Snow Day!!!

Snow Day!!!  And yes, parking in the garage was the right decision.

Cars were covered by at least a foot of snow, and according to Jorge, found on Riverside Drive shoveling out his car for his reverse commute to Yonkers, he'd been digging out his car for at least 45 minutes.

On the way to Riverside Park to walk our schnoodle, we passed a buried Prius.  

And a neighbor walking her dog, 

and an M-5 bus making its way up Riverside Drive.

The park was glorious!

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To Park on the Street or Not to Park on the Street

To park on the street or not to park on the street.  Generally, we park on the street.  It's not too hard to find a parking place on our street in front of one of the schools where parking is permitted from 4 pm until 7 am.  Usually I'm delighted when it snows because we can leave our cars parked for days (not in front of the school) when alternate side parking restrictions are lifted.  Then I take care to park on Riverside Drive -- where I'm sure I'm not in a school spot and sure I won't have to move my car before 7 am.

Today school was dismissed early because of snow.  Our last three 80 minute classes were cut to 45 and we all went home at 11:30 am.  Woo Hoo!!!  I traded the Prius (not good on ice or in snow) for the Volvo parked in the middle school lot across from the train station.  The wiper blade became detached because of all the snow and I had to stop before getting on the parkway to clean the front window and re-attach the side-swiping blade.  One one car accident on the Saw Mill -- a huge SUV spun around down a hill off the side of the road.  The snow was heavy and wet;  The road slushy and slippery.

I had to decide whether to leave the car on Riverside Drive where it was sure to get covered by a foot of snow and get plowed in by another three feet when the plows went through or put it in a garage down the street for $15 a night.  In the end, it was a no brainer.  I didn't want to be shoveling out heavy, wet, icy snow two or three days from now.  What a relief to pull into a garage.  What a luxury!  And on my way home there was a neighbor shoveling out her car, moving shovelful after shovelful of white weight from street to sidewalk.

My only concern was that we wouldn't have a snow day tomorrow -- that I'd have to call the garage at 6 am to have them pull my car out.  The call came at almost 10 pm.  A snow day tomorrow!!!!  And outside our window, Broadway is white.  And the cars parked on 109th are covered in white and blocked up to the top of their hubcaps with a berm of white pushed there by city plows.  And we're still expecting another 6-12 inches tonight.

Check out the story in the New York Times.

A Dog Story

This is not quite a commuting story, more of a dog walking story.  In Riverside Park I met Annie and her fluffy beigeish dog, Picca.  We walked from the park where Picca had been sitting for a very long time gazing at a tree, hoping for a squirrel sighting, to Lenscrafters at 107th and Broadway.  Just as Annie and I were saying good-bye, a man in a leather jacket turned to ask if that was Annie's dollar bill on the sidewalk.  She said no, and asked me.  I said no.  Then she asked another woman walking down the street if it were her dollar.  She checked her zippered silver clutch and said no.  Suddenly, there was a second dollar bill.  And a five.  "Dollars from Heaven" does not have the same mellifluous sound as "Pennies from Heaven," none-the-less, that is exactly what three green wing-like bills landing on the sidewalk appeared to be.  The man again suggested the money must belong to one of us.  And so we picked up the bills, handed the five to the woman with the silver clutch and divided the two singles between us.

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.