Halloween Storm, 2011

I’m back in the office now, with actual lights and power enough to type this. Let me tell you about the last few days.

On Friday morning, the radio informed me that the area (Eastern PA) would be getting 4-6 inches of snow. By the afternoon, a co-worker was saying 6-8. When I got home, my mother-in-law said 8-10. I was simply hoping that it would get me out of my Saturday morning cat dissection. No such luck.

At 7:30am Saturday, when I left the house, it was cold, windy and pouring rain. By the time I left class at 11am, it looked like this:This is not normal October snow. I’m from Syracuse, and snow on Halloween is more common than not. But that is usually a powdery dusting. This was wet, heavy, icy shit. January snow. And lots of it. At one point, it was coming down at an inch an hour, easily.

I got home safely - barely - and was eating lunch with my fiance and his mother when that stupid Miley Cyrus song about hiking came on the radio. I said, “When I hear this at the office, I turn the radio off”, and the power went out. It hasn’t come back on yet.

Saturday was nice: Dave and I took a nap in our still-warm room, we went out for Chinese food, watched the Usual Suspects and drank Black Russians. We walked by candlelight and it was more an adventure than anything. Throughout the night we could hear loud cracks from outside as branches broke under the strain of such heavy snow.

We awoke Sunday to blazing sun and half a tree across the porch. Also, no heat. We took a shower with what little hot water remained in the tank and enjoyed watching our bodies steam in the rapidly cooling house. We cleared the debris and ran errands all day in the hopes that we would get power back soon. When we heard from a neighbor that Tuesday is the earliest that the grocery store down the road will get power, we checked into a hotel. By now every hotel in the city is booked full, as over 115,000 homes in the area are without power.

As fun as staying in a hotel can be, this sucks. It means I have to get up even earlier for work, Dave is back doing his rotations so I have a room alone, and this morning it was so foggy I could barely see to drive. I’m beginning to think that Harold Camping may have been right.

And yet, we are the lucky ones. We can afford a hotel room, and we had enough foresight to book it while there were still some left. There are still hundreds of thousands, I’ve heard up to 2.1 million in total in the Northeast, without power. If you can find a way to help, please do. This is America, we should be above having our citizens freeze to death, though I’m sure it is already happening.

Humidity

I have lived most of my life in Syracuse, New York. I recently moved to Maine, but I am back in the 'Cuse for some vacationing.

Now, as anyone who lives in this area knows, Syracuse has a weather pattern entirely it's own. Winter begins in mid October, often causing Halloween to buried in a foot and a half of snow and tiny children dressed as fairies and pirates to all look like Eskimos. Winter ends sometime around graduation. It does not matter when your graduation is, that is when winter takes it's last bow, and shits all over everything. The alternative is that the snowfall ends on April 15th, and summer starts on the 16th. We literally had a weekend of spring a few years ago: we had a blizzard on Friday, it warmed up over the weekend, and by Monday, everything was in bloom and having sex with the air.

Summer lasts from the end of winter (there is no spring) to the beginning of October. Fall lasts about 2.5 weeks, and is cold as shit and precipitous. Then winter starts again.

The winter here is bad, but at least bearable. It can occasionally hit -20 degrees (without windchill - a lovely device that makes already cold weather REALLY FUCKING COLD) with lake-effect snowfalls of three feet a day. But that isn't the bad part of the year.

When summer hits, it doesn't just give Syracuse a little love tap - it punches it really hard in the gonads and stands there laughing, every once in a while throwing a brick at its head. It has, for instance, been in the mid nineties all week, with humidity well above 150 percent. How is that possible, you may ask. How can anything have more than 100 percent? Well, most places can't, and the humidity scale was constructed for normal places where humans can actually exist in comfort. Then Syracuse happened.
Another great thing about Syracuse is that, as the winter lasts 3/4 of the year, NO ONE has air conditioning. That's fine October-June, but what happens in between? Hell.

The humidity is like this:

• You need to take at least two showers a day to not smell like your pet Labrador
• These showers will be icy cold, in an attempt to lower your body temperature enough that you don't begin sweating again as you towel off
• When you open the freezer, vapor will come boiling out an cloud your vision, and while you wait for it to clear, you will get yelled at for wasting energy
• Toilet paper rolls become so damp that they bend and sag on their holders, making it impossible to unroll them without announcing to the rest of the house, via repeated clangs, that you are doing so
•  Every single window in the house is opened, and usually the doors as well, so there is a total lack of privacy and an inordinate number of insects flying, bumbling, biting and stinging their way around the house
• Becoming nocturnal does no good, as staying up until 6 am means you sleep past noon, and awake drenched in sweat and cranky as hell and hating life

No one in the world loves snow as much as someone who has to live through summers in Syracuse.