It took the band leader nearly a couple of hours to get here, not because the roads were so bad, but because everyone was driving so slow. Like, 15 on a 65. Which is its own form of dangerous. He was all, "I appreciate your commitment to road safety, but I suspect you might be able to maintain those standards even at, say, 30 mph."

So they are heading out now, but I am not. Even with being off work tonight, they got started three hours after schedule, so I doubt they'd have gotten to me anyway.

It is now all the way up to a balmy 5 degrees, wind chill of -12. When I woke up this morning it was -8, so we're making progress! I need to go out for round two of birdfeeding, which I'll be at all day today, but I have to work myself up to it.

We did the thing where you throw a cup of boiling water in the air and make snow. It was pretty impressive.

Banana muffins were delicious, though, so I'm counting today's snow day as already a win.

I'm enjoying being snowed in. It's not something that happens very often, because most of the places I've worked at were so bottom-line oriented they wouldn't close for shit or I was working as a contractor where I couldn't always afford to take an unpaid day. I was very surprised when they made the decision last night to close the university today. I don't think I've ever seen it happen before.

I'm actually taking the day to get a few things done around the condo that I normally leave for the weekend. And I just got done throwing together a crockpot of chile verde. I am so looking forward to that tonight. Yummy pork and potato goodness.

We were told we shouldn't come in, but I can't get past our firewalls at home to access stuff I need to run my Wed. meeting, so I came in anyway. Leaving shortly though. I can answer emails at home.

Also, downtown isn't affected by the blackouts so, I can haz heats & interwebs!

I've started the dough for homemade pizza. Later I'm going to make egg bread, and maybe an apple cake, so the kitchen will be all warmed up from the oven.

Made it back from breakfast. I observed a new technique for clearing a car of snow - someone had a big Crown Victoria, and they had three small children climbing on top of the car and pushing snow off it.

As I got home, I talked to a guy driving. He was stuck at a stop sign. His way forward was blocked, and if he backed up, the front plastic part of his car would snag on the snow and begin to tear off. He told me he'd made a big mistake driving today.

Can anyone make sense of the maps here? They don't seem very precise. [link]

It seems to be saying what number of households will lose power, but if they shut it off to an area, wouldn't that be all the people?

I thought that electric companies' grids mean that everyone in an area would be all the people, but I could be wrong.

I'm going to cover up and head outside around 3:00 to dig my car out before the temp drops like a rock tonight. I don't want to be digging it out in the morning when the temp is hovering around zero.

Some pictures taken with my iPod Touch. I'm not that happy with most of them, but I didn't feel like tromping around to get better ones.

[link]