Grad Diary 2/11/10

Snow Day!!!!

As everyone else living in the NE is aware of, PA (and other areas...wow, look at DC!) got dumped on with snow. We've had two other big snow storms this winter, but they were always on the weekend. This time it started Tuesday evening and snowed all day yesterday and this morning. Fortunately (I mean...darn!), classes were canceled, but unfortunately, experiments still had to be done. I decided to take a half day and come in the afternoon when I would have normally. Thankfully I wasn't in a hurry, so trudging through a foot and a half of snow (which literally came up to my knees) wasn't terrible...just adventurous. Living in West Philly meant that sidewalk shoveling duties fell on the homeowners, which left the sidewalks a veritable obstacle course with certain stretches cleanly shoveled immediately followed by a wall of snow. For my own part, my landlord agency takes care of the snow, so I don't have to shovel, but my particular apt is later on the list, so I didn't get shoveled until this morning (a full 24hrs post snowfall) which made stepping off my front porch yesterday...interesting (kind hard when it's hard to see where the porch ends).

It was actually really fun walking around and admiring the snow-laden trees and shrubs. A lot of the side streets weren't even plowed, and the unlucky drivers who had their cars parked there won't be digging their vehicles out anytime soon. The best part so far has been at night, when the extreme reflective properties of the snow make the normally dark lamplight illuminate the street to almost daylight levels...seriously, you would have no problems reading outside at night (except for the fact that it's, you know, cold).

The snow has been a nice diversion thus far, but I can't wait till people get their act together and shovel some more snow...if it's still like this tomorrow I'm going to have to allot an extra ten minutes just to get to class on time in the morning (and it normally only takes me 20 minutes to begin with).

As it turns out, my youngest brother (a senior in high school) not only got school off today and yesterday, but already had a scheduled day off tomorrow and the following Monday, netting him a second Winter Break. Lucky bastard.

Let me share some of the pics I took on the way to and from work over the past two days. Enjoy!

Snow Days 2010!