Ever driver knows, or should know, what a "no parking zone" is, but how about a "snow parking zone?" I was out the other night delivering pizzas when I found this sign in a parking space at townhouse complex in Crofton MD.
Generally speaking, I am not a fan of home owners associations. They do little more than collect money and tell you what you can or cannot do with your personal property like how big a Christmas lights display you have or what color you are allowed to paint the shutters on your home. This, however, is actually an idea that I like.
I live in a townhouse complex here in Bowie. Each home has two assigned parking spaces. We have a handful of unassigned visitors parking spaces. This works out pretty well for all of us, unless somebody in the neighborhood has a large number of visitors.
One of the issues we have in our lot occurs whenever there is plowable snow. There simply is no place for the plow drivers to pile up the snow. The "snow parking zone" helps to alleviate the issue. This particular complex has taken two visitors parking spaces and designated those spaces for the plow drivers to pile up the snow.
Image via WikipediaWe had a fairly nasty snow storm blow through the DC area last night. It was one of those heavy, wet snows that cause a lot of problems with trees breaking and power outages. We were fairly lucky in our house as the lights flickered a couple times but they never went completely out. My brother lost his power late yesterday, and it is still out nearly 24 hours later.
It was also one of those storms that cause a lot of havoc on the roadways. They expected the snow to hit pretty heavy right around the evening rush hour. Evening rush hours around here are pretty brutal anyway, but add snow and ice and it makes it that much worse. The local television news programs last night and this morning were full of horror stories about last night's commute.
Once again, I was lucky. Yesterday at about 2:30, my department head came around and asked everyone if we were packing up to call it a day. It was about an hour or so before the weather was supposed to hit the area. I left shortly thereafter and made it home by 4:00 as it started to sleet pretty heavily. It was a wise move, as the news reported total gridlock on the roads. There were reports this morning of people taking over 12 hours to get home. Several people just left their cars on the roads and started walking.
I woke up this morning and called into our office information line. It said that the office would be opening at 10:00 but liberal leave was in effect. I got up and started the process of shoveling the sidewalk and digging out the cars. Our HOA rules require that we shovel the entire walk in front of our homes, which I proceeded to begin. Then I started working on digging out the cars, starting at the front of them since the snow plows piled several more inches of snow in front of my parking space.
While I was working on digging out the cars, I could hear somebody singing as they were shoveling the sidewalks. As they got closer, I realized that it was a group of Latino men who worked for the landscape company that plows are complex. I knew they were Latino, not because they worked for the landscape company, but because they were singing and yelling at each other in Spanish. It was then that I realized that they were shoveling the sidewalks of our complex, not the walks from the door, but the walks in front of the houses.
This was the first time that I had ever seen the landscaping company shoveling the front walks of the houses. They usually only do work in the common areas of the complex, and we are responsible for the areas in front of our townhouse. I was a little perturbed because I had shoveled my walk, and the residents of the houses on each side of me didn't have to bother. If I had of known they were going to do the shoveling, I could have saved my self an extra 30 minutes of shoveling and concentrated on getting the cars out. Such is life.
It looks like we have made it through the second blizzard to hit the DC area in less than a week. The first one hit Friday and Saturday dumping about two feet of snow. It took me about four shifts of digging after that one to get the cars out. On Tuesday and Wednesday, blizzard number two hit the region. It only dropped about a foot of snow on us. It took only two shifts of digging to get the cars out.
With the latest round of snowfall, the 2009-2010 winter is the snowiest on record in the DC area. It has surpassed the previous snowiest winter of 1898-1899, and there is still nearly six weeks of winter remaining.
On Monday, the Washington Examiner had a post online regarding an editorial written by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. just 15 months ago. RFK, Jr. is a hypocrite in the order of Al "I invented the Internet & Global Warming" Gore. They type of person who flies around in his private jet while telling everyone else what they need to do to save the planet. The Examiner reprinted most of the editorial, but to sum it up, RFK, Jr. blamed the lack of snow in the DC region in recent years on global warming.
Fast forward to today. As I said, this has been the snowiest winter on record in the DC region. We now have Time magazine writer Bryan Walsh telling us that the record snowfalls are a result of "global warming." We also have MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan telling us the same thing. The Heritage Foundation has an excellent rebuttal to Walsh's argument.
Now, I don't claim to be a climate scientist, but I am a thinker and I do tend to think logically. On the one hand, you have a global warming alarmist, RFK, Jr saying that due to global warming, the DC region doesn't get much snow fall. Then when the DC region does get snowfall, and a bunch of it, we get more global warming alarmists saying it is due to global warming. Which is it? Doesn't seem logical to me.
Let me put it into our old mathematical equation of if a=b, and b=c, then logically, a=c. In this case "a" will be DC not getting snow; "b" would be global warming, and "c" would be DC getting a bunch of snow. So a=b is DC not getting snow=global warming; next b=c would be global warming=DC getting a bunch of snow, therefore DC not getting snow=DC getting a bunch of snow. Again, doesn't seem logical to me.
Now I know that one season doesn't a trend make. However, the global warming cultists want to attribute everything to their cause. Even if those two things are polar opposites. The phrase, "You can't have your cake and eat it to," comes to mind.
I have spent the better part of the last two days shoveling out the two cars from the two feet of snow that fell Friday and Saturday. I am physically exhausted and unbelievably sore. The worst part is, I just saw a weather alert saying there was a winter storm watch is in place for the area for Tuesday night and we could get another 5 or more inches of the white stuff. There is just no place to put anymore snow.
I was checking the Capital Weather Gang and they say we only need one more inch to surpass the second snowiest winter in DC history and only nine inches to surpass the snowiest winter ever of 1898-1899. That is over 100 years ago for all you global warming cultists out there. Right now, they are saying that four inches is a decent bet and that eight or more inches a distinct possibility.
I don't know how much more of this I can take. I am definitely sick of the snow and suffering from a bit of cabin fever right now. I have made enough progress with the shoveling that I will be able to get the cars out tomorrow. So, even though it is a few more hours until Monday for me, here is my choice this week for Music Monday, "Boat Drinks" by Jimmy Buffett. It pretty much sums up how I feel today.
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Well the worst of the blizzard is over. Now the shoveling out begins. I actually have been out twice already to start the process. I have at least dug a path to get out to the front of our cars to begin the process being able to move them. To be honest, I don't expect to be able to get out anywhere until Monday at the earliest. I am not as young as I used to be and I am definitely not in as good a shape as I could be. I don't want to overdue it.
The plows have been through a couple times already and when I was outside a couple hours ago you could see pavement. Unfortunately, the plows also have piled snow in front of the cars. That is now frozen pretty solid and much harder to shovel. I came back inside after the plow driver told me not to kill myself too much yet because he would be back at least two more times tonight. I only asked that he not bury too much on his next passes through.
The roads were not too bad when it was time for me to head out to my pizza delivery job last night. The snow was just beginning to stick to the roads as I headed out to work. When I got to the store, they had decided to cut off delivery service to a couple of the areas we normally service. There are a lot of narrow, winding roads in our delivery area. Thankfully those areas were shut off early.
I made it through the night unscathed though there were a couple times I had some difficulty with sliding and stopping. Unfortunately, at least three drivers had some sort of accident. One driver slid off the road into a guardrail. Another missed a turn and ended up turning into somebody's yard and had to be dug out. The third driver had somebody slide into him. All in all, it was not worth it (other than keeping my job by showing up) since I ended up with about four deliveries and $28.
I am assuming that we are closed tonight. I checked the company website, and my store is not accepting online orders due to the inclement weather. I also tried calling the store and nobody answered. For the rest of this evening, I am going to check out some of my fellow bloggers, play some games, watch the Bud Shootout, and drink a bit of red wine to help me thaw out from my earlier bits of shoveling.
Have you ever had one of those days when nothing seems to go right? Today is shaping up to be one of those days for me. First off, as I was getting dressed this morning, the button popped off of my khaki pants. Fortunately, I found a second pair of khakis in the closet that fit. (I have to wear khaki pants for my part time pizza delivery gig.) When I pulled up to the parking garage of the office, I noticed that the seam in the crotch of the pants had split. So far it’s off to a rousing start.
Speaking of my part time pizza delivery job, it may be time to look for a new part time job. There are a number of reasons why I would want to get out of it. First and foremost, the job does come with its set of hazards. Several weeks back, one of the drivers was robbed at gunpoint. Fortunately nobody was hurt. Second is the wear and tear on the automobile that comes with the extra driving. Third is an incident that happened last weekend.
Saturday morning it began to snow. At about 10:00 AM there was about an inch or two of snow on the ground. I went out to run a couple errands. I nearly had one accident and did a lot of sliding in general. About 3:00 PM, we had about 5-6 inches in our complex and had yet to be plowed. I called the manager on duty to tell them I did not think I could make it in and was told that the roads were terrible and he didn’t blame me if I didn’t come in.
A couple hours later, I called to confirm that I would not be coming in to the night manager. He told me that he was aware and that they had gotten somebody else to fill the shift. He also dropped a bomb on me telling me that the district managers had said that they wanted anybody who did not show up for work that night to be fired. I was told not to worry about it, that they would say I was not scheduled.
I am trying to figure out when pizza delivery drivers became essential workers during a snow emergency. Doctors and nurses at hospitals, I understand. They pay us $3 something an hour plus tips and they want us to put our lives and property (cars) in jeopardy during hazardous driving conditions? I don’t think so! It should be interesting to see if they are going to adhere to this policy this weekend. In a few hours, we are expecting a major storm to come through the area. They are calling for over 2 feet of snow. I would like to think that we would be closed in that case.
Mother Nature has blessed me with a rare Saturday night off. No pizza delivery this evening as everything is shut down. It is kind of a shame because I really could use the money, but even if the pizza palace was open tonight I don't think I would be going anywhere. We have had 14 inches of snow so far and it is still coming down. This was the scene from my front door a few hours ago.
I went out about an hour or so ago to start the process of digging out. There is now a path that I can walk from the house to get to the cars. Tomorrow morning I'll work on car #1 and car #2 in the afternoon. I have decided that I am too old for this shit. It made me wonder what happened to all the young bucks with strong backs who wanted to help out their neighbors. I guess it could be worse. My parking spaces are situated so that when the plow comes through, I only get a small pile of snow pushed up in front of my space. I feel sorry for these neighbors who got a big pile blocking them in their space.
I really need to get a job like the weatherman has. Where else, besides Congress, can you be wrong more often than not and still keep your job?
We are expecting our first snow of the season here in DC today. Yesterday, the forecast started with a chance of up to an inch. Later in the day, it grew to a chance of 1-3 inches. This morning, my part of town has a chance of 2-4 inches, but the snow wouldn't start around here until sunset. Here is the scene outside my back door as of 11:00 AM, about 6 hours before sunset.
Of course the very mention of snow in the DC area brings about widespread panic. This morning, I had to do my usualy ritual of going to the bank to cash my pizza delivery paycheck and pick up something for dinner. The store was much more crowded than usual. People have to run out and stock up on milk, bread, and toilet paper in case they get snowed in.
I don't expect it to get too bad out there. We haven't even had our first freeze of the season so roads are fairly warm. I am hoping that the inclement weather will bring out the best in people when I am out delivering pizza tonight. I can always use the extra money.
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