rivka

We decided to go ahead and make the trip. It seems clear that we won't get out of here on Sunday - the storm is supposed to start tonight and last through the day tomorrow. My only remaining question is whether the roads will be okay on Monday. This is supposed to be a pretty slow storm. We'll see.

It's a nice visit so far. We've only had one brief opportunity to visit with my sister Judy and her family, because it's such a crazy booked-up time of year. But the brief visit was nice. We exchanged Christmas presents. The almost-11-year-old immediately spread her Sculpey kit across the restaurant table to examine all the pieces, giving a running commentary on what she was going to make and how far away her siblings would need to stay. The 13-year-old kept lovingly fondling his new Scott Westerfeld books. Alex got promptly and deeply to work with the wooden sushi set they gave her. And my sister delighted me with a reprint of the American Girls' Handy Book, a sort of a craft-adventure-advice book for 19th century girls.

It was very, very cold this morning (17 degrees F), but we went out to play in the snow anyway. It was Alex's first encounter with deep-ish snow (we've got about 6 inches on the ground), and she loved it. Climbed, crawled, rolled (!), got Grandpa to pull her all around the yard (which my poor urban child calls "the park") on a sled, and finally took several sled runs down an extremely gentle hill. It was wonderful.

I introduced my father to the singer-songwriter Peter Meyer, and also (I may at some point regret this) to Jonathan Coulton's "Mandelbrot Set." He's listening to it again and again, trying to figure out all the words. (He doesn't see well enough to use lyrics sites.)

For Christmas, along with some smaller things, my folks gave me the most amazing picnic set. It's a backpack. The front compartment holds a complete set of picnic tableware: dishes, polycarbonate glasses, metal silverware, mini salt and pepper shakers, a cheese board and cheese knife, a corkscrew. The rear compartment is heavily insulated to keep food hot or cold, and has a completely removable liner for easy washing. There's a separate small front compartment that's insulated as well, so you could have a hot-food section and a cold-food section. And strapped to the sides: an insulated sleeve for a wine or water bottle, and a large picnic blanket that's flannel on one side and waterproof nylon on the other. O. M. G. This is one of the coolest things I've ever seen.

So all is well, even if we may be a tiny bit marooned for the next couple of days. At least we have plenty of goodies to play with.

Last night was so awful.

It started out well enough. My friend Emily came over to stay with Alex (yaaay, babysitting trades!) so that Michael and I could go out and enjoy Baltimore Restaurant Week - a summer promotion in which dozens of restaurants are offering special $30 three-course menus. We went to Sascha's 527, a neighborhood restaurant serving what I guess I'd describe as upscale-American food. Dinner was good, but not amazing.

I had an appetizer of pepper-crusted raw ahi tuna with what was described as an orange Thai sauce. The sauce tasted like orange marmelade seasoned with way too much chili pepper, and it totally concealed the flavor of the fish. The very, very good Asian coleslaw on the side saved the dish. Then I had their take on bouillabase, which was sort of a New England clambake version (it had potatoes and inch-thick rounds of corn on the cob in it) with a really tasty broth. Finally, I finished up with the world's best carrot cake.

We came home and curled up on the couch to watch an episode of Planet Earth. Partway through, there was a loud crack and our power went out. I looked out the window - no lights anywhere on the block.

This is where I need to back up and talk about the weather. Because it was 100 degrees Farenheit yesterday, and humid, and breezeless. By the time our power went out, I estimate that it was still over 85 degrees. Our brick rowhouse had been soaking up the sun's rays all day long. Within minutes of losing power, the house was noticeably hot and stuffy.

We called the power company and were given an estimate of 1:30am power restoration. We tried to go to bed. Meanwhile, I started worrying about Alex. Her room is on the third floor - the hottest part of the house. It works out nicely enough in winter, when her room stays much warmer than ours, but in summer it's damn near uninhabitable without air conditioning. It's a small closed room - we can't open the window because the air conditioner is in it, and there isn't much opportunity for cross-ventilation on that floor.

She woke up shortly after we went to bed, calling for Mommy. I went up to her hot, hot bedroom, disentangled her from some blankets, and helped her find her pacifier. She went back to sleep. I went back to bed and didn't sleep.

Some of the other people on our block had spilled out onto their stoops, where it was slightly cooler and (thanks to the nearby hospital's emergency generator) better lit than indoors. They apparently decided that it was a fine time to have a blackout party. We were subjected to bursts of loud conversation and even louder laughter, with occasional running and squealing, until... I think until close to 2am.

Our bedroom got hotter and hotter. A damp blanket of still hot air stifled me as I tried to relax and go to sleep. When the neighbors shut up for a few moments, I could hear rats squeaking outside in our garbage. Which - and this is the other thing that made yesterday awful, and today doesn't look any better - hadn't been picked up when it was supposed to on Tuesday evening, and had continued to fester in the 100-degree heat ever since because the city kept swearing that they'd send a solid waste truck by any minute so we should leave it on the curb. So every time the human party waned I could hear a rat party on the sidewalk.

In my weird half-asleep, half-awake, intolerably uncomfortable state my worry about Alex started to balloon out of control. I thought about children trapped in hot cars. I thought about elderly people in Chicago dying in a heat wave because they couldn't open their windows. I started to seriously believe that there was a chance that the heat could kill her - not to such an extent that I woke her up and drove her to an air-conditioned motel, but to enough of an extent that any chance of restful sleep for myself was hopeless.

Around 1am it became so intolerably hot that Michael hammered open one of our stuck-shut front windows. (Our only bedroom window that opens easily had the air conditioner in it, naturally.) I opened the tiny bathroom window at the other end of the house in a feeble attempt to create a cross-breeze. The bedroom was still sweltering. I went up to check on Alex. Her room wasn't any hotter than ours, at least. She was breathing. Her hair was damp with sweat, but her skin was a normal temperature. I tried to ratchet my anxiety down a little.

At 2am I got up and called BGE again. Now they gave an estimated power restoration time of 5am. I began to worry about our refrigerator and freezerfull of food, as well as our own survival, our utter exhaustion, and Alex. But shortly after that - maybe around 2:30? - a cool-ish breeze sprang up, and I was able to get a solid couple of hours of sleep.

I awoke at 4:30 because the air conditioner coughed itself into action. Michael went downstairs and turned off the TV and the ground floor air conditioner, but when I asked him about the refrigerator he said he had been too sleepy to check it. So I got up and went downstairs, and was relieved to find the meat still quite cold to the touch and the frozen food rock-solid. I listened at the foot of the attic stairs to be sure that Alex's air conditioner had re-started (it had), and went back to bed for a few more hours of broken sleep.

What. A. Night. And I don't think I really stopped worrying about Alex entirely until we finally woke her up this morning. And they still haven't picked up our goddamned trash. The bags had holes chewed all over them this morning - I didn't dream the rats squeaking.

I don't know how people managed, in the years before air conditioning. I really don't. Now I understand why Washington DC was considered a hazardous posting for foreign diplomats, and why cities would be emptied, in the summer, of everyone who could possibly afford to go anyplace else. I guess we would've had awnings, and a better ventilation plan, and maybe a sleeping porch in the shaded back of the house. And certainly we wouldn't have had windows that couldn't be opened in the summer. Because Oh. My. God.

I have a horrendous cold. Weirdly, it started in my chest and has mostly stayed there - I have a little nasal congestion, but mostly a cough, a raw throat, and a dreadful case of fatigue. I think yesterday was probably the peak; I was up half the night either coughing or listening to Alex cough over the baby monitor. Because naturally we both get sick at once. Mercifully, Michael had the damn thing last week and is feeling mostly better.

"I wish I could stay home," I told him last night, "but we have an abstract deadline coming up next week, and if I don't get the data analysis done tomorrow I don't know when I'll have time to do it."

Actually, it didn't sound too bad: a day of peaceful, quiet work at my desk - too germy to be expected to go anywhere near patients - with no cranky, sick baby to deal with and an endless supply of lemon-ginger tea.

So of course, this morning, it was bucketing down rain. And my bus was ten minutes late. Even my golf umbrella wasn't up to the contingency. My shoes are so hopelessly soaked I have taken them off. I wish I could do the same with the chilly wet denim clinging to my knees and calves. Even my shirt has big wet patches from the brief interval between stepping off the bus and getting my umbrella open.

At least the thing about wet feet and colds is just a myth.

This photo was taken about a mile from my office, on the same street. I still don't think my office is going to flood, but I no longer feel stupid for walking down there today to move irreplaceable data from floor-level cabinets to an overhead cabinet.

Today is normally a day that I drive down to Cheverly, a suburb of DC, to see clients at the Prince George's County Health Department. Game called on account of hurricane - or at least, on Tuesday, I was expecting a hurricane today. When I called yesterday to cancel my clients (not that I had many scheduled), they were relieved.

As of yesterday, we had been downgraded to a tropical storm warning. I thought about changing my plans and going down to the clinic, but allowed myself to be talked out of it. Today's a work-at-home day, although not much work is actually being done. I only feel slightly guilty. I probably could've made it safely to the clinic and safely home, but whatever.

It's chilly and windy. For the last hour or so, it's been raining steadily. Not much else is happening. curiousangel argued this morning that we should take out the two precariously-established air conditioners we have on the third floor, with their jury-rigged surrounds, so that they didn't crash from the window and kill someone on the street below. I found his argument persuasive, so we did it. No other storm activities so far. I saw in the paper that the city's opened up four storm shelters, which are presumably for homeless people and folks in low-lying (floodable) areas. They're saying we might get flooding downtown. I sincerely hope that my office doesn't flood and destroy everything filed in floor-level cabinets. I think it's a little bit uphill from the nearest finger of the harbor, but I guess you never know. We live on high ground, so there's unlikely to be exciting flood action at home.

Now we wait, and are slightly bored.

Apparently, Hurricane Isabel - now 1mph short of being a Cat 5 storm - is expected to make landfall somewhere on the East Coast, between North Carolina and New Jersey. My local weather report, however, is remarkably bland.

Some houses in Baltimore have big wooden shutters that cover the windows. I've always thought of that as a lovely, quaint decorative touch, but now I'm starting to consider that there might be other uses. We're inland, so you wouldn't think there would be all that much of an issue, but Washington DC is even further inland, and

In Washington, D.C., emergency officials were working on acquiring additional sandbags, and planned to begin a public education campaign and meet with other department and critical services leaders Monday.

"Then we're going to pray," said Peter LaPorte, director of the Emergency Management Agency.

I poked around a little online, looking for hurricane advice, but I didn't care much for what I found. Sure, we'll go out and buy some bottled water, extra batteries, bagged ice, and food that doesn't need cooking - but surely we're not going to need to shut off all our utilities and crouch on the floor in an inside room with our heads covered. Not in Baltimore.

Two feet of snow in Calgary, and the airport is closed. Heavy snow expected to stop in Calgary sometime this evening, but it will potentially continue overnight in Banff. At present we've only gotten an inch or two of accumulation, but who knows what it will look like by tomorrow? Other mountain locations have gotten two feet or more.

This should be interesting.

The IHV is open today, so I set out to go to work. I dressed sensibly, in boots and jeans - I wasn't scheduled to work in the clinic, and the one client I was supposed to see wasn't likely to venture out in the snow. I believed that I was ready to face the elements.

That belief lasted for approximately two seconds after I stepped out from under the shelter of my building's covered entry. I stepped on a patch of ice and immediately found myself flat on my back. I struggled to my feet with difficulty - the whole sidewalk was slick - gathered my belongings, and made my slow way out to the car.

All day yesterday, smiling through our aches, curiousangel and I had congratulated ourselves on our virtue and hard work in digging the car out. All that lay between the car and the outside world was a little ridge of icy packed snow thrown up by the plow - low enough that the wheels were sure to cross it easily. And indeed, they did. However, the undercarriage was a different question. I got hung up once, twice, a third time, each time just when I was almost free. I hacked at the ridge of ice with the corner of a borrowed shovel, in lieu of ice pick. It worked - bits of ice were breaking away - but in infintessimally tiny amounts. I didn't really get anywhere until my upstairs neighbor appeared with a hatchet and the claw end of a hammer. Together we hacked the ice ridge to pieces, and after one more heartrending lurch-and-catch, I broke free.

During the ice-hacking saga, another one of my neighbors came rolling back into the complex. He rolled down his window. "Are you heading up 95 to Baltimore?" he asked. "I was just there. It's bumper to bumper traffic as soon as you get out there. I finally turned around - you might want to stay home." He turned out to be right. A mile after I reached the interstate, traffic slowed to a crawl and I did want to stay home. But a phone call to Lydia - "Lydia, it's taken me a half-hour to go five miles!" - made it clear that I really needed to go to work anyway. So I stuck it out. Discovered that they had closed two lanes for snow removal. Discovered further on that lanes had a tendency to disappear under the snow without warning. Sometimes lots of lanes.

I abandoned my usual cheap parking lot to park in a covered, iceless garage next door to my building, despite the exorbitant hourly rate. As I waited for the elevator, my purse strap snapped. I noticed that my hand was aching and looked down to see a puffy bruise forming at the base of my left middle finger, presumably from falling with my keys clenched in my hand. It doesn't interfere with typing, but tomorrow I'll be in the clinic and trying to keep up with a vast amount of handwritten notes.

It's eleven o'clock, and not looking to be my day. And here I thought that the end of being housebound meant that things would be looking up.

It's not supposed to snow like this in Maryland.

I just bundled up and stepped out onto the patio. Two steps from the door, the snow was knee deep. It's nearly up to our windowsills, and still it keeps falling. We're told we can expect it to keep snowing all night and much of the day tomorrow.

We're nicely stocked up with movies, food, and whisky. As long as the power stays on we should be perfectly comfortable. Stir crazy, perhaps, but comfortably so.

It's not supposed to snow like this in Maryland.

---

I want to clarify what I said in my last post. No, of course I don't think that my parents would have availed themselves of euthanasia, had Peter Singer gotten to them. And, although it was kind of people to say good things about my presence in their lives, I didn't really need to be reassured that my life was worth sparing.

My point, which I guess I didn't make very well, is that even without Dr. Singer's poisonous arguments, it was already hard enough for my mother to advocate for my needs and get my doctors to think of me as a human being whose suffering was worthy of consideration. How much harder would it have been for her if otherwise reasonable people around her had been expounding the philosophy that infants - especially disabled infants - weren't even really conscious beings?

I find myself reluctant to post in my LJ unless I'm going to say something earth-shattering or profound. It's a habit I'd like to overcome - I mean, sheesh, it's nothing but egotism at the heart of it - so here's an undeniably mundane post.

It got sharply colder last night. Yesterday's temperatures were in the upper thirties, warm enough that I left my scarf at church and didn't notice. Today's temperatures were in the teens, and the wind was fierce and bitter. As luck would have it, my schedule required me to visit three different buildings at extreme opposite ends of campus from each other. All day, my joints ached in protest.

I went to the gym tonight anyway. They keep the pool at damn near blood temperature, and I wanted to feel warm and weightless. The pleasure of moving without bearing weight isn't quite as intense now that I move so much more easily on land, but it still feels freeing.

I'd forgotten how much exercise swimming is, more so than walking or riding the exercise bike. I did twenty-four lengths of the pool, evenly divided between breast stroke, side stroke, and back crawl. That was quite enough.