Thay let us out of work early. I’m outta here! Bye! 
Just tell me if the buses are running on time! frantic
(I can’t see anything outside my library windows but white. It’s so bizarre.)
Same here – first time ever. I get to leave in T-minus-5. Okay, it’s only an hour and a half early, but no complaints here. 
It’s still a little sunny here, but they’re predicting the snow to fall from 10 PM through till tomorrow night. I guess our company won’t declare another day off, though. 
So I stayed home today to study for my 2 midterms today. I’m just glad that I thought to check the University’s website before showing up – I would have been panicking thinking that I was at the wrong room!
My Florida-born wife is flying into NH tonight! It looks like she’ll finally get to see close-up what snow is like. The forecast is for 2-4 inches overnight and 2-4 inches tomorrow. I have a feeling it’ll quell her desire to live someplace north of I-10. Boy, I hope so.
Hot chocolate for everybody!
I’m at home now… my co-worker gave me a lift all the way home! It only took us 1.5 hours of crawling steadily through the snow along arterial roads to get here.
Apparently there is chaos out there: subway problems, a major train derailment, cancelled flights, gas shortages, car crashes… a perfect storm of a dozen things all coming together at once.
The gas shortages are because of a refinery fire that is just getting fixed, but because it’s winter the Seaway is closed and they can’t send spare fuel in by tanker, the pipeline from the east is at capacity, and a strike of CN Rail crews limited tanker trains. Add in corporate mergers that led to refinery closures (from 43 to 13 according to a report I heard this afternoon on the CBC) and just-in-time policies that limit inventory, and you have a recipe for trouble. The CBC was saying that it may be weeks yet before things are operating normally. Just-in-time only works in conditions of stable, predictable transport and supply!
The train derailment is east of the city (Brock Road in Pickering), and has cut regional and intercity passenger trains. Passengers are being diverted to buses in the middle of the snowstorm… buses that then have to use the congested highways.
The snowstorm has messed up traffic and I suspect at least a few people are running out of gas. Buses are having difficulty getting up hills, and there are road closures all over the city.
There was a mechanical failure on a subway train at St. George, messing up the subway.
They expect freezing rain tonight or tomorrow morning as the temperature warms.
Boy am I glad I’m home, and so extremely thankful to my friend.
Lemme tell ya… what should have been a 30 minute trip from work to home ended up taking two hours. Traffic was crawling, and not just at the Hurontario-Britannia bottleneck, either. It was stop and go the entire length of Hurontario from there to Brampton. Buses were packed cheek to cheek, though I was lucky enough to score a seat about 2/3rds the way home (which meant I had a good half hour sit). Some poor guy’s car broke down right in the middle of the road; he’d presumably abandoned it with the hood popped to slog over to a nearby service station for help. (Well, nearby in anything but this weather)
One thing is for sure: I’m not going anywhere tonight unless someone’s life is at stake. I don’t know what tomorrow will be like, but I expect I’ll still have to leave earlier than normal.
I guess it’s official: Ol’ Bastard Winter has made up for his tardiness.
Here too. Grumble grumble. We had an almost 50 degree day a couple weeks ago. Sighs all around. Winter’s almost over and all the big storms missed us. Now we’ve had two in the last week. The interstates and airports are closed. I hope everyone stays healthy, because ambulances wouldn’t be able to get through.
If I could get out the back door, I’d take a picture of the snow.
So I guess we get this next. The weather network is saying 20-30cm overnight and tomorrow… never enough to actually miss work over! Frankly, it isn’t so bad for us, since we live on one of the major streets in the city (direct access to one of the bridges) so it’s always one of the first to get cleared. A day or two of shoveling the car out, and then they come vacuum the snow right up!
I used to live in Hamilton and drive to Mississauga for work (fucking 403) and it was insane. I hated the GTA gridlock whenever it decided to snow; it seems so many people were always caught by surprise (What? Snow? In Canada? In the winter? IMPOSSIBLE!!). I’m glad you’ve made it home safely!
We’re getting the big storm system here tonight. The last one was just freezing rain for my area so I’m hoping either we get enough so that I don’t have to go to work, or that it’s mild so that when I DO have to go to work I’m not miserable.
That’s what happens when you live on the coast though.
Didn’t seem so bad when I was getting ready for work today.
Then I get out on the interstate and it’s only me in my compact car and a handful of SUVs…
Huh. Turns out it was a LOT worse than I thought.
So I get to work, talk to the boss on the phone about a project, and he tells me to go home. No, he TELLS me to go home.
Only two hours later than my drive in, but boy howdy it was definitely stress inducing, that little drive on I-80 that normally takes 15 minutes.
But I did score points with the boss for coming in!!
You get snow days off work? Lucky.
When I was a kid in Minnesota, we got a lot of snow days off of school but one thing I noticed is that my dad never got a day off work because of snow (he is a technical engineer). Although his vacation days were generally flexible, and I think I remember him coming home early from work once in 10 years to avoid getting seriously snowed in.
If the Toronto news sites I’ve just looked at are accurate (and I have no reason to believe otherwise), then “perfect storm” is a good way to put it. Phew! Doesn’t look pleasant, and I’m glad to hear that you made it home OK, Sunspace. Hope that you and the other Ontario/Quebec Dopers stay safe during this storm.
Not too bad here, but definitely greasy and the snow is still coming down, but lightly. At least half of our team stayed home with kids or because of long commutes. I guess I’ll probably head out soon unless our Big Boss shows up.
Yeah, in Minnesota we’re under a blizzard warning today until 6. I’m at work. I walked the eight blocks or so to get here. I did go home early yesterday just so we could get both the vehicles in the alley and because they weren’t plowing the streets at all. I didn’t want to walk home through a foot of snow. By this morning a few of the streets were plowed so I was fine. I really hope they plow our alley out sometime today though, so my husband can pick me up this afternoon instead of having to walk again (he’s off because his work is 20 miles away and all the highways are closed). The walk wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be this morning, actually. It’s not that cold (about 20 degrees) and once I got through the snow in my front yard, the walking wasn’t terrible. In my yard, though, the snow was about three inches above my knees. Still coming down, too.
When my dad was at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota last year, I was chatting with one of the gals who took him to his different appointments. She was probably 20.
She said that the thing that sucks about growing up in Rochester is that you never get snow days there because the roads are always always always plowed because of Mayo.
I was expecting chaos this morning on the way to work, but to my intense surprise it was normal! Everything was on schedule and on time; the only difference was a lot of slush and running water in the roads in my neighbourhood. The clouds were thinning and beginning to break up, and I even had glimpses of sun and blue sky!
And my cool Transylvanian co-worker offered me a lift should I need it in the future. This is a different co-worker from the one who gave me a lift yesterday.
groan
They cancelled classes again today, which means a third midterm is going to be re-scheduled. I already have two assignments due next week. I don’t even think that it snowed last night.
I’m just waiting to see a plow! It was snowing hard when I woke up at 7 am, and I have yet to see one. Although the guy who does my driveway just did my next-door neighbour’s place – it took him a dozen passes in his truck. He’s just started doing mine.