SnOMG pt 2

[wendyzski]

Yesterday I stayed in all day like the lazy condo-owning bitch that I am. :) I told the property managers that as long as the front sidewalk was clear enough to get out by this morning and the back was clear by evening then I'd be satisfied.

I actually had to go out in the early height of the blizzard because it was 85 in my unit and 90 in my neighbor's. I checked the building's single thermostat and it was fine, so I flushed and restarted the boiler. Then I told the people that were over-warm to turn off a radiator or two, open a window, and count their &^(#&*^#)% blessings. Things seemed to stabilize by mid-day yesterday, so I'm guessing a combination of maintenance not draining the boiler regularly like they are 'sposed to and the 70mph wind gusts sucking the heat out of that side of the building. That was about 8PM Tuesday night and there was a 2 ft drift in the courtyard already by that point. It's about 4ft now.

I really want to bitch-slap my downstairs neighbor for starting to whine about the snow less than 6 hours after the blizzard was over! Can't wait till he's on the board and I'm not, so I can make HIS life miserable instead.

But mostly I hung around the house, napped, played on the computer, read a bit and watched TV. Oh, and made brownies.

I left extra time to get to work today, and took the route that involved trains rather than busses for most of it, and ended up getting to work half an hour early. There was at least a single-snowblower-width path all the way to the terminal (although between the snow and the piled-ed up parts it was a small canyon with parts up to my armpits on both sides). I wore extra clothes and boots and made it in with minimal issues. Clark, Devon and Broadway were all cleared.

Here at Tree it looks like we got a little water infiltration into the overhead soffits- papers on my desk look like they were rained on, but everything was dry this morning. I checked all the suites and there are 2 more that have a bit of that showing, so I left post-its saying that I was aware of the situation and if anything stopped working to let me know. All three desks affected are directly under ceiling heat vents, but my keyboard is fine and I can iron my papers if I have to :)

There is a hilarious video online of Jim Cantore from The Weather Channel doing a live remote during the thundersnow. He jumped about a foot in the air and managed not to actually swear on camera. The location he was broadcasting from was across the street from Tribune Tower, so I'll bet he was staying at the Intercontinental 3 doors up the street. And then of course all the pictures of the abandoned cars on LSD.

Here is my take on that - the city was monitoring things. They warned that the drive was going to be dicey and get worse really fast, but they also knew that they had thousands of people trying to get out of the downtown area. Had I personally been driving, I would have stayed off the Drive and slogged on side streets - when bigblued posted on Facebook that she was headed that way, I told her to turn around and take side streets. But it WAS moving - until 2 CTA busses spun out in the space of less than half an hour, blocking almost all traffic. Things went south so fast from there that there really wasn't time to shut things down because all of those cars were already on the Drive. I think that given the info that they had, they made the best decision that they could at the time. Yeas, it was awful, but no one died or was seriously injured, and they went around on snowmobiles eventually and got everyone out and to a warming center at St. Joseph's hospital. Was it a perfect decision? Well hindsight is always 20-20. But I'm sure that the same people who are screeching about "Why didn't they shut down the Drive sooner" would have been screaming "Why did they shut the Drive down so soon - thousands of people were trapped downtown!" in any case. Shut up.

Comments

[qnofhrt.livejournal.com]

I agree with your assessment of the whole LSD thing. The guy who made the decision was in a no-win situation and he made the best call he could. I heard the warnings about LSD in the morning and had I been downtown, I would have avoided it. But it's a major people mover and probably thousands of people got home Tuesday because they took it.