Town dog walk
Mallards and house sparrows visiting my neighbor's birdfeeders during today's Nor'easter.
We took the dogs for a walk around the neighborhood around eleven this morning. It had already snowed about 8 inches, and it had turned into sleet which was beating the snow into a heavy mush. The sidewalks were so thick with the stuff that we decided to walk in the street. It was kind of nice to talk to our neighbors, many of whom were out shoveling. It took a lot of energy to walk, though, and I had already shoveled our sidewalk, so I was beat when I got home.
St. Paul's church looks extremely seasonal.
This loading dock is a bit of a contrast to it. That shows the range of the Doorways of Brookline.
We got home and collapsed. I finished off my bottle of Nor'easter Bourbon and slept through the 3:00 snapshot. Then I went out to clear off my car. The temperature had gone up a few degrees, and the sleet had changed to rain. I shoveled around my car and the snow was the texture of wet clay. It's supposed to freeze up overnight, so clearing off the car was a must. Then we took the dogs out for their evening walk, and had to walk through huge puddles of slush everywhere. A Rite-Aid in Brighton center had their roof cave in under the weight of the snow and rain. Gutters and storm drains are clogged with slush, and the rain has nowhere to go. Depending on how cold it gets overnight, there could be a whole lot of ice out there tomorrow.
Last year at this time it was almost freakishly warm. Our urgency to move to somewhere milder faded into the background. I found myself imagining that I could stay in New England, if only we had a yard and a fireplace. After Thursday's storm (which let to me shoveling snow from 5 to 9 on Friday) and today's thoroughly shitty weather, I'm thinking about warm places again. One of my neighbor's, who is from North Carolina, was shoveling next to me, and asked "Is it unusual for it to snow this much this early in the season?" I had to break it to him: "No, actually, last year's weather was unusual. This is much more typical." "So we have a few more of these coming, huh?" "Yeah, about one every two weeks or so until April, probably."
The cultural differences between Massachusetts and Texas, or the difficulty in finding a job in North Carolina, or the high housing costs in California, seem relatively insignificant, now that I'm cold and sweaty and sore all over. Alexis is heading to Alamogordo tomorrow to pick up our new foster puppy. I wouldn't blame her if she didn't want to come back.
On this day in 365 Urban Species: Northern catalpa, although, according to an anonymous commenter, I actually depicted southern catalpa.