cellio | snow!

Friday morning there was a dusting of snow and there was snow in the air. They were predicting a few inches for the day, with 6-10 inches overnight. This did not make much of a difference in my commute, though I gather that by the time evening rush hour was in full swing it was a problem. Ah, saved by an early Shabbat. :-) (Dani came home early too, for no particular reason.)

The walk to services was a bit inconvenient (maybe 3 inches by then?) but not a big deal. I was surprised to find the sidewalks in front of the synagogue not cleared; we have (gentile) caretakers for stuff like that. I found out later that there had been a catastrophic snow-blower failure and someone was at Home Depot at 7:30pm taking care of that. The sidewalk was cleared this morning. (And someone had shovelled a path to the wheelchair-accessible entrance; it was just the main entrance that was blocked.)

Turnout Friday night was surprisingly good, but the bat-mitzvah family was upset because bunches of relatives were trapped in airports elsewhere in the northeast. I think about half of them ended up making it for Saturday morning. That has to really suck -- you have a non-reschedulable major event and people can't make it. Ugh. (Wave to someone on my friends list in a similar situation. Sorry you're getting screwed by weather.)

More snow did fall overnight. It was hard to tell because of drifts, but I'm guessing 6-8 inches overall as of this morning. It made for a challenging walk to shul, because all the neighbors are lazy slugs just like us :-), but walking in the streets was fine at that hour. Things were better on the way home (and it felt a lot warmer than the forecast called for, which probably helped), but no one on my block shovels the (back) sidewalk (on Forbes), which is a bit annoying. Fortunately, I can just walk down Beechwood instead and go in the front door; it's a bit longer but not by much. Dani went to an SCA event today, but since I came in the front door I didn't notice what he did about the driveway. I'm guessing he took the non-subtle approach; almost any car can be a primitive plow if you're patient.

Last year during snows we got a few visits from people with shovels offering to exchange services for money, and on the way home I wondered if today would be such a day and how I could handle it to best effect. (That is, I am a lazy slug willing to exchange cash for snow removal, but not on Shabbat.) I found myself playing through a scenario like the following:

Guy with shovel: Shovel your walk?

Me: I'd love to have you shovel my walk. Unfortunately it's Shabbat, which means I can't make arrangements until sundown. Will you be around this evening?

GwS: In the dark? Are you crazy?

Me: Well, we have good streetlights. Say, what are you charging, anyway?

GwS: [something not too ridiculous]

Me: That would be a fair price. You usually shovel first and then collect, right?

GwS: Yeah.

Me: I'm not going anywhere today. If you decide you want to do the job later, just stop by at sundown.

Now if GwS has a little faith, he might shovel the walk late in the day and demand his money at sundown. That might have been too subtle, of course, but I couldn't think of anything else. I had failed to have the foresight to put a $20 bill on the radiator in the front hall before Shabbat, which might have allowed for more ridiculous levels of hinting. :-)

What I really need, of course, is a steady guy with shovel, one I could make advance arrangements with. All our shovel-guys seem to be one-shots, and I suspect the commercial service providers aren't practical for singleton homeowners. They use plows and make their money from apartment complexes and malls and stuff; I just need a guy with a shovel (or snow-blower).

(I should mention that our guys with shovels tend to be adults, not kids. I assume this is an economic indicator.)

For the first time since I started going to my synagogue, we did not have a minyan this morning. We got up to eight (plus one twelve-year-old, six months from bar mitzvah), but never made it to ten. We've had some bad Shabbat storms in the past (including one where we had a whopping 17 people Friday night, which usually draws 100+), but we've always had a minyan in the morning. How odd. I feel bad for Walter, one of my volunteer torah readers, because you don't read torah without a minyan. He read the portion from a chumash (as "study"), so the prep wasn't completely wasted, but the hardest part is memorizing the trope and vowels, both of which you get in a chumash, and he didn't get to do use that preparation. I had passing thoughts about raiding the bat mitzvah upstairs for a few more people, but I squashed them. :-)

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I love looking at snow, and especially being snuggled up inside a warm house while it snows outside, but the situation with shoveling oneself out is one of my most horrendous experiences. Which is why I've vowed never to live anywhere I have to be prescient enough to know I have to set my alarm clock an hour earlier to get up and clear the driveway and sidewalks before work the next morning. I wouldn't mind a job I could telecommute for, but no more shoveling just to get out of the driveway and fight my way to the office. Blah.

My sympathies to your reader. I do remember one Christmas where all we choir members fought to get to the church for the Christmas concert, and we had 14 people more than the parents (out of a usual concert audience of about 400), and it was crushing. (Of course, I was 9, but...)

I hope it either stays cold enough to be livable, or gets warm enough to get rid of the stuff soon.

There are times that I'm glad for the Really Short Driveway. (I hypothesize that the street it empties onto used to be narrower; all the driveways on this side of the street are about 4 feet and then into garages.)

But yeah, while I don't mind snow and am happy to look at it from the comfort of a warm room, I would be happier if either it magically eluded the sidewalks/driveway/streets or if the snow-removal fairies would come around promptly. :-)

Well, when we do get snow out here (I'll try to remember to post the movie of the 2 inches of sleet we got early one January -- the tree is still on the back porch waiting to be made into mulch), the temp is usually right at the point where the snow sticks on the grass, wood, etc., but not on the streets or driveways .... which looks just exactly perfect for the 1-2 hours we actually can see it before it melts ;-) It's most startling to get snow on top of bright green grass.

I mentioned parts of this post to my daughter, and then explained what "minyan" means.. and she stumped me with "why?" Why, other than "because God said so," do you have to have 10 men present for worship?

I'm also a bit startled at the idea of a bat mitzvah being in the synagogue, at the same time as worship, but separate. I guess I'm thinking in terms of baptism, which is theologically a community event; I thought bar/bat mitzvah was something of the same thing, a recognition of new adult status by the community.

Why, other than "because God said so," do you have to have 10 men present for worship?

You don't need ten people for all worship, but parts of the service are considered to be "public", which raises the question of "how many people do you have to have before something is public?". The answer to that is ten, based (primarily) on the fact that the ten bad spies (in the book of Numbers) are referred to as a congregation. Most of the service can be said without a minyan, by the way.

It is better to pray in a minyan than on your own, but if on your own is all you can manage, so be it. (In this case, we technically had eight people each praying on his own, even if we happened to be synchronized very well.)

Reading the torah (from the torah scroll) is one of the things that can only be done in public (or when practicing, but that's understood). So we had to skip that, but reading and discussing words of torah is always appropriate so we read the text without using the scroll or saying the accompanying blessings.

I'm also a bit startled at the idea of a bat mitzvah being in the synagogue, at the same time as worship, but separate.

Oops -- sorry for the confusion! The bar (or bat) mitzvah is part of a service. We have two services, early (my minyan) and late (for the bar/bat mitzvah). The latter tends to be pretty much for the family; we only instantiate it if there is a bar/bat mitzvah that week. The early service meets every week and forms the regular community.

So we could have all just gone upstairs to the later service, waited around a couple hours, and heard a torah reading (and the other parts that got skipped), if we really wanted to.

Would you believe we have nothing on the ground but a light dusting? I had originally made plans to go letterboxing this morning it was such a nice day. (Read my entry for why things didn't work out.)
-- Dagonell

We got snow but you didn't? That's just wrong. :-)

my parents hire a company that does odds and ends yardwork, etc. basically they contract with the company to shovel their driveway and walk, and every time it snows, the next morning the driveway is clean and they get a bill for $25. i'm not sure what those services are called, nor how they got them; and they were based in a rather yuppy town in connecticut, so i don't know how relevant that is to you. perhaps there might be something like that here?

Thanks for the tip. I'll bet there's something like that somewhere in Pittsburgh. Someone else suggested that gardeners are a first point of contact, so I'll try that. (We actually have a gardener. He came with the house, and we decided he was reasonable and kept him.)

We had rain basically all Shabbat. I had planned on staying in anyway since I'm sick

Sorry you're sick. I hope you're feeling better soon.

(This is the time of year when you're supposed to get lots of rain there, right?)

Thanks :)

(Yeah, our winter is basically cold, with (hopefully) a lot of rain and generally one snowstorm. It usually goes from December until March (mid-December-February being the worst, tapers off towards Pessach).

It usually goes from December until March

The winter, not the snowstorm, I hope. :-)

...because you don't read torah without a minyan.

This is the case in Reform? I'm a bit surprised.

This is how my rabbi rules. Because of that whole autonomy thing, though, different congregations might do things differently.

My rabbi makes exactly one exception to the rules about what we don't do without a minyan: we always say mourners' kaddish, because we aren't going to tell people who need that for their own grieving that they can't.

My folks' gardener does snow removal in the winter. I don't know what he charges, you might ask them. I went over to their house Friday night and couldn't get up the driveway, but by 7:30 am on Saturday it was clean.

Thanks for the tip. I'll ask our gardener if he does snow too (he does leaves in the fall, so maybe). I hadn't thought to try that. If he doesn't, I'll probably talk to your parents.

Most gardeners do. At least up North-ish (you count) because there's just not a lot of other work around for a gardener to do in December. (I specified up North because there's certainly plenty of work for a gardener to do in Florida in December)

Here in California, plenty to do, too. Up here in the foothills of the Sierras we get cold and dormant for some plants a little bit, but there's lots of other things to do -- like rake leaves, or mow the lawn, or plant bulbs, or trim back spring blooming plants, or, or, or.... ;-)

snow!

Snow, sigh...

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