I was expecting a bit of a shock, coming back from the glorious warmth of Florida into the deep freeze of New England, but that’s not to say that I was prepared. The thermostat in my parents’ house reads 59 F (15 C). I’m sure this seems like a reasonable temperature if you’re paying the heating bill, but it’s way too cold for me. Before we left for Florida I had to sleep in all my clothes, under four blankets, avoiding deep breaths that might bring a burst of cold. After acclimating to Florida, I gave up entirely and took my pillow down to the basement, which has an easily adjusted independent thermostat. I’ve slept on the floor in the basement for the past two nights, basking in the warmth and darkness.
When I woke up yesterday morning it was snowing, and I couldn’t find my cell phone. I looked everywhere, and eventually took to calling it from the house phone. I eventually found it this way, buried in a snowdrift inside my car. One of the windows had accidentally been left ajar overnight.
My friends and I eventually made plans for New Year’s Eve, which started off at my house, but my driveway was still covered in snow. My parents have an arrangement with a snowplow operator who charges some exorbitant price to clear the driveway after every snowstorm, but he hadn’t come yet. I decided to shovel it myself. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to get some exercise, do something a bit meditative, and enjoy the sunset over the snowscape. “Besides,”, I thought, “I don’t think I’ve ever shoveled this whole driveway myself. How hard could it be?”.
As it turns out, those plow operators could probably charge even more than they do. I wasstill shoveling as my first guest arrived.
Our plan was approximately the same as two years ago: a deliberately counterseasonal barbeque. (I call this approach “Mission: Inadvisable”.) Grilling in the pitch black night, in the middle of a howling windstorm and blowing snow, is not easy. The food was hard to see, and so had a tendency to get overdone, but the results were still tasty. Christina contributed a delicious apple crumble, approximately an apple pie with no crust.
The rest of the evening was our usual comedy of errors, but we eventually found our way to my friend Jeremy’s apartment (which is beautiful), where we played Guitar Hero until the early hours of the morning.
Happy 2009! That number is a little bit hard to believe.