Snowy Road, Icy Road

It was a HORRIBLE drive to school today -- it started snowing as I left Manhattan -- thinking this is a Monet painting -- gorgeous muted blues looking across the Hudson to NJ -- Then it snowed harder and harder until when I got up here there were HUGE quarter sized flakes -- still beautiful, floating down.

The roads up here have at least an inch of snow and the streets are ice. There were at least 7-8 accidents along the Sawmill -- cars spun around, literally upended onto their sides, awful, awful. Icy roads -- and during the climb up the hill past Readers' Digest to school, I thought my car would slide backwards; my wheels were spinning -- so I pulled as far to the right as I could into snow so I'd get some traction. Student cars tailgaiting so I put on my flashers.

Then, coming around the corner of our lot toward where I park, my car wouldn't stop on the downward slope, my automatic brakes pulsing, and not knowing whether to pump the brakes or not (I did) and I thinking my car will fly off the hill into the ravine where the train passes (not that I thought my car would get down that far) -- but I thought, My god, I'll flip, I'll crash into a tree. Then my brakes grabbed, I made the turn -- and thought, well, if I can't stop, maybe the rusty gard rail will stop me and maybe it won't. Whew. I'm here. But it wasn't easy. An hour to arrive (rather than the normal 40-45 minutes) -- which wasn't too bad.

Nesting Mice and Rats

Today I took my Volvo in for an oil change. The car is usually parked in the middle school lot across the street from the train station. The oil change technician called me over to the open hood. "Look," he said. On top of the engine block was what looked like pillow stuffing or thick ribbons of insulation. There were scattered acorn halves, holes gnawed through the caps. A hole had been gnawed in the insulation under the hood. "Mice," the attendant suggested, and he swept up the heaping nest in his gloved hand. Field mice living in the athletic fields around the parking lot, he suggested, climbed into the car for warmth.

Last week, our other car, a Prius, went into the Toyota dealership for its regular oil change. The technician called to say there would be an additional $300 charge to clean up the mess left by rats -- including chicken bones, excrement, and whatever else rats hoard. "Do you park by a dump?" the attendant wanted to know. No. Just on the street off Broadway on the Upper West Side. (This had not ever happened when we parked on Fifth Avenue on the Upper East Side.)

Rain and Rerouting

Rain came down (?) horizontally today -- 40 mile an hour winds made teeming rain look like snow. The train between North White Plains was not running because a tree fell over the tracks. A tree had fallen by Chappaqua's Community Education building on Roaring Brook Road, causing the building to close because of fallen electric lines. I checked traffic.com several times before leaving the school, and each time I checked, was routed a different way, zigzagging all over Westchester County, the Bronx, and Manhattan. The ride home --with the sun trying to come out -- was like running maze: getting off the Saw Mill (because traffic was stopped for either a fallen tree or a flood), shooting over on 117 to the Taconic, getting back on the Saw Mill and squeezing into a single lane at McLean Blvd in Yonkers and again under a Riverdale bridge because of brown flood waters spreading across the parkway.

Hailing the M-60

I had heard you could hail a bus after 10 pm and before 6 am.

This morning, in the dark at 5:30, I ducked under the lowered security grate into Absolute Bagels on Broadway at 108 to pick up three dozen hot bagels for my classes. Coming out at 5:35, the M60 came barreling up Broadway. I stepped between two parked cars and stuck out my hand -- two blocks in either direction from the official bus stops at 106th and 110th.

It stopped!

I boarded, swiping my card for the $2.25 ride to the Harlem-125th Street train station. Delighted, I asked the driver "Until what time would the bus stop mid block?" He said for 20 more minutes. You can indeed hail a big MTA bus as if it were a cab. And the bagels kept my feet all the way to the train station.