It’s snowing. Again. Today. Right now. It has been snowing all day. It will continue to snow all night. Tonight.
I don’t really mind the snow – in fact, I actually do enjoy the snow, when I don’t have to drive in it on roads that have not yet been plowed/salted/sanded/whatevered. I can actually feel all of this snow taunting me, making me yearn for pulling on my boots, stepping into my bindings, and cruising down a nice, wide hard-packed snowy trail.
Sigh… I need to go flip through some old skiing photos…
I’m not sure why, normally I don’t really care much about it one way or the other, but for some reason, this Winter olympics, I am really geared up to see the USA doing so well and bringing home the hardware. I like the Winter Olympics, in general, especially the alpine skiing events, and the men’s and women’s hockey (if the US has a decent team) but I really want our country to collect the most medals this time around.
It almost feels like 1980 all over again. I’m getting kindof goose-bumpy when I think about it… dare I hope for a two gold medals for the USA hockey teams?
Friday night was our Cub Scout Pack meeting, which lasted from around 7:30 PM until clean-up finished around 10:00 PM. Saturday morning, I drove up to Florham Park to complete the required Cub Scout Leader specific training for the Pack Committee Chairman position, from 9:00 AM until Noon. Drove home, cleaned up the house a bit and got ready for the baby-sitter to arrive at 3:45, so that Edith and I could drive over to Summit to catch the 4:49 train into Hoboken for the night…
Last night we celebrated my in-laws 45th wedding anniversary (today) at Leo’s restaurant in Hoboken, along with the majority of Edith’s siblings and their spouses (Michael, Cassy, Guy, Meaghan, Judith, Brian, Andrea, Gus) along with Edith’s grandmother, Uncle Peter and Aunt Lisa. We all took the train in together, which was a fun time, but the evening was still young; we got to Leo’s at a little past 6:00 PM, and had to wait a bit for our table for 15 (they do not take reservations, but assured us we arrived early enough we would be seated) so we hung out at the bar and ran a tab. Now, Leo’s is not a terribly big place, and the bar area is pretty tight, and our party was starting to get a bit, um, relaxed. Let’s just say that I’m sure there were plenty of folks at the bar who were happy to finally see us seated, but once we were seated, we were just hitting our stride. We practically took ownership of the place at that point. Now, we were not particularly obnoxious, but we were certainly loud, and enjoying the evening. I don’t think we’ve ever had the opportunity before to go out together, with all of our kids at home with sitters, and just enjoy each other’s company in such a way. Was there excessive alcohol? You bet. Lots of food? Absolutely. Lots of busting of chops, but no one taking any of it seriously, all in good fun; lots of laughing, yelling, and singing. Lots of picture taking, even a birthday cake to celebrate Judith’s 31st birthday yesterday. A few hours later, our meals were finished, and we were ready to move onto the next stop.
We intended to have some drinks at The Nag’s Head, an Irish bar located downtown, but unfortunately for us we had not yet finished the cigars we had started on the walk over from Leo’s. We decided instead to walk down to the river and grab some drinks at the W, i.e. the Westin Hotel, in their outdoor bar overlooking the New York City skyline. Again, unfortunately for us, there was a line outside waiting to get in, which we did not want to stand on. Fortunately, Trinity was located right across the street, so we finally gathered there. I was able to manage a pint of Guinness, before Edith and I had to take off to catch the 11:08 train back to Summit (the train schedule out of Hoboken is pretty desperate; basically if you miss the 11:08 PM, train, which gets you back to Summit at 12:06 AM after switching trains in Newark, you’ve got to catch the 11:33 PM train, switch trains in Secaucus, and then get back into Summit at 1:28 AM. Miss those trains, and your last hope is the 1:32 AM drunkard train, pulling into Summit at 2:28 AM.) We made the 11:08 train, no problem – but the rest of our party hung out at Trinity to wait and catch a non-existent 12:00 AM train, and arrived in Summit nearly 3 1/2 hours later.
We were a bit tired this morning – managed to miss Mass, but I don’t think we were expecting to make it anyway. Today was a catch-up day, to squeeze into one day whatever normally gets done in two days.
While I’m thinking of it… I did manage to catch the opening ceremonies of the Vancouver Winter Olympics this past Friday night, and I thought it was pretty darn good, but aside from the athletes, and Wayne Gretzky and the Olympic torch and all that, there were two pieces of the ceremony that simply blew me away:
k.d. lang singing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. This is an amazingly incredible performance, filled with so much emotion and power, yet such tenderness and sweetness. If you haven’t seen this performance, you need to. The actual video is not available via YouTube (it comes down almost as quickly as someone puts it up) but here’s the audio from the performance:
Joni Mitchell singing Both Sides Now to a graceful acrobatic flying performance across amazing images of the Canadian prairie
Seriously. Why do I need to come up with a stupid title to my posts? I mean, we’re talking about a post that gets saved as an entry in a database table, with its own primary key internally stored, so it can’t be needed, technically. How about defaulting the title to the date and time the post was created? That’s what I used to do back in the old days when I simply wrote my thoughts down in spiral bound notebooks. How about it? I kind of like the idea, and I’ll give it a go with the next post.
Anyway, it was an interesting weekend. Woke up early on Saturday to take Will to his audiologist for a routine hearing check, followed by a stop at the Patriots Path Council Scout shop to pick up belt loops and pins for this Friday’s Pack meeting, then drove by the bank to make a deposit at the ATM, then filled up the Lexus at the gas station, and then home. Hung out at home in the afternoon and evening, watched some of the Winter Olympics. Woke up early again on Sunday to make 9:00 AM Mass at St. Joseph’s before heading over to Newark with Will for the Seton Hall vs. DePaul basketball game at the Prudential Center (SHU won 79-71.) Picked up some Valentine treats for Edith on the way home, had dinner and shared Valentines with the kids, put Kate to bed, and replied to an email that I received on Sunday morning from Susan.
I’m not going to get into the details of her email here, nor my reply, but receiving her email was a bit of a surprise; a welcome surprise, at that. I don’t know, what’s it been, maybe 7 years since I’ve heard from her directly? I’m not sure. She’s got a personal crisis she’s dealing with, and as much as I might think I understand what she’s going through in reality I can’t say that I do. I do hope and pray for things to work out, and who knows, maybe I will hear from her again, soon. In my reply I shared with her my post from back in July (SCP); I mean, what the Hell, might as well put that out there, and maybe, just maybe, Susan will want to break down the walls to open up some dialogue between us, and not keep on hiding behind whatever it is that keeps us from being civil, if not downright friendly, to one another again.
Yesterday was a holiday from work, which was nice. Will had one of his classmates over to play in the afternoon, and they had a fun time together sledding down at the big hill by the elementary school, then playing in the snow in the backyard, playing Boom Blox on the Wii, and finally Lego’s in Will’s bedroom. Will doesn’t really have any friends in our town, and he gets quite bored without anyone local to play with; I feel really bad for him, since this is such the contrast from when I was a kid where you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting a kid my age on the street where I grew up. He’s enjoying himself enough in Scouts, though. All in all, he’s a little bit lacking in social development – he’s somewhat reserved, which can be seen as being anti-social, and is very much concerned about embarrassing himself, and with what other kids think of him, to the point where it sometimes prevents him from sometimes doing simple social activities like saying “Hi” to the kids in his class. It’s something we’re keeping an eye on.
Worked from home today – it was snowing this morning, and although not really sticking to the roads I did not want to drive down the back roads to Princeton and Lawrenceville and find they were slippery. It’s funny, I used to drive in the snow all the time when I was in Pennsylvania, it didn’t bother me one bit. I even drove up to University of Connecticut one Valentine’s Day Eve in a snowstorm without blinking an eye (I distinctly remember riding along with the caravan of snowplows on I-84 into Hartford.) Edith and I used to ski all over New England, and drove through our share of heavy snow on the way to Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. Nowadays, I simply hate it – can’t stand it, and will avoid driving in it if I can help it. Must have something to do with living the past 19 years in New Jersey and dealing with the dense population of idiots on the roads here. Anyway, I’ll be back in the office again tomorrow. Thank God it is less than two weeks left to February, and then not long until the first day of Spring.
I took W. to see Avatar 3D on Saturday. I’m not sure that he was too excited about actually seeing the movie (I guess he’s just not that aware of the movie at all, which is kind of a good thing, I guess) but I thought he might enjoy it anyway, so off we went over to Manville for the 12:30 PM showing. It was not bad – the story is OK, but the effect are pretty darn impressive. You can bet it will see a bunch of Oscar nominations this week.
I also updated a bunch of the kids’ book over on LibraryThing the other day – we’re finally near the end of cataloging every book that is worth cataloging. Also, I finally finished book 7 – Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I had bought books 1 through 4 10 years ago, before W. was born, for my children to one day read. Sure enough, last year W. came across the books on his bookshelf and instantly fell in love with the stories. I bought the books 5 through 7 for him, which he devoured in no time, so I decided to read the books myself. They were sure enough entertaining, but it really wasn’t until the Goblet of Fire that I felt the story become interesting, to the point that I really wanted to know how it was going to end. Some things I figured out (like Severus Snape, for example) but even so, there were enough twisted along the way to make the overall series enjouyable. The problem is: what to read next!
It’s snowing. Again. Today. Right now. It has been snowing all day. It will continue to snow all night. Tonight.
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