I feel like I should say more about the snow, although it didn't amount to any particularly great hardship or inconvenience. When I got up early Sunday afternoon it was snowing, at a fairly brisk pace, and there was an inch or two on the ground. I remembered there was something we needed from the store --- we were relatively low on soda --- but on mentioning it to my mother, she said, forget it. We'll make do with what we have till Tuesday morning. I don't think conditions were that bad and were I on my own, I'd probably have dared the four-mile drive to the supermarket and maybe even gone for fast food before they closed down. But in deference to my mother I didn't go out, and within an hour it was getting awfully bad. I'd have had a lousy time driving home, if I'd used McDonald's as a chance to read my book.
Word that work would be closed Monday came in mid-afternoon, first through my brother, who got a text message from the head of the tech department and instant-messaged my father, who came to the living room (where I was exercising) to tell me about it. Then the head of the mainframe room phoned me to give the news. And then the head of client services text-messaged my brother, who again instant-messaged my father, who came to the living room with the reinforcement. Note that my brother has never done more than a handful of consulting-type jobs for the company, although he used to be a pretty demanding client back in the day. These are the remnants of friendships expressed.
As said we were in the area that got two-plus feet of snow, a respectable total even considering I used to live in Troy, New York, and it was coming down at roughly 500 feet of snow per hour at speeds of upwards of warp seven much of the night. Late at night I remembered one of my traditions, the attempt to take an unlit photograph of the strange conditions of light and dark that prevail in a heavy snowstorm. When I went to open the front door and photograph the four-foot snowbanks and two-to-three foot wall of snow leading far out to the futilely plows roads, I found, my father had locked the door. He's very concerned about Norwegian ski-wearing burglars.
Trivia: One Lewis Clement-designed snowshed for the Central Pacific transcontinental railroad extended for 28 miles without a break. Source: Nothing Like It In The World, Stephen E Ambrose.
Currently Reading: An Intellectual History Of Modern Europe, Marvin Perry. Now, I appreciate a book that takes a broad view of its subject matter but when it starts out by discussing the formation of Mesopotamian culture I think they're being a little too loose in what ``Modern'' means.