More Blizzard Blues

After shoveling my driveway three times yesterday, I shoveled a neighbor's driveway as a favor. Only it was a long driveway with a detached rear garage and it hadn't been shoveled during the storm to prevent it from piling up. It took me five hours to shovel it and my neighbor's sidewalk, and I barely was able to begin shoveling my own driveway a fourth time.

I'm too tired to produce a more substantial blog post today.

It turned out that the greater New York area was the epicenter of the blizzard, getting the most snow. Philadelphia only got a foot, but Central Park in New York City got twenty inches, and Elizabeth, New Jersey got over thirty.

Interesting fun fact: Atlanta got snow on Saturday, giving the Georgia capital its first white Christmas since Chester Arthur was President - specifically, since 1882.

Blizzard Blues

Winter has barely begun, and the first snowstorm of the season is a full-fledged blizzard - a classic nor'easter in every sense of the word (and the winds to match). I've already had to shovel the snow in our two-car driveway thrice (three times), and I've only been able to do our front walk once.

Oh yeah, we live on a corner and the driveway is on our side, meaning our front walk goes all the way to the sidewalk. And to think my mother bought our house in the month of December and didn't once contemplate the consequences of snowstorms.

I'm still reeling from the big snowstorms that hit my neck of the woods this past February, the kind of snowstorms people were calling "Snowmageddon." One knocked our power out - the first time our electricity had ever been knocked out by a  snowstorm. But you already know about that.

I hope this Boxing Day blizzard is the worst storm we get this winter. A six-inch snowfall will seem like nothing compared to this.

Gore Gored

With Washington, D.C. having been hit by two blizzards in a week, Republican lawmakers have been needling Albert Gore for his insistence that global warming is a real threat, with one Republican hoping that it snows until "Al Gore cries 'uncle.'" The daughter and son-in-law of noted global warming denier James Inhofe even ridiculed Gore by building an igloo in the middle of downtown Washington and calling it Gore's "new house."

Again - severe snowstorms, not even blizzards in areas that normally don't see such weather, aren't indicators that global warming doesn't exist. In fact, they may be an indicator that what should be called "climate change" does exist. Warming in some parts of the world may have an adverse effect of causing more precipitation and even colder temperatures elsewhere. In Britain - which saw tremendous amounts of snow last month - people could see a new ice age as melting ice caps in the polar regions disrupts the Gulf Stream, which keeps the British Isles temperate and mild enough for human settlement. And by the way, the United Kingdom and Ireland are as far north as Labrador in Canada is.

Environmentalists shouldn't get upset over Republican ridiculing of Al Gore. If so many Republicans are making fun of him, that only shows how popular he is. When the only Republican making fun of Al Gore is a county clerk in Wyoming, then he'll have a problem.

Snow Big Deal

The snowstorm that passed through the American East turned out to be a raspberry for the greater New York area, which includes northern New Jersey, where what little snow that fell wasn't even enough to be considered a dusting. But it was very different in central and southern New Jersey, and especially Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and much of Virginia and West Virginia. In some parts of New Jersey the snow measured anywhere between 18 and 24 inches, and it got up to 30 inches in the nation's capital. Snowfall totals for Washington were the most for a single storm in ninety years.

Maybe the politicians will take advantage of being snowed in together and accomplish something.

Meanwhile, the aforementioned DJ Pete Fornatale had his annual midwinter show on New York's WFUV-FM. As always, he devoted his air time to songs about or mentioning winter with, of course, special emphasis on winter songs - "Sleigh Ride," Jingle Bells," "Winter Wonderland" - that are associated exclusively with Christmas and are no longer played on the radio after the holiday season but have nothing to do with Christmas. He set out to play six different versions of "Winter Wonderland" to drive the point home.

Five were played. See, Fornatale was not on the air live; he taped his show, or at least his studio banter, in advance. Someone at the station must have screwed up, because when Dion's version of "Winter Wonderland" was supposed to be played, the station aired Dion's cover of "White Christmas" instead.

Oops.

Anyway, residents of northern New Jersey and New York City will get to walk in a winter wonderland soon enough. Another winter storm is predicted for Wednesday, and this one should hit our area, though maybe not as severely as the previous storm hit the rest of the mid-Atlantic region. We'll see. We in the greater New York area have been lucky this winter; this will only be the second big storm of the season. But I still can't wait for spring.

Snow 'Nuff

Central and southern New Jersey, Washington, D.C. and many parts of Virginia and West Virginia are under a blizzard warning, with up to thirty inches of snow expected in and around the nation's capital. The New York area is likely to be spared the worst of this storm, but may still get hit with a similar nor'easter later - possibly as early as the middle of next week.

The esteemed New York disc jockey Pete Fornatale once mused on the air why winter songs played during the Christmas season - "Jingle Bells," "Winter Wonderland," and similar songs that don't mention Christmas by name - are never played on the radio in January or February, when most winter weather occurs. This is because when you hear these heartwarming depictions of winter - lyrical vignettes that really nearly are like a picture print by Currier and Ives - during the Christmas season, winter is just beginning, everyone is in a festive mood because of the holidays, and the idea of sleigh rides and glistening snowscapes sounds romantic. By January, and especially by February, many people have strained their backs shoveling snow, driven at three miles an hour through driving hail, possibly lost power in an ice storm, and gone through a lot of other horrors. They're in no mood to build snowmen and pretend they're ministers or clowns, or frolic and play the Eskimo way. They're too busy waiting for spring.

And while we're on the subject, when was the last time anyone went for a ride in a one-horse open sleigh? Or met anyone who did? Dude, I've never even gone for a carriage ride in Central Park.