My Elkhound is in heaven when we visit Ronan Park. I have to take the back ways though, Lawrence has some 4-foot snow drifts on the sidewalk.
The opening on the trading floors was delayed a couple hours today. I’m right next to the Board of Trade, and it’s pretty dead down here. Hopefully lunch places will be open.
But look at the bright side; right now you’re all helping combat rising global sea levels!
Thanks for the link,** Ed**.
My street (southern suburbs here) has not been plowed–and we have at least 2 paramedics who live on it. The not plowed thing is a first. Usually our street is plowed.
I cannot open the kitchen door or the back sliding glass door. I can open the front door, so at least we can get out of the house! The drifts are crazy: some quite high, other patches are almost bare. The wind has died down here, thank goodness, but it is still snowing.
The thunder snow was amazing, as was the lightning. I think re '99 I just chalked it up to a heavy snowstorm. I was a SAHM at that point, so I had no work conflict etc.
Memory is a funny thing. I remember '79 crystal clear, and I’ve been told stories of the '67 one (we had just moved here about a month earlier… from Florida).
I hear I-80 out west (near Princeton) is shut down due to the many stranded cars and accidents. What a mess.
ETA: I just remembered '99! We have pics of the snow tunnel our kids built out of the shovelings off our driveway. DUH.
After looking out this morning and digging through the snow, I’d say it’s just about even with 1999. The biggest difference was that one was over the weekend (Jan 1, not only being New Year’s, but also a Friday) so it didn’t seem to disrupt the flow of life as much.
So, how does 2011 compare to 1967?
IN 1967, the snow was much higher in relation to my own height.
We just finished several hours’ worth of shoveling (there was no way my little snowblower was going to make it through three- and four-foot drifts). We’ve gotten everything clear but the alley, which the village will (eventually) plow, and which currently has about 3 feet of snow in it. Until that happens, we aren’t going anywhere.
My office (an ad agency downtown) closed, as did the private school where my wife is principal. She’s currently talking to the school board and trying to figure out if they’re going to open tomorrow (the roads are still a mess around the school).
Our cable TV (and, thus, internet connection) was knocked out by the wind around 10pm last night, and wasn’t restored until around 1pm this afternoon. We spent the morning listening to the radio…it felt like the 1940s. 
This looks worse than some of the 1967 blizzard photos that the Tribune had on their website:
http://jdavidake.tumblr.com/post/3071401690/lake-shore-stuck-another-image-from-snowbound
I’m here, home and safe! I was home by 11. Got lucky at the Argyle stop, a train had come from Howard on the wrong side, dumped its passengers, and made an announcement it was reversing and going back to Howard, so I hopped on and got to Loyola in a normal amount of time. Walking home from there was the trick. The snow had drifted over the street and sidewalks knee-deep already by then, so it took me about 20 minutes to make what’s normally a 5 minute walk.
Had a snow drift in my kitchen when I got home, about 2.5 feet long and 5 inches deep. The back door is apparently not sealed as well as I thought. At least, not in 60+ mph winds. I get wind right off the lake, so it was wicked and howling through the door! I “shoveled” it up with my stand-up broom dust collector, wiped the wood down from the wet, and rolled up a towel against the bottom of the door. Been OK since. I could feel the cold coming in, and had to turn on the radiator in the living room to counter it - it’s usually too warm in here with all the radiators on, but not last night! It’s back to normal today, though, and the radiators are off except one again.
Made a big pot of soup last night. It was the right thing to do. Between that, and checking up on friends and family by phone and facebook, I didn’t get back to the Dope before bedtime.
Whew! Staying home from work is usually not an option, but enough people made it in that I didn’t need to, so I wasn’t about to try to get through the drifts again if I didn’t have to. I did have to go down the block to pick up my organic produce box, and that was quite a chore. Normal round trip: 8 minutes. Today: 25! Though I did stop to take a few pictures.
My street and the adjoining streets are as yet not plowed, nor has anyone cleared their sidewalks, including my courtyard with butt-deep drifts I had to slog through to get to the store.
Through all this, I still just love the snow. Love it and always will.
Is anybody using an old kitchen chair to save your shoveled-out parking spot on the street yet?
I absolutely refuse to do that, but I haven’t touched my car yet today. I’ve never participated in that nonsense. I’ll ease up on my anti-dibs stance for a day like today, but people do it when there’s like a friggin two- or three-inch snowfall, sometimes leaving their dibs markers on the street for days after the snow has melted. The Sun-Times asked all the mayoral candidates about this today, and only one – Doc Walls, I believe – had the courage to speak out against it. I almost want to vote for the guy just for that.
Missed edit: It was Dock Walls indeed who was anti-dibs.
No, my space is clearly visible in my heated garage. 
Impressive as last night’s howling winds were, I’d have to say the '67 and '79 storms were more epic. The '67 storm brought the city to a standstill for five days. The '79 storm was one of a series of near-weekly massive snowfalls that eventually dumped nearly 90 inches on the city - I remember walking down an unshoveled commercial street in Evanston and having the tops of the parking meters at approximately ankle height. The city’s response was inept; much of the city remained impassable for weeks and the CTA collapsed. I vividly remember standing on the Belmont L platform as the third train passed without stopping and thinking: I’m voting for Jane Byrne. A lot of other people obviously had the same thought.
Today, not so bad. The sidewalks on the block are mostly shoveled. My street isn’t plowed, but Irving Park is clear, and my son’s girlfriend managed to make it here from California and Devon via the bus and the Brown Line. Judging from the helicopter videos, though, it’ll be a couple days before they get NB LSD cleared. They should have closed it way sooner than they did.
Oh, good! I admit, I DopeStalked you after I posted, and was concerned you hadn’t posted to any threads since last night! Glad to hear you’re safe and sound.
hangs head in shame
For the very first time in my life, I did. I apologize, but my rationalization is that it took three of us two hours to dig out (the other half of my car was buried by winds this morning), parking’s not that tight on my street and my SO’s 58 years old with a heart condition and a hernia, so I am NOT letting him near a shovel again if I can help it. (I tried to stop him the first time, which almost lead to our very first fight, but he prevailed and I watched him like a hawk to make sure he was taking it slow.)
So yes, this one time, I’m the asshole. I honestly do feel bad about it, but I did it for about 20 minutes while I ran to the store.
I did help the little old lady digging out her minivan all by herself, if that gets me any snow Karma points, though.
Re: the kitchen chair thing, I’ve never done it, but have always been amused by the idea. I wonder where it came from? How did it begin? Has it ever been sanctioned? Or outlawed? And what is the City’s view of it? Maybe this hard-hitting issue would be a good topic for a Straight Dope Chicago column?
Like I said, I’ll give people a pass in these extreme circumstances. But anything less than a blizzard, and I think you’re an asshole. (Not that any Chicagoans care what I think about them.)
In friendly neighborhood news, some unknown neighbor last night snowblowed the entire side of the block two or three times. Yay nice neighbors. It was a futile effort, as this morning you couldn’t tell anything was snowblowed. But I did shovel out my walk, as well as my neighbor’s. (I felt silly shoveling out only my part and leaving this huge bank of snow in front of my neighbor, when a big cleared strip of the block was just beyond that.)
It’s technically illegal, but it’s a tolerated and apparently much-loved tradition. It supposedly makes you a “Chicagoan” if the comments in the Sun-Times or Trib on this much-discussed seasonal issue are to be believed. None of the major mayoral candidates were brave enough to take a stance against it, and smartly so, politics-wise. Towards the end of the season, the City of Chicago tells people to remove their crap before they remove it themselves. I don’t know how much they go through with their threat, though.
The practice of “dibs” has been pretty well covered. For example, Eric Zorn writes about it here:
http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2011/02/compromise-1.html#more
I think it came up a lot in the wake of '99 storm - if I get a minute I might root around in the archives. I pitched a dibs story to the Wall Street Journal following a big storm some years ago and got turned down on the grounds that it had been done. If some novel angle occurred to me I might run the idea past the Master, but right now I can’t think of much that hasn’t already been said.