Snow Jobs

No, I’m not talking about what we get from Congress. I’m talking about the mighty dumps of light and fluffy (if you’re lucky) or heavy and wet (if you’re not) white stuff that we’ve seen this year.

So far here in NoVa we’ve had a pretty quiet winter. Aside from the seven or eight inches of snow we had last Monday night and into Tuesday, we’ve not had more than a bit of dusting* so far, in comparison to the long-suffering residents of Boston, who will probably be digging out until Labor Day. We tend to get more sleet and freezing rain than snow around here, although given the choice, I’d rather have the snow.

Snow. It can be soft and beautiful, dropping a blanket of gleaming white over landscapes that are otherwise drab and unsightly. It can call to mind sleigh rides, snowball fights, fun times spent zipping down hills on sleds, and anxious nights spent watching the skies for the arrival of Santa Claus.

It can also mean pulled muscles, heart attacks, bones broken in icy falls, traffic accidents, and havoc wreaked on school schedules.

Guess which one I’m talking about.

Yes, Dear Readers, that seven inches of snow that fell on us was a lot easier to shovel away when I was 23 than it is now that I’m 63. And I’m getting to be a lot crabbier about it, too.

Grouchy Curmudgeon Rant Ahead – You’ve Been Warned

I take my responsibilities as a good neighbor seriously. When it’s done snowing, I bundle myself up, grab my trusty shovel, and clean off my sidewalks. It’s the right thing to do, of course, to keep people from slipping and injuring themselves … and our local government encourages us to do it (http://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/shovel/). In response to the question, “Who is responsible for clearing snow from the sidewalks in my neighborhood?”, the Fairfax County website says,

“Neither the state nor the county clears snow and ice from public walkways (sidewalks and trails). While not legally obligated, residents and businesses are asked to help keep sidewalks safe. They should, as soon as feasible, clear snow off the sidewalks in front of their property so that all pedestrians, especially school children, those with disabilities and the elderly, may walk securely. Homeowner associations may require members of their communities to clear walkways abutting their property.”

They even provide a helpful graphic …

Now, I can hear all my conservative and libertarian friends complaining about the hideous spectre of government overreach … It’s my sidewalk, dammit, and if I think it needs shoveled, I’ll shovel it, and nobody in government has the right to tell me to do it!!

Of course, if we were all community-minded citizens, as concerned about each other’s welfare as about our personal freedoms, we wouldn’t need laws and gently hectoring websites that encourage us to do the right thing. But I can tell you from experience that a lot of people won’t shovel that snow. In my neighborhood, it’s usually easier to walk in the middle of the half-plowed street than it is to try to pick one’s way along sidewalks only intermittently shoveled. And some of the worst offenders are the folks who have bus stops in front of their homes … there’s nothing like standing in the slippery street as the bus slides toward you because people refused to shovel their sidewalks.

Okay, I’m done fulminating for now. But when winter comes, please do your part. All us fragile old geezers-in-training will thank you for it.

Have a good day. Keep the sidewalks clean. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

* Back home in Pittsburgh, we used to say that it didn’t count as a snowfall unless there was enough on the ground that you could track a cat.

We're Off to See the Blizzard

As the Starks say in "Game of Thrones," Winter is Coming.

Coming, hell ... it's been here, and it just won't leave, dadgummit.

Yes, we are awaiting the arrival this evening of the storm that is being viewed down in Georgia in mega-apocalyptic terms. Around here, we're expecting anywhere between 5 and 10 inches of snow. Or sleet. Or freezing rain. Or just rain. Or maybe nothing. Nobody quite knows yet, but bread, lunch meat, toilet paper, and DVDs at the local Red Box are all flying off the shelves in the usual flailing hysteria and hunkering down that accompanies the arrival of the merest flake of snow here in NoVa.

At least the miserable winter weather, whatever it turns out to be, gives ignorant dumbasses who don't understand science a chance to squawk that "global warming" is a godless liberal commie plot to destroy America. It gives children a chance to stay home from school, and parents the challenge of juggling work schedules to make sure those children are entertained and cared for on their unexpected holiday. And it balances out the bitching we'll be doing in six months when it's hotter than a Sofia Vergara pictorial.

Look at the bright side ... if you have to go out and drive in the snow, you will probably be in your enclosed car with the heater and defroster and (maybe) heated seats. You won't enjoy motoring like our grandparents (or great-grandparents) did ...

So, if you're in the path of the winter storm that's barreling across the South and up the East Coast, just suck it up. It'll be August soon enough, and you'll be wishing for some of that white stuff.

Trust me.

Have a good day. Stay warm and be careful out there. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

SNOWSTORM!!! I Mean, snowstorm!

I'm channeling the title of a fifties-era science fiction film ... The Amazing Colossal Disappearing Snowstorm!

Yes, Dear Readers, our mighty snowstorm that started out with apocalyptic predictions (for Disneyland-on-the-Potomac) of four to five inches of the terrifying white stuff ... which then diminished to one to two inches ... then to an inch, mostly on cars and grassy areas ... to ... well, according to the old Pittsburgh tradition, it counts as "snow" if you can track a cat in it. Which you can. On the grass. Assuming you have any interest in finding a cat.

Oh, and the temperature today will be over 50 (that's 10 degrees Celsius for you, Jean-Luc, Craziequeen, and Amanda).

Now, I'm not sad that we've dodged the crystalline bullet, as we already have enough experience of major snowstorms for which our local governments are woefully unprepared and in the face of which local drivers grow unaccountably hysterical. But for pete's sake, if we're going to have a winter, let's get on with it!

At least we won't have the experience of Agnes's last trip to Germany, when she was scheduled to fly during our last Snowmageddon. You may recall that at that time, her flight to Germany was cancelled two days in a row ... then it flew as scheduled on the third day, but we were snowed into our neighborhood and couldn't get to the airport. She ended up leaving a week later.

The Old Farmer's Almanac (online edition) had predicted a major storm with heavy, wet snow along the East Coast for this time, so I guess they called it partly right. We dodged this storm, which tracked more to the south, but the next one the Almanac is calling for is supposed to hit on or about March 7^th ... which is the date Agnes returns from Germany.

Oy.

So, let's all do the No-Snow Dance so that we can avoid this ...

... at least until Agnes gets back.

Have a good day. Stay warm. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

It Ain't Snowmageddon, But It's Enough...

It's 6:20 AM as I start to write this...just about two hours later than my normal schedule. Why am I running so late, you ask. Blame it on the snow.

Yes, we had a fast-moving yet ugly snowstorm that rolled through here yesterday afternoon and evening, just in time to hose up the afternoon commute for the tens of thousands of drones that make Disneyland-on-the-Potomac such a wonderful place to live and work. Here are a few vignettes from yesterday afternoon and this morning ...

As the storm was approaching, the Federal Government announced it was shutting down and releasing all workers two hours early. The practical effects of this were as follows:

1. It didn't make any difference to me, because the first bus I can take home from the Metro station didn't run any earlier, anyhow. I left work an hour earlier than usual.

2. All the people whose commutes generally span a space of about four hours left work at once, which meant sardine-room only on all Metrorail cars. The overcrowding, predictably, prevented the doors from properly closing and - equally predictably - each time the driver opened the doors to try to close them properly, more people tried to jam in. Somehow, we made it to the Springfield station, where ...

3. The rain changed to sleet and then to snow while we waited for our local bus. Since this bus is almost always late in perfect weather conditions, we were not surprised to find it late in the prevailing conditions. We loaded up and the driver heroically carried us at a crippled snail's pace through appalling weather conditions and miserable traffic. He even, amazingly enough, drove the full route through our subdivision, which the buses usually won't do in conditions far better than those.

4. Time of arrival at home: exactly five minutes later than my normal arrival time, despite leaving work an hour earlier than usual.

All things considered, I had it pretty easy. There were plenty of horror stories of people needing seven hours or more to get home, and the roads were clogged with abandoned cars that had spun out and gotten stuck. But such is life in the big city.

This morning I got up at my usual time, bundled up, and went out to shovel out our driveway and sidewalks. We have about five inches of very heavy, very wet snow - the kind that is utterly miserable to shovel. I got the sidewalks cleared and a path dug out around the car, but there isn't much point in shoveling out the entire driveway, since our local streets haven't been plowed and are pretty much impassable. My local bus system is running a Saturday schedule, which means that it's not running to our neighborhood, so unless and until I can get up the hill and out to the main roads, I'm enjoying what we euphemistically call "a day of non-scheduled leave."

As storms go, this one was miserable, but nothing on the scale of last year's fabled "Snowmageddon" (you can relive that marvelous experience in pictures here and here), and we certainly didn't have the dangers faced by Amanda and her family in the Australian floods ... nevertheless, it was bad enough.

And now, I need to take a nice, hot shower and get reacquainted with my feet.

Have a good day. Stay warm. More thoughts tomorrow ... or perhaps later today, who knows?

Bilbo

Why Did They Do It THAT Way?

It is now 4:50 AM in Northern Virginia. Our latest winter storm is supposed to start at about 10:00 AM, end sometime tomorrow evening, and leave us with 18-24 inches of snow. Agnes's flight to Germany, scheduled for 7:15 this evening, was already canceled last evening. The Federal government is "Open, with an unscheduled leave policy, and employees should be dismissed by their agencies four hours early."

Yep, we're gonna get hammered.

And I'm tired of writing about it. It's gonna be what it's gonna be. Let's talk about something else. How about railroad gauges?

My late uncle Frank was, for many years, the editor of Trains Magazine, and so I grew up immersed in railroad history and lore. But one thing I never thought to ask was why rails are spaced the way they are...why are the standard rails spaced exactly 4 feet, 8.5 inches apart?

I ran across this explanation many years ago, and it seems just as good as any:

The US Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches because that's the way railroads were built in England, and the first US railroads were built by English expatriates.

Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.

Why did they use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Okay! Why did the wagons use that odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing the wagons would break on some of the old, long distance roads, because that was the spacing of the old wheel ruts.

So who built these old rutted roads?

The first long-distance roads in Europe were built by Imperial Rome to enable their legions to move swiftly from place to place. Those roads have been used ever since. And the ruts? The initial ruts, which everyone since has had to match for fear of destroying their wagons, were first made by Roman war chariots. Since the chariots were made for the Imperial Roman legions, they were made with standardized wheel spacing as specified by the Roman Army...which, in turn, drove the specifications for the width of the roads - wide enough to accommodate two war chariots passing in opposite directions. Voila! The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original military specification ("MilSpec," in modern military acquisition terminology) for an Imperial Roman army war chariot.

So, the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse's ass came up with it, you may be exactly right. Because the Imperial Roman chariots were made to be just wide enough to accommodate the back-ends of two war horses.

Think about it ... after all these centuries, decisions in government are still being made by horses' asses.

Explains a lot, doesn't it?

Have a good day. Stay warm. Drink hot chocolate, wrap yourself up in quilts, hunker down in front of the fireplace, and read or watch your way through your DVD collection.

The above advice does not apply in Australia. Sorry, Amanda.

More thoughts tomorrow, assuming we've been able to dig out.

Bilbo