IME, people in Boston like to pretend that their weather is a lot worse than it actually is. The reputation of the New England Winter isn’t really deserved – though I guess the settlers that came here first were used to winter being a bit cold and drizzly. But here? More than a few inches, and nobody leaves the house. The whole city seems abandoned… yet everything still runs. Businesses close, but most retail places stay open, and public transit still runs as well as it every does.
Hell, during one of last year’s snow storms in Boston, I decided to walk a few miles through it rather than taking the bus, just to gauge the weather around here. It was pretty cold and snowy, but the worst of Boston’s winter is pretty unremarkable by Cleveland or Michigan standards. In college, I used to walk through worse almost every day during the winter.
I’m a manager with a large grocery here in Central Virginia. We’ve been open a little less than a year in this location. On Friday we did 60% more business than we have ever done on any other business day. We did it without a good portion of our staff who panicked and did not come in. Indeed, I have spent most of the past 3 days, including two sleepless overnights trying to get the place back into shape because there’s just a very few of us who actually came to work. Also most of our delivery trucks have been stranded on the highways and have not brought product.
2 feet of snow and the talk was that we were in some sort of Wintery Katrina.
The drive home yesterday on 29 South was bizarre. Probably 200 cars abandoned or wrecked in a 20 mile stretch.
I came home yesterday for 2 hours, showered and went back. Unbelievable how wiped out the store was. Unbelievable.
I’m from the East, and the reaction to the first rain of the season, in the Bay Area at least, is lot like the reaction to the first snow in more civilized areas. Headlines in the papers, tons of accidents, bad traffic. OMG, water from the sky!!! We haven’t seen this ever (or at least since last March.)
LA gets snow in the Grapevine, at least, and we can see it on our mountains. And I still have my snow shovels, just in case.
I don’t really know where you’re going with this question - my husband and I were pissed off, because after he spent four hours in his car getting home from work, he abandoned it on the 14th Street hill that he couldn’t get up and walked home from there. We have a reasonable expectation that in a city that gets dumps of snow multiple times every year, we will have equipment and manpower in place to handle it so that we can still get around. We expect the major routes (like 14th Street) to be in passable shape, and the side streets to get cleared in a day or two.
We don’t clean out the grocery stores in a snowfall, though. If I can’t drive there, I strap on my snowboots and walk (even in
-30 - I have a parka and longjohns).
But to not be prepared for the eventuality of not being able to leave the house for two or three days is just insane. Because a disaster that leaves the roads impassable for a couple days is pretty much guaranteed to happen at some point.
Are there really people who literally have nothing to eat at home? No boxes of cereal, no cans of soup, no crackers, NOTHING? Like, their kitchen cupboards are completely empty?
I’m low on soup at the moment (except for the cream soups that I use to make sauces) but I still have at least a month’s worth of food on hand. No milk or cereal, due to my lactose intolerance, but my freezer is full and my cabinet are pretty well stocked with the basics.
I generally stock up on things when they’re on sale, so I seldom have to make emergency runs to the store anyway. Sometimes I’ll run low on something (like the aforementioned soup) if there hasn’t been a sale lately or if I didn’t get a chance to shop for some reason, but I can always find something to eat.
I did actually date a guy once that kept instant coffee, nondairy creamer, sugar, and paper cups and plates and plastic flatware. He did take out all the time. The only thing that could be considered food in the house was his collection of packets of airline snacks, some assorted booze, cans of mixers and some cocktail olives. Very rat pack-like, I guess. The guy was a sales manager and traveled constantly. All his toiletries were taken from hotels. His towels on the other hand were not stolen from hotels, he liked really nice thick bath sheets.
Seriously. I just got back from visiting my SO’s family in Mission Viejo this past weekend, and they were all bitching about how cold it was at night, and asking me OVER AND OVER again if I was sure I was okay in a t-shirt, jeans, and flip-flops. I mean, it was less than 60 degrees - surely I was FREEZING?!?!
I gently (and in some cases, humorously) reminded them that it had recently been below zero as a HIGH in Colorado for a couple of days, so I was perfectly fine. You’d have thought I was walking around in a blizzard wearing only a thong.
Born in Minnesota, spent grades 2-4 outside Charlottesville, towards the Blue Ridge. Lived towards the mountains. Even as a kid I dismissed the school authorities of terminal pussitude because they’d close school with the slightest bit of new snow. That is, until I was on the bus with 1/4" of snow, stuck behind some idjit on a sweeping, banked turn over a gorgeous valley which started near the road’s edge but flattened a couple miles away horizontally but hundreds of feet vertically, and when the driver applied the gas we began to slide towards it. :eek:
I’ve gotten to when it’s above freezing anywhere between about mid-October and April I forget to even fasten my coat half the time. I go through a few days in the fall when the temps first go down where I think it’s pretty damned chilly in the 30sF and then I’m fine for the rest of the winter. This is a good thing because of that cold spell a couple of weeks ago…now, -14 at night, -8 when I leave for work, that’s cold.
I went out to my car last night in my pajamas, essentially a long-sleeved t-shirt and sweatpants. I was fine. It was only just below freezing and I wasn’t out there for more than two minutes. No coat.
My perspective on cold changed radically my first real winter here. And I found that I love it. I also love snowplows. Love love love snowplows.
Yeah, it’s really weird. Us Californians dress as if we’re about to hike Everest when the temperatures hit the upper 40s. Do you really need thirty layers of clothing for the one minute it takes for you to walk from your car to the office? :smack:
This made me laugh. Not the fact that someone that travels a lot would only have stuff like that in his apartment, but that you would throw booze and mixers in with “the only thing[s] that could be considered food.” Just because people *try *to subsist on it doesn’t mean it’s food. I’d hate to see what your liver looks like.
I absolutely agree that Boston winter isn’t usually as bad as advertised, but I really must take issue with your assertion about the MBTA. It can be frustrating on a normal day, but it’s generally utter shit in the snow. The subway is bad enough, I can’t imagine being dependent on a bus in this weather. I mean, there are technically buses I can take, but since you never know when they’re gonna be there, my feeling is “Well, I can stand here and be cold, or I can walk and be cold. If I’m walking, at least I know I’m eventually gonna get there.”
Me? I actually don’t drink now, and generally was the dedicated driver most evenings. Even when I did drink it was maybe 2 or 3 drinks except for one party where I did 16 margaritas [and never did pass out or vomit] when I hot 21. I think it is a law that people take you out and gt you drunk on your 21st birthday. [and THAT is a joke before you misconstrue that somehow]
If you look I said ‘could be considered food’ not that I considered them food.
I was also highly offended because when I took a friend to AA because he couldn’t drive himself, on the basis that 1 I showed up at the meeting instead of sitting in my car reading and 2 I enjoyed a tablespoon of brandy in coffee several evenings of the week [and do note that it was perhaps as much booze as one might get in a sauce at a restaurant and I was not drinking for effect, but flavor] no matter what I said, and despite the fact that I had not had more than that tablespoon of brandy at a time in almost a year I was a stone cold alcoholic.
Fair enough. That probably depends on which routes you use. The handful of buses I used last winter usually weren’t slowed down much, but they were either during non-rush hours, or rush hour through parts of town with light traffic. Though I agree with you, and usually will walk for 15 minutes rather than wait for a bus.
I have to step in here and defend my state. I’ve lived in northern VA/DC area for over 25 years and the one constant every winter is the crooning of the Yankees at the first snow. “Why, in my home state, we get 100 feet of snow and we like it that way!” It never gets old hearing about how northern cars can magically drive through 20 feet of snow because their drivers were born north of the Mason-Dixon line.
Sure, there are a lot of folks here that have never seen much snow. These days I know a lot more people from southern India than from southern USA and for some of them this really is the first snow they have driven in. But, the worst of all is the people from the north who think that weather has no effect on them, like they have some sort of professional agreement with mother nature. So, some of the northerners here, how about telling us what ya’ll do up north when you get two feet of snow, and then have a thaw/freeze cycle for a couple of days which leaves three inches of solid ice on everything? How exactly does your car go when it is encased in ice? What makes your Honda Accord able to travel effortlessly over an ice cover road or able to push through a two foot wall of ice to get out in the first place?
This is the first snow storm in ages where everything didn’t freeze and leave everything covered in a few inches of ice. For the most part, this is why we seem to have dug ourselves out relatively quickly, and with a few exceptions (Old Town Alexandria), the streets have been plowed, and everything is almost back to normal. My street was plowed by Sunday morning and was clear of any snow or ice.
Owning a 4x4 plow truck with chains on all 4 Mud/Snow tires helps. ;).
Our other cars are SUVS with good ground clearance and dedicated snow tires. I tried a two wheel drive car with studded snows on all 4 wheels and not much ground clearance. I got tired of dragging it home with the truck and bought a Jeep, and have now since owned 2 SUV’s.
In 18 years at altitude in the Rocky mountains, I have called in twice to work because of snow. Once was April 19th the day of the OK bombings. The other day was Columbus day, that I was able to take as a holiday anyway.
Once was April 19th the day of the OK bombings. The other day was Columbus day, that I was able to take as a holiday anyway.