Weathering the storms
27/01/15 05:25
It appears, as I rise for a new day, that the predicted “worst blizzard ever to hit New York City” wasn’t. I don’t mean it didn’t snow. I just mean that the snowfall and wind speeds didn’t exceed previous records. There was less snow in New York than predicted. Up in Boston, it appears that they have a pretty good storm on their hands. It is supposed keep snowing throughout the day and coastal areas are been battered by heavy winds and high seas.
They did a pretty good job of keeping people from being stranded by the storm. Mayors and Governors up and down the eastern seaboard issued travel bans, declared states of emergency, shut down transit systems. Airport hotels began to fill up as flights were cancelled. Not everyone got to their destination, and many those who couldn’t make their trips ended up having to wait out the blizzard before returning to their homes, some of them, no doubt, in sunnier parts of the country.
It was hard for us to imagine the blizzard here yesterday with a high near 70 degrees. Today will be a bit cooler, but the high will still be in the mid-sixties.
Actually, things seem to be working pretty well from what I can gather from a cursory reading of headlines this morning. With electricity companies providing power to millions and millions of homes, outages to only about 5,000 seems like a small percentage. There were some accidents yesterday, but, for the most part people have kept off of the highways and streets. New York and Boston are basically shut down, but everyone needs a snow day from time to time and as long as they have food and shelter we won’t worry about them too much.
The New York Stock Exchange is expected to open and trade normally today.
Snowmageddon 2015 appears not to have been the end of the world.
I’m not very afraid of blizzards. We get our share, from time to time. We keep a pretty good stock of groceries and emergency supplies in our home. We’ve weathered multiple-day power outages in relative comfort. I cut things a bit too close once and ended up leaving the car in the neighbor’s driveway during the fiercest part of the storm, but the walk up the hill was no particular problem and the neighbor got his driveway shoveled for free as I waited for the snowplows to clear the street.
We have switched from Pennington County providing our snow plowing to Rapid City. Since the change, the city hasn’t felt it necessary to send any plows to our neighborhood, so we don’t know how long we’ll wait in the event of a major blizzard - probably longer than was the case with the county. Maybe we’ll get an extra half day off if we get a really big storm. My neighbors get cabin fever pretty easily and they have pretty powerful 4-wheelers with plows. Sometimes they dig us out before the official plows arrive.
What i could do without, however, is all of the hyperbole.
I realize that it takes strong language to get people to use common sense. I know that Governors and Mayors need to make public statements to get folks to stay home when a storm comes. I know that it can be dangerous when ill-prepared people venture out into inclement weather.
But the northeastern part of the United States gets winter every year. Using end of the world language is overstating the reality by quite a little bit. I liked the statement issued by Boston’s mayor about using common sense and common courtesy. On the other hand, Kevin Cullen of the Boston Globe might have hit the nail on the head when he wrote, “This is no time for levelheadedness. Blizzards are like roller coasters: they’re only fun if they scare the begeebers out of you.”
I’m not sure I know what begeebers are. If the urban dictionary can be trusted, some of us think that many of the residents of the big cities of the east have been full of begeebers for years.
Life goes on and the weather gives us something to talk about. We have a few blizzard stories under our belts and it is good to be able to dig them out from time to time and tell them to our grandchildren. I’m so old that I can remember a blizzard when I put the chains on all four wheels of our Montero and drove to the church to check things out and change the message on the answering machine when we decided to cancel services due to the weather. I’m pretty sure our grandchildren will never know a time when one has to go someplace to change a voicemail message. We wouldn’t have to make that trip these days. Of course if we lost electricity, our internet-based phone service would go out in about 4 hours and after that we’d have to use the car to charge the cell phone to call in and change the voice mail at the church. Somehow that doesn’t pack the same punch as driving a four-wheel car with chains in whiteout conditions.
My father used to tell how they tied a rope from the house to the barn so they wouldn’t get lost in the blizzard in the twice-a-day trip to milk the cows. And he had a story of the year when Christmas was delayed for a couple of days because the parents were stuck in town and the kids were taking care of the farm. There was an accompanying story about poorly timed comments about his sister’s pancakes and the lessons he learned. Their folks returned and they had Christmas and the oranges that the folks went to town to meet the train to get were delivered without being frozen.
They apparently didn’t suffer that much.
Think of those poor people in Boston, however. I’ve heard that the supermarkets were running out of bananas yesterday.
I wonder if the grocers were singing, “Yes, we have no bananas!”
They did a pretty good job of keeping people from being stranded by the storm. Mayors and Governors up and down the eastern seaboard issued travel bans, declared states of emergency, shut down transit systems. Airport hotels began to fill up as flights were cancelled. Not everyone got to their destination, and many those who couldn’t make their trips ended up having to wait out the blizzard before returning to their homes, some of them, no doubt, in sunnier parts of the country.
It was hard for us to imagine the blizzard here yesterday with a high near 70 degrees. Today will be a bit cooler, but the high will still be in the mid-sixties.
Actually, things seem to be working pretty well from what I can gather from a cursory reading of headlines this morning. With electricity companies providing power to millions and millions of homes, outages to only about 5,000 seems like a small percentage. There were some accidents yesterday, but, for the most part people have kept off of the highways and streets. New York and Boston are basically shut down, but everyone needs a snow day from time to time and as long as they have food and shelter we won’t worry about them too much.
The New York Stock Exchange is expected to open and trade normally today.
Snowmageddon 2015 appears not to have been the end of the world.
I’m not very afraid of blizzards. We get our share, from time to time. We keep a pretty good stock of groceries and emergency supplies in our home. We’ve weathered multiple-day power outages in relative comfort. I cut things a bit too close once and ended up leaving the car in the neighbor’s driveway during the fiercest part of the storm, but the walk up the hill was no particular problem and the neighbor got his driveway shoveled for free as I waited for the snowplows to clear the street.
We have switched from Pennington County providing our snow plowing to Rapid City. Since the change, the city hasn’t felt it necessary to send any plows to our neighborhood, so we don’t know how long we’ll wait in the event of a major blizzard - probably longer than was the case with the county. Maybe we’ll get an extra half day off if we get a really big storm. My neighbors get cabin fever pretty easily and they have pretty powerful 4-wheelers with plows. Sometimes they dig us out before the official plows arrive.
What i could do without, however, is all of the hyperbole.
I realize that it takes strong language to get people to use common sense. I know that Governors and Mayors need to make public statements to get folks to stay home when a storm comes. I know that it can be dangerous when ill-prepared people venture out into inclement weather.
But the northeastern part of the United States gets winter every year. Using end of the world language is overstating the reality by quite a little bit. I liked the statement issued by Boston’s mayor about using common sense and common courtesy. On the other hand, Kevin Cullen of the Boston Globe might have hit the nail on the head when he wrote, “This is no time for levelheadedness. Blizzards are like roller coasters: they’re only fun if they scare the begeebers out of you.”
I’m not sure I know what begeebers are. If the urban dictionary can be trusted, some of us think that many of the residents of the big cities of the east have been full of begeebers for years.
Life goes on and the weather gives us something to talk about. We have a few blizzard stories under our belts and it is good to be able to dig them out from time to time and tell them to our grandchildren. I’m so old that I can remember a blizzard when I put the chains on all four wheels of our Montero and drove to the church to check things out and change the message on the answering machine when we decided to cancel services due to the weather. I’m pretty sure our grandchildren will never know a time when one has to go someplace to change a voicemail message. We wouldn’t have to make that trip these days. Of course if we lost electricity, our internet-based phone service would go out in about 4 hours and after that we’d have to use the car to charge the cell phone to call in and change the voice mail at the church. Somehow that doesn’t pack the same punch as driving a four-wheel car with chains in whiteout conditions.
My father used to tell how they tied a rope from the house to the barn so they wouldn’t get lost in the blizzard in the twice-a-day trip to milk the cows. And he had a story of the year when Christmas was delayed for a couple of days because the parents were stuck in town and the kids were taking care of the farm. There was an accompanying story about poorly timed comments about his sister’s pancakes and the lessons he learned. Their folks returned and they had Christmas and the oranges that the folks went to town to meet the train to get were delivered without being frozen.
They apparently didn’t suffer that much.
Think of those poor people in Boston, however. I’ve heard that the supermarkets were running out of bananas yesterday.
I wonder if the grocers were singing, “Yes, we have no bananas!”