Thursday, March 10, 2005

Spring? What was I thinking?

I’m glad I had such a good weekend last weekend, because this is a rough week.

Fortunately it is at least a prescheduled rough week. We have these roughly once a month when it’s time to close the previous month – this one’s a quarterly close so even more work. So I knew it was coming.

Still, I didn’t get home tonight until about 10:30. That was just because I was just determined to finish the last of my reports. I did, too. Yay me. Rather just have tomorrow to review everything for errors. Maybe I can even make it to yoga at the company gym – that would be nice although my chances of actually getting calm & centered is just about nil. At least it’s moving around. Today was all about hunching over my computer churning out numbers. Bleah.

Worked pretty late last night too, and last night getting home got to be a bit of an adventure! My “Spring Peeper Song” post a while back was (ahem) perhaps a touch premature, as I should have known. That was a most amazing storm yesterday. I’d actually listened to the forecast in the morning – it said something about rain possible turning to snow in the afternoon but I wasn’t envisioning ANYTHING like that. The company I work for has a cafeteria on the top floor (well, almost top). Big windows, great views of the city. I went up there to get lunch, which I had to eat at my desk as I’d gone to a Pilates class in the afternoon (ok usually I’m not so into classes that I’d do yoga AND pilates in one week – but in weeks like this I just don’t feel like making up my own workout circuit) and had a ton to get done – but I did stop & gape for a while at the snow whizzing around outside, and at the trees in the planters on the deck whipping around, and at the way you could almost hear the glass flexing as the wind beat against it. I got to a good stopping point (point of frustration with missing data that is) at around 8 and heading for home.

Well – the B train made it just past the stop 2 express stops from my home, then stopped and sat there between stations for about 45 minutes. And I had managed to leave the office with no reading material. Boo. So I sat there & tried to formulate what to say to the swim-race man – the more I’ve been trying to write up my concerns, the more I’m finding myself worried about some major liability issues not just for him, but for myself (one of the drawbacks of being a BCU 4-star paddler is that hell yes, if anything goes wrong, and I’m involved in any way, I automatically carry a lot more responsibility than Joe Recreational-Kayak-Paddler, who can legitimately say “How would I have known?” in a way that I can’t) – it’s all kind of scary, and this is just the kind of stuff the guy has a history of not wanting to listen to, so in addition to trying to get work done yesterday, I also couldn’t stop thinking about that. A stalled train with no reading material was as good a place as any for such bleak and gloomy thoughts. Finally they did manage to sneak the train into the next station, but at that point they announced that there were power outages & that there was no telling how long we’d be sitting there. The station being a mile from my home, I decided to hoof it.

Exciting walk, that – the snow had stopped hours ago but it was icy cold, and that wind – wow. It would settle down from time to time but then you’d hear a roaring (I passed one house that had wind chimes on the porch & the things sounded like an old-fashioned wind-up Big Ben alarm clock jangling away) and see the trees start to dance a gale-force blast would hit. Yes, a much more exciting walk than my usual fair-weather post-work saunters through Chinatown. My hands were starting to feel unpleasantly tingly by the time I got home. That was one of those nights where I was really glad our building super takes pride in keeping that boiler roaring all winter! Not quite as glad of that as I was that I didn’t get clobbered by a falling tree, though - that definitely wasn’t outside the realm of possibility.

So maybe I should take down “spring peeper song”…NO! Darn it all those daffodils are still out there. I won’t give up.

Well, I have got to get some sleep now. With the financial presentation on Friday who knows how late I’ll be stuck at the office tomorrow. Wish me luck…once more into the breach…

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi, we got the same storm, understandably, here in Philadelphia.

On Monday it was 65 degrees outside. By 9pm Tuesday the wind-chill factor was a bitter 19 degrees. The odd thing about the storm is that it plastered sidewalks on the west side of the North to South running streets with a thick and very slick sheet of ice. Sidewalks on the East side of the streets were virtually snow and ice free.