I saw the shortest little snowstorm at the end of my walk to work this morning, about 30 seconds of the lightest flurries I have ever seen then nothing… It was like a teaser trailer.
We caught Blade Runner: The Final Cut last night with the film club.. It was refreshing to see a director treat the revisiting of an earlier, classic film with the respect they should. Great crowd last night, afterwards we ended up at Fugakuyu, which was a bit pricey for the film club…
Woke up very early this morning to this terrible scraping sound. I did my best to ignore it and go back to sleep, but it wasn’t going anywhere. I started trying to figure out what the sound was… My first guess was it was some kids who tied our dumpster to their car and were trying to drag it around. But then the car sounds I heard didn’t jive with that theory, so I settled on a drunk person slamming repeatedly into the dumpster with their car. Hitting it, backing up, slamming into it again, each time moving the dumpster just a little bit.
Eventually, I was awake enough to look out the bedroom window. Imagine my disappointment when I saw it was just a snowplow. I prefer imagination.
The 5-6 inch storm that hit Boston was a 12-14 inch storm in Chelmsford where I work. It was snowing when I woke up yesterday, and although it was enough to disrupt traffic, it wasn’t enough to keep me from trying to get into work. It took 1:45 to complete my 27 mile commute, most of that was getting through Brighton and Cambridge and to the highway. Looking out the window all day at work I knew the commute home was going to be a nightmare, and I was right.
I sat on Route 3 for about 45 minutes without moving at all… For some reason the plows intermittently plowed the right hand lane, which caused all kinds of traffic as people merged. This, combined with the usual traffic of people getting on 95 north (I go south) meant a nightmare commute. It ended up taking me about 2 hours to get to Alewife. I decided to park my car at Alewife over the weekend so I didn’t have to worry about the parking situation on the street here. It’s only 5 bucks a night, and since it is supposed to be above freezing the next few days I figured it was a small price to pay to wait out the snow. If the situation seems less grim here tomorrow I will probably go get it and bring it back. I took the Red Line to Harvard and then took the 86 bus to Brighton Center. My commute home ended up being 3 hours when I walked in the door to our apartment.
In a stunning bit of serendipity, I had decided to make a stew in the crock pot, which was a pretty comforting meal after such a cold day. I had put it in the pot before I left for work in the morning, so it was pretty much all ready to go when we got home… We just kinda chilled last night, both of us had pretty bad days..
Land of the Dead was great, although as predicted the Sunday Night Film Club turnout was small (but I don’t really care). As is common in zombie flicks, the (living) characters had retreated to a fortified position, as have I. As the weather has gotten unbearably hot I have retreated to our air-conditioned bedroom. And my love for my Powerbook grows.
I have used command-line mailers for as long as I’ve had internet email. Originally, elm on my Unix UUCP account on Dan’s Domain (hoser@gen.ds.nj.us) through pine then mutt at CSH, I have been a loyal command-line user (although I did have a minor dalliance with Mail-It! while using BeOS). I played around with graphical mailers while convalescing, but had all kinds of trouble dealing with my 500+ mailboxes over IMAP, so I threw in the towel. I finally decided to move my mail archive off of CSH’s servers and onto my laptop, and have been using OSX’s Mail.app as my mailer for a few weeks now. So far, so good, and searching my mail with Spotlight is very, very nice. I tried Thunderbird back with my failed IMAP experiment, and while I fully support the Mozilla project, I think I’ll wait for it to get a bit of polish before I revisit it. Anyway, I had started to feel that the only reason I was sticking with CLI email was geek pride, and that I was just being stubborn. Seeing all the niceties you kids and your GUI mailers have had for god-knows how long now I think I was correct in that assessment.
Chuck left around PM last night to avoid the impending snowstorm that hit NJ late last night…. He mailed me when he got home around 2:30a to tell me that he started hitting snow around 2…. So at least he didn’t hit too much of it and made it home safely. We had a lot of fun this weekend, going out with Trouble and crew.. Chuck and I edited up the last of the video just before he sailed off; We ended up doing a rush-edit just laying the logged clips down next to each other without much finishing… He has another Mini-DV back in Jersey that he forgot to bring with him, so we will take that footage and combine it with what we saved from this weekends shooting and do a real edit after I return to NJ. DV is a great format, and it was real fun playing with all the DV and 1394 stuff that I never really had an opportunity or knowledge to play with before.
I am really looking forward to the upcoming release of Hannibal. The book was wonderful, and I have since learned, contrary to rumors I had heard previously, that the book’s ending remains mostly intact. The ending of the novel was very powerful, and I was truly disappointed when I heard that they sissified it for general consumption. Silence of the Lambs is one of my favorite novels and movies, and I am quite anxious to see the film…..
I love this album. :)
I wouldn’t say we are trapped in the house, but the snow (which is currently about 16.5″ deep) is definately good encouragement to stay inside… Luckily Santa Claus left me lots of movies and toys to play with… :P
I ventured out into the wild before to deploy our Snow Cat/Mow Cat, which is a graduated board (in the shape of a cat), which tells you how deep the snow is… Being that the forecast is saying that parts of Sussex County could see up to 30″, it might come in handy!
Another thing that came in handy was my new jacket. It is a Columbia, and replaces my older Columbia, which was getting toward retirement… I got the Ice Dragon Parka, which is crazy-complicated, and has lots of goodies to keep snow out of my arms, chest, and crotch. It is super warm, and has a super-comfy fleece liner…. And it is completely waterproof… :P
There is something fundamentally wrong when I go to bed during a torrential thunderstorm, yet I wake up to a beautiful day without a trace of water on the ground.
This I do not understand.