Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 23 January 2005
Unbelievable storm. Kids shoveled last night at 6pm. I did again at 8pm. Spouse at 10pm and me again at midnight.
Got up this morning and found some of drive clear but big chunks buried in 4-foot snow drifts. Wind has been almost completely horizontal for about 24 hours now, so hard that you often can't face into it and breathe. Temp in teens.
I shoveled this morning for 3 hours on snow drifts and got about 3/4 of drive clear, but only a single lane out to road at end because drifts there were packed and up to my chest.
Last night I checked attic. We have these air vents out the top that have special hoods so no rain fall can come in. Problem is with horizontal snow it gets in anyway. Last year in blizzard found up to one foot piles in attic that were leaking down on ceilings in bedrooms, so I hung big 5-gal buckets under them. Good thing, because they were full of snow last night. So I empty them all.
When I check attic this noon I see all this snow has blown in through wall vent at end of house facing north. I end up sweeping up about a tall kitchen garbage can's worth of snow. Then I use a couple of old posters from college to seal off vents. Absolutely bizarre to be emptying that much snow out of your attic!
Had hoped to write first section of Chapter 3 today, but as I prepped the material, I realized I needed to disaggregate whole chapter at once, so I will use today to plan next three sections, which I will write over next three days, putting me hopefully one day ahead of schedule before some travel south and overseas (tougher to write on road). Chapter three is all "growing the Core" and as such will be New Core-heavy or China-heavy. Since I write on China so much in the blog, my codex of blog stories is crammed full of possible angles, but I need to disaggregate them between internal (section 1 focusing on China's growth), state-level (section 2 focusing on China's rising in system) and system-level (section 3 on New Core as source of 3rd way thinking). So I am going through all my notes, posts, and sources to decide today which goes where, otherwise I risk writing 1 and having that steal from 2 and 3 (and so on with 2).
I will struggle to do even this. I feel I need a nap after the shoveling, and yet I have another good 2 hours to go out there (and my kids simply aren't big enough to do the drifts yet so it's gonna be me on my own).
Still, overall a nice day at home with everyone, making me realize how I'll probably enjoy working out of my house quite a bit. Doesn't scare me one whit, because I did it for 10 years in college, including 6 (grad) where I held down several other jobs at the same time, so time management's a veteran skill for me. And I tend to view the proximity of kids as just great. Instead of the chit-chat at work and down time there, I get the same with my kids now. Of course, I will need to do a certain amount of conferencing, etc. to keep up the contacts, but as I check out my schedule for 5 Feb through June, I not looking at any gaps. In fact, my travel sked will be pretty much what it's always been. Now, I just won't have to spend 40 hours a week justifying the college stuff, and that will be a relief because I know exactly what to do with those extra hours.
I have no idea if this weather includes PA, but it's hard to imagine playing football in it, not because of the cold or snow, but the wind! Should be interesting to see how much it impacts.
