Then the “blizzard conditions” arrived, on top of the snow that had fallen so recently, on top of what we’d already shoveled into rather large piles, and things threatened to become interesting again.

Drifts. Now that’s something I miss here in DC. It’s happened a couple of times since I’ve been here, and it’s happening now. The snow is still arriving pretty much horizontally, although the end of the precipitation is supposedly in sight. The winds, however, will continue, if we are to believe the weather mavens (and they’ve been pretty accurate this year).

I know, it’s trite to talk about the weather so much. So here’s a picture of a bird hiding under our back deck during the onslaught today:

For all I know, the sparrows are still hunkering down in the bush by the front porch (two of them flew out Monday while I was talking across it with a neighbor, me down on the ground, he on his porch—he didn’t even notice).

Almost time to start shoveling again …
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*I refuse to call it Snowmageddon, or Snowpocalypse, or Blizzacane, or whatever everybody’s calling it. Good grief, as if.

(Note the three o’clock shadows—already a month from the solstice, but the sun is still lying low.)

Two weeks ago today, the Potomac was frozen over, and I saw this scene from Key Bridge as I biked to work:

A diver had knocked a hole in the ice with an ax and had lowered himself into the water. On the dock of the nearby boathouse, a bunch of guys prepared to join him, one of them maneuvering a strange contraption:

I thought maybe they were fishing for a dead body,* or looking for explosives, or something else appropriately dramatic.

But eventually their casual, almost lackadaisical behavior convinced me it was a training exercise, so I repacked the camera, put my gloves back on, and continued on my merry way to an absolutely thrilling Monday at work.
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*One summer day several years ago, again on my way to work, I had indeed seen a dead man splayed out on the boathouse dock, surrounded by police and rescue personnel. It was the morning after a nighttime cloudburst, and it’s my guess he was a homeless guy who had been washed out of a culvert about a half-mile upriver. If you rent a canoe and paddle up that way, you’ll see the warning sign where the stormwater periodically rushes out into the Potomac.

Five male robins were rummaging around in the dead leaves under the front porch and shrub this morning. It looked like they were looking for food. The leaves were flying left and right, and one of them made an angry open-mouthed gesture when another got too close. One guy made a brief dash toward the window where I was sitting and thought better of it. This does not look good, folks. It’s winter. What the hell are the robins doing?

My alma mater got a little cute the other day, sending out a sample admissions essay that they thought would help calm applicants down a bit as the January 2 deadline approached. While most people seemed to think it was just fine, others thought it went over the line. You decide. I think it was classic U of C.

When a big corporation does something right, we should acknowledge it, right? Way back at the beginning of 2009 my trusty Canon A95 started acting funny. Eventually the funniness turned into a permanent inability to take a picture—the image had a magenta cast and bunch of horizontal lines all over it. I kept fiddling with it, hoping it would “fix itself” (yes, I do believe in magic), but also decided to buy a newer model. I ended up with the SX10 IS, which I really like. In late summer I decided to sell the A95′s wide angle lens on eBay, but while I was researching what such things might go for and the A95 in general, I learned about a problem some A95s had with their CCD (the imager): some units supplied by Sony had an issue with the connector, which Canon eventually concluded was not caused by user mishandling, and the company was replacing them for free whether or not the camera was still covered by the warranty (I bought the thing back in 2005). Long story short: talked to a Canon rep, got a free FedEx label, sent the little guy to Illinois, and got a working A95 back two days later. So now I have a nice second camera I can carry around and not worry about anything. (My recent wandering-around-town pics were taken with the A95.) Kudos to Canon. Customer for life here.

Oh, heck: one more testimonial. The Roland Micro Cube is really nifty. I use it with a Yamaha electric violin. You can plug in your guitar if you want. Either way, you can mess around with straight amplification or an array of classic amp decks (JC Clean, Black Panel, Brit Combo, etc.). It’s a gas. Not a lot of power, but enough—it’s really a practice amp. But get this: it runs on batteries, and for a long time (I bought it over a year ago and still haven’t swapped out the rechargeables I put in it). If you need more power, get the bigger model. But this little thing is great just as is.

Okay, that’s enough. Goodbye, 2009.

Addendum 2010.01.20: Turns out the feisty robins are from up north; “our” robins have headed south.

I’m a Clevelander, so snow always makes me happy. I wasn’t at all bothered that the Volvo was buried …

… but, damn, look at this!

Luckily that’s my backup bike (my Trek is warm and dry inside—and gloating, no doubt). But the point is this: I had to take the Metro all week! Okay, okay, it was a short week, with Christmas and all. But still—no biking makes me ornery.

Usually. But snow always pleases me somehow. And the walk to and from the Metro gave me a chance to see the snowy sights I might miss on the bike. For instance, this—the fattest snowman I’d ever seen, digesting happily near the festooned deck of the Dancing Crab:

As for this, I have no idea what it was meant to be—a decorated pile of snow, I suppose:

In taking this shot, however, I learned something about those signs made of dots that run from right to left (there’s probably a fancy name for them—the devoted reader will clue me in, I’m sure). The dots must get filled in from top to bottom as well, because the word “cigar” (or the phone number, whatever) was clearly visible when I snapped the picture, but not all the dots are lit up in the photo. Even such minuscule enlightment is enlightenment, right? My spouse (who is truly enlightened) would not agree, of course, but that’s okay. Many paths etc.

And I saw this, which has nothing to do with the snowstorm:

“Captain Arturo, fighting for nonviolence.” I’m a sucker for heavy irony, especially when it comes to aggressive or antisocial behavior.

Speaking of which, let’s commemorate the can’t-do attitude of the new upper-northwest branch office of TD Bank (“America’s Most Inconsiderate Neighbor™”). Unlike most if not all of the businesses around them, they declined to shovel the public sidewalks along the two streets abutting their marble-and-glass palace, never mind that it is a requirement imposed by force of local law, if not also and equally by the natural and healthy urge of a properly developed social consciousness.

As of Monday evening (thirty or forty hours after the snow had stopped falling, but who’s counting?), they had not cleared the sidewalks, and by Tuesday the local Yahoo listserv was buzzing with complaints—tales of women slipping and falling, bank personnel saying they have no intention of shoveling the sidewalks, etc.). Also by Tuesday, the bank had shoveled the sidewalks, but it was too late—the bile was out of the bladder.

The chronology is funny, if you find really stupid, inconsiderate things funny: at 5:45 am on Sunday, heavy equipment arrived to clear TD Bank’s parking lot and drive-through lanes—the kind of heavy equipment that beeps whenever it backs up. The nearest residence is right across the alley from the bank, and it’s residences all the way up the street. But apparently the job wasn’t really done, because at around 11:00 pm on Monday, the heavy equipment shows up again, this time with a big dump truck. They’re going to haul away all that snow, you see. For whatever reason. And this is when the guy shows up with a shovel to do the sidewalks. Funny, eh?

In response to a query about how long they intended to work, the man in charge said, “As long as it takes.” Did that mean “through the night”? Yes, it did mean that. Who told them to start work at 11:00 pm? We were hoping for a name, but the answer was: “The property owner.” The property owner—isn’t that the bank? No, it’s not the bank. And indeed, the property owner is not TD Bank. We forgot. They’re leasing the site from … from some … well, rumor has it, a couple of greedy sisters up in Rockville sequestered behind some LLC. Well, sisters anyway—the greedy part is obviously editorializing, based on how they ran off a popular movie theater (The Outer Circle) and a restaurant (Round Table, which had cleaned up its act and had turned into a very neighborly establishment indeed) because they weren’t bringing in enough dough, and who, because they wanted to lease the land rather than sell it, constricted the pool of tenants to the likes of a 24-hour CVS (which was already situated a few blocks south on Wisconsin Ave.) or a bank (of which there were already five in a four-block stretch, from Fessenden to Jenifer). According to this nocturnal snow-removing demon, it was the old ladies in Rockville (or their rep) who arranged for the work that disturbed the sleep of the bank’s neighbors for a second night straight—not the bank. (He, of course, didn’t say “the old ladies in Rockville.” We’re putting two and two together, that’s all.)

Oh, well. That’s all blood under the bridge by now. The rains came, the snow melted, the squirrels are frolicking, and the sidewalks along TD Bank are incredibly clear. Let’s not even think about the nine months of construction hell in 2009, and the years of hassles and ANC meetings because of the bank’s original plan to use the nearby alley as a driveway for its two drive-through windows, and so on, and on and on. The new year is almost here. Perhaps the bank learned that customer convenience doesn’t trump common decency toward its neighbors. And no doubt the plans for the big new super-Safeway down the block will be just fine and the project will be a monument to enlightened urban life.