the blizz

Ugggggh. I am going crazy from boredom at work. I can get bored at either of my regular jobs... but at least at Fossil there's someone to talk to... or somewhere to walk to. Not here.

So, Christmas happened! We went home on the Tuesday before and ended up staying an extra day because of the insane blizzard that hit New York. It was a great time, though. I hadn't been home for Christmas since 2006 so it was looooong overdue. My dad spent a great deal of time making a DVD of our wedding which included footage that I had never seen before because I didn't know it existed.... like the entire ceremony. He made us watch it immediately. I mean, it was awesome and so nice of him but we were so embarrassed. especially while watching our vows. I had to leave the room because I was so... incomprehensible. Then I cried during Chris's vows... but it was so nice to see the stuff Ben did and watch Greg perform, especially knowing what both of them were going through at the time.

Right after everyone started leaving at like 11pm I checked my phone and saw that I had a message from Delta telling me the flight was cancelled. I looked online and there was no hope of rebooking for anytime in the near future (or EVER, apparently, as I was never rebooked) so we decided to rent a car and drive home. The next morning (Sunday, the 26th) we were getting ready to go to the airport and the weather man was basically telling us we'd die or get stranded if we decided to go that night. We wanted neither of these things, so we called off work 24 hours in advance and decided to go the NEXT day. The drive home was perfect.... until we got onto the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan. At that point it was basically like we entered the movie The Day After Tomorrow. You would never believe the road conditions... and it was 24 hours since the peak of the storm, 18 hours after it had stopped altogether!! It was a nightmare. We somehow missed the entrance to the Triborough Bridge and ended up driving down to the Queensboro, which was nearly impossible to get on to because so many entrances were closed. We also almost got stuck in the middle of 2nd Ave in a snow drift. When we finally made it into Queens it was even worse. The main road in LIC and Astoria had not been plowed AT ALL. We followed car tracks until we got into our neighborhood which was even worse. Abandoned cars everywhere, ambulances, snow piled up 3+ feet at every corner... We couldn't even get onto our street because there was an abandoned van right in the middle, so we had to park the rental car in the middle of 24th ave, drag our stuff through the mountains of snow to our apartment to drop it off, and then get back to the car to return it to Hertz at the airport. I changed into my rain boots thinking "I'm going to be in a car and then on a bus most of the time... I won't have to worry about my feet getting too cold!" WRONG. So, LaGuardia is close enough to walk to normally. Like a 5 minute drive. It not only took 20 minutes to get there, but once we got there and dropped the car off, it took an additional TWO HOURS to get home! We just missed a shuttle from the rental place to the main airport and then I saw the M60 drive by. We ran out, but we missed it, but I figured another would come by soon, which was so, soooo stupid of me. I swear to God only 1 of the buses must have been running on the entire line. We waited outside, after wading through snow, for half an hour before I literally started to think I had frost bite on my toes and Chris made us go back to Hertz to wait for the shuttle. My toes hurt so bad I was almost in tears. After we got the main part of the airport we had to get in the 1 taxi line that was open, which was over an hour long because cabs only arrived every 5 minutes. By the grace of God, after only about half an hour, the girl at the front of the line was also going to Astoria and they asked for any other passengers going that way. We of course jumped on it. I got home, ran my feet under warm water and rubbed them until they started to get itchy and I knew I would have toes another day and wouldn't have to amputate them.

Man. I would not last long in a wintertime emergency situation.

Anyway, so the next day I was supposed to work at 8am and just as I was about to walk out the door, NY1 said the entire N train line had been suspended. It eventually, apparently, came back, but I was an hour and a half late for work. I called, obviously. Since none of the buses were running, the train was our only way out. It's been crazy. Things are getting better but there is still soooo much snow everywhere. Most roads, especially in Queens, have barely been touched by a plow and even intersections like 5th Ave and 42nd street are hard to walk through from so much snow piled up. What I hate the MOST is the fact that you don't know if a puddle is just a little bit of water or several inches of water. I've started dipping my toes in to check.

In better news, the sun was finally out today and I soaked up as much of it as I possibly could while sitting on the train. We also got a blue ray DVD player (which was Chris's Christmas present from me). I can't wait until I have a day off. It's stupid to say that after I just had a whole BUNCH of days off while in Ohio, but that snow drama felt like a week.

And so, we are at the close of another year. Faster than we'll be able to handle, it'll already be July and we'll be complaining about how hot and miserable it is.