Nor'Easter

Seven days after the hurricane, both my wife's and my offices reopened. By then odd even gas rationing had started, which meant I could pull right up to the pump at my choice of now powered local gas stations. However, school remained closed in our town. Originally scheduled as a week off (with Election Day and the two day NJ Teachers' Convention at the end of the week, so many families schedule vacations for that period that the superintendent decided to make the week a week off to get around low attendance), the schools remained closed as half the town remained without power. I tried to begin to catch up on my work (helped the office was closed all week too due to lack of power) as I worked from home that Monday. A later trip to the supermarket to get milk, eggs and meat proved to be a waste of time -- with so many getting power back that weekend, the supermarket was out of those foods (though I did get egg whites and turkey burgers).

Tuesday, with my wife off for Election Day, I drove into my office. I noticed traffic lights out and still closed intersections of Route 9 about 4 miles north of our house, but the section of darkness was soon replaced by powered areas. That scene repeated itself with some closed roads as I go to my office. People seemed generally happy to be there, especially those still without heat and electricity in their homes. Many children, still out of school, wandered around the semi-empty office -- with the NJ Transit line that runs by our office still out of service, nobody from NYC was making it physically in that day. Aside from talking about the lack of power the previous week, the big concern was the forecasted Nor'Easter, especially for those still without power, for the next day. I was able to get milk and chicken on the way home.

Wednesday. With school closed, my son had a sleep over at his friend's house the previous night, so it was just my daughter and I as I worked from home. She happily watched TV and played video games as I worked. I had previously arranged to pick up my son at the end of my work day, around 4PM, before the storm really hit. Around 2PM my daughter came in to my office to tell me it was snowing. I looked out the window and thought to myself, guess the storm is going further east, as forecasters had speculated earlier in the day, meaning more cold air and, hopefully, less wind. This is good I thought to myself.

By 3PM I noticed the snow was sticking to the grass. Odd I thought, I didn't know that would happen so early. By 4PM the snow was sticking to the streets. Now, after last year's October snow storm, this early snow shouldn't have surprised me, but it did. We live fairly close to the ocean and, at this time of the year, warm ocean waters usually prevent snow from falling in our area this early in the season. Not this time.

Before long, the snow was accumulating on the street. Now I have lived within 10 miles of the Atlantic Ocean in the NYC area my entire life and have never seen an accumulating snow before Thanksgiving, with only a handful before Christmas. My wife came home, we ate dinner, I lit a fire and we settled in for another evening in front of the fire hoping the power wouldn't go out. Well the power didn't go out, can't say that for the trees.

Around 6:30 we heard a thump from the roof towards the back of the house. While I wondered what  had fallen, my wife looked out the window and saw that our old cranberry tree had split in half and struck the house. Then I realized, that while many of trees had lost their leaves during the hurricane, there were still a lot of leaves up in the trees. Rut roh.

That night we heard the sounds of thousands of trees snapping in half then suddenly silenced. By morning we woke up to a beautiful winter wonderland, if you weren't a tree lover. In addition to our crab apple, our weeping cherry tree lost every branch but one, and the maple tree we planted when our son was born a dozen years ago lost its top. A branch from another tree grazed my car, but did no damage. Looking around the neighborhood, we saw the tree damage was much worse than from Sandy. But at least we didn't lose power, can't say that for my office.

Telecommuters are broken into two groups in my office. Those like me who have laptops and can work from wherever they are and those who remotely log onto their desktops from home. To remotely log on, the PC needs to be on at work. Unfortunately the power outage at the office knocked all the machines out. With traveling still a little difficult, between Sandy and snow storm, not many people wanted to go in. Long story short, we found a new use for Facebook -- trying to determine who is physically in the office who can turn on desktop computers for remote log on. Still have a bit of a ride to the 21st century.

As to the tree on the roof, we were very lucky. The bulk of the tree landed in the front yard, with only the tops of the formerly upper most branches hitting the roof. As soon as the snow melted, I cut off the branches and was relieved to discover was only a small dent in one of our gutters. So while my tree forts line the street, ready to be converted into mulch by the town, I am relieved we dodged another bullet. Considering all the shots we've taken so far this year, it's nice when a break doesn't go bad for a change.