Winter Ain't Over

Yesterday turned out to be more of a snow day than I expected. I knew I would have to shovel us out before heading to work, so I emailed my boss Sunday night to say that I expected to be in the office by late morning. But I didn't finish shoveling until almost noon, and I probably wouldn't have made it to work until 1:30 or so. At that point it seemed not worth the trouble, so I ended up taking a personal day. I spent the rest of the afternoon watching stuff off the TiVo and generally doing nothing, which is what a snow day should be.

After it almost hit 60 last Friday, I wanted winter to be over as much as anyone else. I wanted to believe it was over, but I knew it wasn't. On February 11th I said in an email to a friend, "I'm sure we're going to get at least one more snow storm." Because that's just how things go around here. I'm not ready to put away the shovels yet.

Yesterday's storm left about nine inches at our house, putting us somewhere north of five feet so far this winter, which doesn't come close to comparing with the winter of 1995-96, when we got a total of over eight feet of snow through the entire winter. At least this time the snow had a chance to melt before we got hit again, though in our back yard and on the curbs in front of the house, it just finished doing so on Friday, just in time to start over again.

Back in '96 on our little dead-end street in Somerville, we literally ran out of places to put the snow because it just kept coming, storm after storm, until we ended up throwing some of it over the fence into the back yard of a house on an adjacent street that backed up against our place. Those neighbors weren't too happy about that, which was kind of ridiculous given the circumstances. And they weren't exactly ideal neighbors themselves; these were the same people that would do yard work starting at around 7:30 AM on Saturdays in the summer, inevitably waking us up with either their constant bickering or the growl of their lawn mower.

Anyway, it's supposed to get up into the 40s by Saturday, so maybe this batch of snow will melt a little quicker. The Mrs. and I are heading to New York for a few days on the 13th, and we're really hoping the weather isn't sucky. We went in March back in 2002, and aside from being cold it was all right. Another storm would seriously spoil the fun.