snow!

[cellio]

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. :-)

Comments

Snow

[dagonell.livejournal.com]

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

Re: Snow

[cellio]

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