it's all kind of a lot sometimes
Jan. 23rd, 2019 07:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7I came here to bitch about something else which i've of course forgotten. something about opening up a posting window erases my short-term memory.
So I've been bitching a lot in Instagram Stories lately about my commute. There's one particular garage (collision shop) that is on the corner of the last turn I have to make, and they are absolute shit at clearing their sidewalks. I can just cut through their parking lot on the corner and avoid the completely unplowed walks there, but then there's a bit, the last bit before I get to my own workplace's mini-mall, where the sidewalk goes alongside a very busy road with no shoulder at all, and their halfassed efforts at snow-clearing have been just this fucking saga.
I know it's like, ha ha, what a nosy old lady thing to do, complaining about how people keep their yards-- but listen. LISTEN.
The snow is over a foot deep. I have to walk about a mile and a half. The first day, there were SEVEN HOUSES on the one street that hadn't cleared their walkway. To pass them, I either had to break trail through a foot of snow, or climb over an encrusted three-foot embankment to get out to the street to walk in the street, where it's slippery and cars are not expecting me and visibility is not fantastic with these snowbanks all around and other parked cars parked every which-way in the deep half-cleared snow, which is very dangerous for me, a soft-bodied human, and then climb back over the embankment to get back onto the sidewalk.
(The mercy of it being six fucking degrees is that when I went over the tops of my boots in snow, the snow was at least still frozen, and so it didn't slush into my boots and freeze me. But I have spent this week wearing a pair of baggy sweatpants over my jeans as I walk to and fro, because then I can take the ice-crusted sweatpants off when I get to work and not have to deal with the snow melting on me. And it's so dry indoors that it all evaporates before I have to put the sweatpants back on.)
And then Carubba fucking Collision, who you'll see ads for if you ever watch a Sabres game (they sponsor a replay per game of a hard hit and call it the Carubba (crash sound effect) Collision of the game, those fuckers)...
That first day, I was presented with an enormous encrusted snowbank about four feet in height, and past that, a thirty-foot-long stretch of sidewalk that was not only covered in a foot of snow, but also covered in the edges of big chunks thrown there by the plow from the major road to one side, and the plowed snow from Carubba's parking lot that had been pushed and tumbled down the embankment on the other side. (The guy in the truck was doing this AS I WALKED, so I got to have this obstacle course with ACTIVE ENEMY FIRE, basically. I could not have been more pleased by this, surely.) Going and walking in the road is not an option, as it is a very busy five-lane road with absolutely no shoulder whatsoever, I would have to walk IN TRAFFIC which is about 40 mph on that stretch, and there's a hollow where the road used to go under an overpass so the visibility isn't good.
So I had to slog through this snow, and if you haven't walked in deep snow, it's very hard to describe how hard it is. The bottom shifts, so you can't take a stride, and then there's a lot of resistance as you move your feet, and you have to keep pushing because you're never sure where your foot will come to rest. It's not just unstable, it drags at you. It's intense and exhausting.
Anyway, yesterday someone clearly told them they've got to clear that sidewalk, so they cleared it... with a plow on a truck. The guy just swiped at it with a pickup truck. Now, you can only plow flat ground, really, and this isn't flat anywhere along its length. So there was a four-foot embankment at EITHER END, and the middle of it was all churned up with about six to eight inches of snow in deep muddled ruts, with hunks of dirt from the embankment mixed in where the plow had churned up the frozen ground because you can't use a plow on ground that isn't level.
These chuckleheads are fucking morons. No, there's no other route I can take. I have no choice but to walk along this stretch. All other approaches are fenced off.
My legs were jelly by the time I got home last night. It's been so cold that the snow hasn't sublimated or evaporated or melted or compacted at all, so it's in thick powdery-gunk welts all over, and there's no bare concrete anywhere at all. So my entire commute is unstable surfaces.
I'm less beat-up than you'd expect, but I am tired.
Am I going to get a break?
NO
It's 34 right now, which is two degrees above the freezing point of water, which means all of that is now slush. And it's going to rain today. We've got six-foot snowdrifts everywhere the plows turned corners, which are going to be there until May, and a good temperature see-saw like this is going to transform everything from powder to slick slush and then when it freezes again tonight it'll set into rock. With deep ruts in it, naturally.
I wish I could stay in bed today, but I cannot.
In other news I reread not only the Barbarians Novel but also a novel I attempted to write circa 2005? 2006? about vikings, so that was fun. Again, it had some good moments, but overall I am not uhhhhh... entirely delighted with it. I think I remembered it as better than it was. It wasn't that good. Also I literally can only find half of it, and I think that's because I was doing a big rewrite and that's as far as I got. Which is good, because what I remember of the rest of it was also Definitely Not Good.
On the upside, gosh, I have written a lot of stuff. And it's a bonus, I think, for me, that the stuff that's old enough that I don't like it was, well-- I didn't get on AO3 until a solid ten years into my writing career on the Internet, and so most of that shit isn't immortalized. And it's not that it was awful and irredeemable, it probably would have had readers who were fond of it, so I'd have to leave it up and then I'd sort of cringe.
On the downside, I was really lonely and took longer to improve probably than I would have with an audience, and--
oh anyway, I have a bunch of invite codes to AO3, I finally looked and discovered that I do, so honestly please ask if you need one.
I've gone this long and still don't remember what I was going to write about here, so anyway. Gotta go get dressed and ready to deal with this unwelcome thaw. You think I'm ungrateful, but honestly it being very cold is best when it's this snowy because then you're not dealing with water. Water is the worst, and when all the drainage systems are entirely covered in thick layers of snow, water is absolutely a nightmare. I'm going to maybe die, that's all.
See y'all later if I survive.
So I've been bitching a lot in Instagram Stories lately about my commute. There's one particular garage (collision shop) that is on the corner of the last turn I have to make, and they are absolute shit at clearing their sidewalks. I can just cut through their parking lot on the corner and avoid the completely unplowed walks there, but then there's a bit, the last bit before I get to my own workplace's mini-mall, where the sidewalk goes alongside a very busy road with no shoulder at all, and their halfassed efforts at snow-clearing have been just this fucking saga.
I know it's like, ha ha, what a nosy old lady thing to do, complaining about how people keep their yards-- but listen. LISTEN.
The snow is over a foot deep. I have to walk about a mile and a half. The first day, there were SEVEN HOUSES on the one street that hadn't cleared their walkway. To pass them, I either had to break trail through a foot of snow, or climb over an encrusted three-foot embankment to get out to the street to walk in the street, where it's slippery and cars are not expecting me and visibility is not fantastic with these snowbanks all around and other parked cars parked every which-way in the deep half-cleared snow, which is very dangerous for me, a soft-bodied human, and then climb back over the embankment to get back onto the sidewalk.
(The mercy of it being six fucking degrees is that when I went over the tops of my boots in snow, the snow was at least still frozen, and so it didn't slush into my boots and freeze me. But I have spent this week wearing a pair of baggy sweatpants over my jeans as I walk to and fro, because then I can take the ice-crusted sweatpants off when I get to work and not have to deal with the snow melting on me. And it's so dry indoors that it all evaporates before I have to put the sweatpants back on.)
And then Carubba fucking Collision, who you'll see ads for if you ever watch a Sabres game (they sponsor a replay per game of a hard hit and call it the Carubba (crash sound effect) Collision of the game, those fuckers)...
That first day, I was presented with an enormous encrusted snowbank about four feet in height, and past that, a thirty-foot-long stretch of sidewalk that was not only covered in a foot of snow, but also covered in the edges of big chunks thrown there by the plow from the major road to one side, and the plowed snow from Carubba's parking lot that had been pushed and tumbled down the embankment on the other side. (The guy in the truck was doing this AS I WALKED, so I got to have this obstacle course with ACTIVE ENEMY FIRE, basically. I could not have been more pleased by this, surely.) Going and walking in the road is not an option, as it is a very busy five-lane road with absolutely no shoulder whatsoever, I would have to walk IN TRAFFIC which is about 40 mph on that stretch, and there's a hollow where the road used to go under an overpass so the visibility isn't good.
So I had to slog through this snow, and if you haven't walked in deep snow, it's very hard to describe how hard it is. The bottom shifts, so you can't take a stride, and then there's a lot of resistance as you move your feet, and you have to keep pushing because you're never sure where your foot will come to rest. It's not just unstable, it drags at you. It's intense and exhausting.
Anyway, yesterday someone clearly told them they've got to clear that sidewalk, so they cleared it... with a plow on a truck. The guy just swiped at it with a pickup truck. Now, you can only plow flat ground, really, and this isn't flat anywhere along its length. So there was a four-foot embankment at EITHER END, and the middle of it was all churned up with about six to eight inches of snow in deep muddled ruts, with hunks of dirt from the embankment mixed in where the plow had churned up the frozen ground because you can't use a plow on ground that isn't level.
These chuckleheads are fucking morons. No, there's no other route I can take. I have no choice but to walk along this stretch. All other approaches are fenced off.
My legs were jelly by the time I got home last night. It's been so cold that the snow hasn't sublimated or evaporated or melted or compacted at all, so it's in thick powdery-gunk welts all over, and there's no bare concrete anywhere at all. So my entire commute is unstable surfaces.
I'm less beat-up than you'd expect, but I am tired.
Am I going to get a break?
NO
It's 34 right now, which is two degrees above the freezing point of water, which means all of that is now slush. And it's going to rain today. We've got six-foot snowdrifts everywhere the plows turned corners, which are going to be there until May, and a good temperature see-saw like this is going to transform everything from powder to slick slush and then when it freezes again tonight it'll set into rock. With deep ruts in it, naturally.
I wish I could stay in bed today, but I cannot.
In other news I reread not only the Barbarians Novel but also a novel I attempted to write circa 2005? 2006? about vikings, so that was fun. Again, it had some good moments, but overall I am not uhhhhh... entirely delighted with it. I think I remembered it as better than it was. It wasn't that good. Also I literally can only find half of it, and I think that's because I was doing a big rewrite and that's as far as I got. Which is good, because what I remember of the rest of it was also Definitely Not Good.
On the upside, gosh, I have written a lot of stuff. And it's a bonus, I think, for me, that the stuff that's old enough that I don't like it was, well-- I didn't get on AO3 until a solid ten years into my writing career on the Internet, and so most of that shit isn't immortalized. And it's not that it was awful and irredeemable, it probably would have had readers who were fond of it, so I'd have to leave it up and then I'd sort of cringe.
On the downside, I was really lonely and took longer to improve probably than I would have with an audience, and--
oh anyway, I have a bunch of invite codes to AO3, I finally looked and discovered that I do, so honestly please ask if you need one.
I've gone this long and still don't remember what I was going to write about here, so anyway. Gotta go get dressed and ready to deal with this unwelcome thaw. You think I'm ungrateful, but honestly it being very cold is best when it's this snowy because then you're not dealing with water. Water is the worst, and when all the drainage systems are entirely covered in thick layers of snow, water is absolutely a nightmare. I'm going to maybe die, that's all.
See y'all later if I survive.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-23 02:21 pm (UTC)♥
and if you get more requests than you have codes, please hmu, i have nine languishing
no subject
Date: 2019-01-23 02:37 pm (UTC)If you do fall over, though, you're likely to have a soft landing, even if it's a wet one. This is why I carry basically an entire spare outfit in my backpack. I'm wearing three pairs of socks at the moment because the first two pairs (and it was two for anti-chafing purposes rather than insulation) I expected would get soaked, and they didn't.
I did have a really exciting time at one point, though, because the sidewalk was on a slope and also icy and with zero traction there was nothing I could do but bend my knees, put my arms out, and literally fucking surf sideways down a hill. It was not that exciting, but the car that was whizzing by on the road was unnerving because I wasn't sure if I'd stop or hit them.
If only my ankle was recovered from the stupid incident in October. *sigh* It's not that bad, it just lacks flexibility and strength and also it hurts, so it makes it hard to do anything particularly agile.
I feel like at this point anyone who wants a code has one, so I'm not super worried, but maybe I'll update my AO3 profile to offer them too.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-23 04:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-23 04:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-24 12:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-24 01:57 am (UTC)I was a little smug at having read the weather report; I was not in my Huge Snowboots, but rather in my farm-rated Muck Boots, which I bought to stand in a slaughterhouse with a faulty drain, so I can withstand about eight inches of lung-flecked bloody shit water in them, which meant that my commute was by comparison really clean and pleasant.
(Hey I rinsed the boots off before I brought them into my house, you'd be amazed how thoroughly viscera rinse off injection-molded rubber.)
no subject
Date: 2019-01-24 02:25 am (UTC)I highly recommend walking in ski pants. Much better for keeping dry, unless your sweats are impermeable fleece.
Now you remind me, I’m going to have to dig the car out tonight before a plow possibly comes by.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-24 03:30 am (UTC)And I have a pair of heavy-duty snowpants, but they're blaze orange, so I have opted not to wear them if at all possible.
(They were blaze orange and deer blood, for a while, but I managed to wash the blood out, fortunately. That was more of a fashion statement than I strictly wanted to make.)
I guess I'm somehow not surprised that Manhattan would suck at snow removal.