Blizzard of 1993
Feb. 4th, 2008 03:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jayfurrWe're a month shy of the fifteenth anniversary of the Blizzard of '93, which still stands as the biggest blizzard I've personally ever been through. I was still in grad school at Vajenyatek in Blacksburg when the storm hit and I wound up spending at least one night sleeping on the floor of my office and drinking bottle after bottle of Cappio bottled cappuccino and eating Cheetos because that's what I had squirreled away in my cabinet. By the time the storm finished, we had something like five feet of snow pushed up against the doors of my building.
My father, a professor at Tech, decided "I Must Clear The Driveway". His half-mile-long, steep, unpaved gravelled driveway. With only his blade-equipped pickup truck. And, like a lot of idiots, he wound up having a heart attack. Some guys had to be fetched out from their houses using front-end loaders and whatever heavy equipment could make it through the snow.
Mom called me at my apartment when the storm was just really socking in to tell me Dad was in the hospital, having had his heart attack, and told me under no circumstances was I to try to walk to the hospital to check up on him. Before she said that part, it hadn't even occurred to me to walk six miles through total whiteout conditions all the way to the hospital. Afterwards...
Well, I was picked up by the police and labeled "a total fscking idiot" about a half mile away from the hospital. They gave me a ride the rest of the way and my father, who was resting comfortably, just about had another heart attack when he saw me come in, dressed in my heaviest coat and swaddled in scarf after scarf. After a while they told me was fine, needed to rest, and made me leave, but at least the cops gave me a ride to campus and I rode out the rest of the storm in my office. Drinking endless bottles of cappuccino and gibbering like an idiot.
Good times, good times.
My father, a professor at Tech, decided "I Must Clear The Driveway". His half-mile-long, steep, unpaved gravelled driveway. With only his blade-equipped pickup truck. And, like a lot of idiots, he wound up having a heart attack. Some guys had to be fetched out from their houses using front-end loaders and whatever heavy equipment could make it through the snow.
Mom called me at my apartment when the storm was just really socking in to tell me Dad was in the hospital, having had his heart attack, and told me under no circumstances was I to try to walk to the hospital to check up on him. Before she said that part, it hadn't even occurred to me to walk six miles through total whiteout conditions all the way to the hospital. Afterwards...
Well, I was picked up by the police and labeled "a total fscking idiot" about a half mile away from the hospital. They gave me a ride the rest of the way and my father, who was resting comfortably, just about had another heart attack when he saw me come in, dressed in my heaviest coat and swaddled in scarf after scarf. After a while they told me was fine, needed to rest, and made me leave, but at least the cops gave me a ride to campus and I rode out the rest of the storm in my office. Drinking endless bottles of cappuccino and gibbering like an idiot.
Good times, good times.
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Date: 2008-02-05 05:48 pm (UTC)That's one area in which you and I are very different. I like snow. I don't even mind shoveling or snowthrowing. The only thing I mind about it is slipping around in it when I have to drive in the stuff.
Class got cancelled early on Friday because my customer was thoughtful enough to realize that if we had class all day I'd be driving home from the Adirondacks to my house in Vermont, 100 miles, in the dark on icy, snowy roads with more coming down. So instead I got to drive home 100 miles in near-total-whiteout conditions. Just barrels of fun. I wound up driving up to Essex, New York on I-87 so I could avoid back roads, then taking the ferry across to the Vermont side. It was longer, but less time spent on little twisty back roads.