banner mounted on the porch post straining and tugging at its pole. We have a "severe weather alert," which I normally ignore since the Weather Channel now slaps severe weather alerts on everything that's not a sunny day or cloudy day without rain. We used to take wind in our stride unless it was a gale and snow unless it was a blizzard and rain unless someone saw animals walking two by two!

We did have a little treat last night: James took Willow outside before bedtime and there swirling in the streetlight in front of our house were snowflakes. Nothing "stuck" of course; there weren't even that many clouds out there. Hope it's a promise of more rain for the new year.

So here it is back to work again; I sit processing orders while downstairs the dryer revolves and I play the last of the cassette Christmas music. Willow is sound asleep and Schuyler is preening. She is moulting just in time for our Twelfth Night party; we may need to call her "Spike" for the duration with all the pinfeathers she's sprouted!

Labels: pets, snow, weather, work

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 11:42:00 AM

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