Nemo Update: we _might_ have gotten 2 feet of snow

Certainly, no power issues. R. is feeling better and thinks he'll run the snowblower around noon.

In the meantime, here are my crappy photos of the results. I'm lazy: first four are in the garage, looking out. Last three are in the kitchen, through the open slider to the deck. I'll update this shortly with some from the basement.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/92195888@N06/8457709427/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/92195888@N06/8458810772/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/92195888@N06/8458810260/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/92195888@N06/8458810018/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/92195888@N06/8457708179/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/92195888@N06/8458809462/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/92195888@N06/8458809226/

From the basement, through a slider to the underneath of a deck:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/92195888@N06/8458834212/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/92195888@N06/8457726441/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/92195888@N06/8458827770/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/92195888@N06/8457725727/

This is from the top side of the same deck (through the kitchen slider again), to give you a sense of how some of the snow got down there (the rest is presumably drifted/blown):

http://www.flickr.com/photos/92195888@N06/8458828466/

ETA: The photos are now a set: http://www.flickr.com/photos/92195888@N06/sets/72157632723086771/

Experimenting with Flickr: embedded slideshow (avoid if slow connection?)

Administrivia/Apologies

If it isn't obvious, a lot of what I'm doing with the snow pictures is learning how Flickr works, and how to get it to interact with LJ in a useful way. I'm also going to be checking out how this looks when mirrored to FB. There's a certain repetitiousness to this, for which I apologize, and obviously the photos do not inherently merit this level of attention -- this is just an opportunity to figure something out while trapped indoors with hopping children who are watching Team Umizoomi and I am exploiting it.

My other activity for the day is creating tables of contents for the photo binders I put together. You can imagine that fiddling with Flickr is a whole lot more entertaining (altho when I send holiday letters next winter, I'll be Real Happy I assembled a complete list of everyone I should be maintaining communication with while trapped inside by snow.).

Slideshow of Funny Travel Photos

Today's Activities Include: Uploading Still More Photos

Usually, I get R. to make the kids grilled cheese sandwiches on the general theory that I don't cook things I can't eat because it's hard to tell if I did it right. However, he is snowblowing and they didn't want to wait. My grilled cheese sandwiches don't look much like his. Altho they ate more of mine than they usually eat when he makes them. I'm going to assume this means mine are Acceptable (altho it might just mean they were Really Hungry).

In between starting more episodes of Team Umizoom on the Apple TV to entertain the kids, I've been trying NOT to just surf the web aimlessly, in favor of Actually Getting Things Done. This has not been particularly successful, however, I did take my camera down from the shelf, figure out the battery was dead and put it on the charger, extracted the SD card and then uploaded the photos (9 out of around 40) that were at least somewhat worth keeping. So that's something. I got the photos off the iPod Touch a couple days ago. There are a few still on my iPhone and of course the task I am avoiding, checking over what is on the ancient iMac as part of the complete decommissioning project.

The Roomba was run downstairs and upstairs; it's not clear how good of a job it is doing versus A Real Vacuum, but we think if you run it a few times a week, it's as good as what the person we have come clean our house does. Which suggests maybe we'll have her vacuum less and dust more over the next few weeks and see how our various allergies do with that tradeoff. We had dramatically limited what we asked of her, because she had some serious health problems that slowed her down, and there had been a lot of mission creep anyway.

It'll be interesting to see how long the kids like the robot vacuum, and whether they reach a point where they want it to Go Away. They can be like that, and that might, um, suck. Or not suck, as the case may be.

Travel Ban lifted, life still canceled

The state wide travel ban was for real. My neighbor says she saw a teenager drive down our road -- and then saw a police car pull them over and have a chat with them. The ban ended at 4 p.m.

R. seemed convinced that lots of things would be open this evening/tomorrow. I was skeptical. While the roads were sort of plowed, it was nothing like the bare pavement we usually see after getting a few inches. Still tricky surface, especially if there is some thawing.

Tomorrow's activities include the usual Sunday therapeutic riding for both children. That's not going to happen; I called the number for the place and they have pre-emptively canceled lessons for tomorrow. Not surprising -- the trails aren't going to be cleared at all and it would be non-trivial even clearing the rings.

Tomorrow's activities also included a long-planned birthday party for A.'s riding and swimming partner. Alas for G., her birthday party has been canceled, probably because the venue decided to stay closed, after having been closed for two days for the storm.

Tonight, it would have been nice to go to the store and pick up a few odds and ends like, say, ketchup (dunno how we ran out of that, but that's kind of a big deal around here). I called Roche Bros. at 4:52 to ask if they were open and if so for how long. They said they were closing at 5 p.m. So much for that plan. No cake for T., I guess, which is what he was asking for and we had run out of. I bought (a small) one just before the storm, but it is long gone (not my fault -- I didn't eat any of it).

While we have lots of food in the house, R. wasn't overjoyed about any of it, so I called Wendy's in Maynard, to see if a drive thru might be an option. At 5 p.m., they had just gotten in (travel ban? Remember?) and were hoping to open at 6 p.m. and stay open until their usual closing time (11 p.m., I guess). Who knows if it actually happened -- they had not cleared the parking lot as of when I talked to them.

R. likes El Huipil, a Mexican place in Maynard. They were not answering their phone at 5 p.m.

There were people on the radio on Thursday saying, oh, you know, closing schools on Friday is probably not called for. _All_ the schools in the state closed for the day (well, maybe a few had early dismissal -- but the closure list was extensive). A variety of people online, on TV, on the radio, and R. all seemed to think this thing would be plowed out and life would be back to normal Saturday afternoon.

It wasn't.

Not even remotely.

We're fine. There were very few power outages in our part of the state. There have been very few deaths as a result of this storm. Everyone is fine. But that doesn't mean that everything is normal. That doesn't mean everything is going to be normal on Sunday. And honestly? I'm wondering what Monday is going to be like. Among other things, the sidewalks haven't been plowed out yet, which means morning dropoff is going to be especially interesting.

ETA: Oh, and the Boston Children's Museum is closed for the third day in a row on Sunday.