John Zeitler

As a final little coda to the Snowpocalypse– for now, at any rate– I managed to get my car cleared off and a path dug out from the finally-plowed driveway to my parking space, despite the best efforts of the plow to prevent me from going anywhere. I also managed to get some good news in the mail, which by rights should have arrived on Friday (seriously, it was still decent that afternoon). So, all in all, I’m more or less in the clear for the time being.

So naturally there’s about another foot of snow forecast for tomorrow…

Saturday morning was a bittersweet time for me. There’s always the peaceful feeling of watching snow falling, seeing the accumulation as the piles start to grow in the yard. The gentle winds blow the snow into drifts– and, as chaotic as they may seem to be, the wind is consistent and creates those drifts always in the same places every snowfall, every year. I relished the feeling of being snowed in, without responsibilities and without anywhere particular to go.

Then I realized a fact that chilled me to the bone in my warm apartment. I’m not alone here.

I don’t talk about my neighbors much. Predominantly we keep to ourselves; I know just enough about them to stay more or less out of their way, and they mine. I do, however, know that several of them are less than healthy. I know that some of those cannot even lift a shovel, let alone use it to clear paths to the road. And I know that at least one might be, in a worst case scenario, in immediate need of an ambulance.

I also knew, Saturday morning, that there was no way in hell any car was going to make it near our door. So I did what pretty much any kid raised within spitting distance of Buffalo did. I wrapped myself up in three layers of clothes, grabbed my gloves, and went looking for the snow shovel.

The last time there had been a snowstorm, someone had bought a snow shovel and left it in the front foyer with a note that said it was to help dig out in case someone needed it. Obviously, it wasn’t there. It was only a moment until I tracked down which of my neighbors had set it up; my plan was to go up, borrow the shovel, and clear a path to the main road via some stone stairs that were positioned in between the dumpsters. That’s when I discovered that the shovel had, in fact, been stolen within about a week of its initial appearance. The irate neighbor indicated that the hardware store up the street had shovels in stock, and that he was donning his hunting gear to wade through the snow and get there. He also said that the maintenance guys don’t work on weekends (prior to this I had just assumed he’d been running late). I was ready now, so I told him I was heading on ahead.

When I say I had to “wade” through the snow, I’m not being figurative. Snow is, after all, frozen water. It piles up better than water does, and it wound up being just about 20 inches or so by the time I went out and dashed into the drifts. Rushing into freezing air and snow up to my knees meant that it took all of my effort and strength to blaze the first footsteps to the staircase, then up it and to the poorly-plowed road. Granted, I’m mildly out of shape, but this was like running through a thunderstorm turned to full blast. It was a minute or so until I caught my breath at the top of the stairs and started up the hill to the hardware store.

At the store, I went straight for what I needed. I bought a shovel, a granola bar and an energy drink. The food was wolfed down quickly in the lobby as I tried to recover some of my strength, and as I was polishing off the drink, I called Mom to check in. In one of those strange little quirks, it turned out that there was no snow at all up there. Everything else was fine at home, though, and I told her my plan.

It took me about an hour to dig paths to the main trail from each doorway I came by on my way back down to the stone staircase. I took a brief moment to rest there, then started clearing those stairs as well, and a full path to the door to my building. I started to feel woozy about 80% of the way there… which was good, because by that point, three other people who had been following me with their shovels had finished the rest of the way. I thanked them, walked back down the stairs to my apartment, and crashed into bed.

I don’t particularly care to brag. I didn’t do this for any kind of thanks or reward, and I didn’t get either (maybe a couple of half-hearted “thanks”). I did it because it needed to be done, and nobody else was gonna do it.

For my next trick, I’m gonna survive the coming zombie apocalypse with naught but a snow shovel and a bag of twistie-ties.

Sorry for the silence today during what’s being alternately called Snowmageddon, snOMG, or the Snowpocalypse (which I still think requires zombies to qualify), but I’ve been kinda busy switching between digging out and thawing out. I’ll discuss the wonderful world of snow in more detail tomorrow.

I have learned something today; call it a new law of the universe. “Whenever John wishes for something, say, a big snowstorm, events will conspire to not only give it to him, but simultaneously regret he ever asked for it in the first place.”

Apparently there’s talk of a big snowstorm coming.

If it’s not at least six feet in Pittsburgh I’m going to be severely disappointed.

Today was a real change from the past couple of days. As opposed to spending a huge amount of time on one or two projects, I wound up spreading my time across a few more tasks, and wound up crossing two of them off my list as “done” (one’s really in a “this is as far as I can take it right now until spring” position, and the other is just a milestone in a much larger project). As it stands, I’m probably going to bed in a couple of hours feeling like I’ve done a lot more than I really have.

It’s all well and good to have multiple projects running, but at the same time it’s important to recognize points at which you can say that you’ve made real progress. It’s also important to not tackle too much at once. That’s a lesson I wish I had learned years ago, really.

It seems my sleep schedule is still in a state where I want to be both active and unconscious at the same time. Obviously this is not optimal towards accomplishing anything interesting during the day; I watched through a season of a television series, started two episodes of another before I realized I really was falling asleep at six in the evening. Apparently, I am twenty-nine going on seventy-eight.

I recently had occasion to deal with someone who believed that, just because I happened to be looking for a job currently, I had all the free time in the world to do, well, pretty much anything I wanted. Naturally, between the three trips out I had to make today, some cleaning that I’d been putting off, and phone calls from a dozen different administrative tasks left hanging after last week, this obviously isn’t the case for me. More to the point, it’s caused me to a) revert to college-bachelor cooking (ie instant mashed potatoes mixed with tuna and some leftover shredded mozzarella), and b) made me so tired that even though I’m getting up later in the morning (read: 6:30a instead of 4a), I’m dead on my feet here at 9:30p.

I understand it’s gonna take time to adjust my sleep schedule, but dammit, this is just not fair to me right now, because now is when I have the ambition to do all this cool stuff.