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November 30, 2006

A Quiet Night At Home

On Monday night, Seattle got the first snow of the year. And hoo boy, the stuff brought a posse, showing up with enough of its friends to get our attention.

This week has been moderately entertaining, transportation-wise: it took me a good two and a half hours to get home Monday, and I was flat-out snowed in the next morning. Microsoft's main campus was closed both Tuesday and Wednesday; today saw the return of (tropical) mid-thirties temperatures, and so the snow has, finally, receded.

I'm not much of a fan of snow - I don't like walking on it, driving on it, or dealing with it. I mean, snow is very pretty to look at, and I love the amazing, sound-dampening quiet that comes over the world when a good, heavy snow has taken over, but overall the stuff is forever associated with automobile crashes, terrible snowboarding accidents, or hypothermia. I avoid.

Tuesday was interesting. I'd brought home my work laptop, and met up with Bill over at Victrola around 8:30 so we could use their wireless and work. His wife and daughter swung by around noon, and Elaine joined us for lunch.

In the late afternoon, I resumed working remotely ... and my work PC promptly died (for what seems like the fifteenth billionth time - this Toshiba is cursed, I tell you). As usual, the stupid thing was dead-dead-dead - like, "call helpdesk and pray" dead.

So I tried switching to my MacBook (hey, it runs Windows), but the weather had fouled my Internet service - intermittently on the blink, finally throwing up its little digital hands and said, "the hell with it."

So now I'm really stuck. No Internet, no work files. Nothing.

The evening goes on. It gets dark. Elaine shows up, and the two of us cook dinner.

So there we are, Elaine and I, snowed in at my apartment. My PC is dead, the Internet is down, the streets are empty of traffic, the phone's not ringing. The world is really, really quiet.

We turned off the lights, opened the blinds, stared out the windows and just watched the stuff come down. It was so ... rejuvenating. With no distractions or "stuff" to get to, we elected to just be.

It was wonderful.

We crashed a few hours later.

My feelings on snow are changing. And: I must unplug more often.

Posted by Gavin Shearer at November 30, 2006 8:53 PM. Posted to Misc.

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