Snow day

Here’s one positive nod for making this lifestyle change: snow days … I’m experiencing my first one today.

And yet, the weather is so wretched that my free day will hardly be a joyous occasion -- not to mention the notion that I still have a lot of settling in to do. I also expect to be doing a lot of homework in my apartment anyway.

The fact that we have a couple feet of snow on the ground certainly hasn’t helped my morale this week … And in the last couple days, it’s worsened in the thick of wind chills hitting 20 degrees below zero.

I mean, we had some really cold days last winter, but I'm pretty sure I've never experienced weather this cold.

We closed down our remote campuses on Wednesday and Thursday ...

And yesterday when our leadership team convened to discuss the weather, they decided the conditions and freezing forecast were enough to close down our main campus today ...

All of it has forced me to get acclimated to the new job pretty quickly. When the whirlwind of alerting the media to our latest closing settled last night, I began walking back to my office and the secretary called out to me. When I turned around to face her, she paused and added with laughter, "Welcome!"

Back to the subject of that leadership team meeting -- for my walk there, I dressed in my heavy coat, gloves and hat … But my face felt like a frozen block after mere minutes outside. My head hurt. My legs tightened up like I’d just finished a marathon … On my walk back to the office, I saw a squirrel huddled so tightly in the snow along the sidewalk that I let out an audible sympathetic, “Aww.”

The wicked wind and drifting snow is so harsh, I can only compare it to the blizzard scene in “Empire Strikes Back.”

The roads aren’t plowed, the entrances aren’t cleared, the side streets have been reduced to one-way paths. … Yesterday, when I had to drive home to meet the cable guys, I didn’t even bother driving into my parking lot because the driveway was covered in drifts so deep my car might have been swallowed whole. I parked on the road instead.

The media here is calling it the worst winter this region has seen since the early 1960s ... And I thought I was getting away from all of this by moving south.

Here's a photo I shot outside my apartment ...


And here's another I shot downtown. It's so cold, there's not a soul in sight ...