What to Expect When You’re Expecting 20-28 Inches of Snow
Image by Getty Images via Daylife
Snowblivion is well under way here in the District of Columbia, twenty inches so far. Post offices are closed, power lines down, and skylights are beginning to buckle in the century-old rowhouses of Capitol Hill. The view out my window this morning was pretty, the whole street gooped with vanilla frosting and the trees white burrs. Cars are buried and the candy-colored rowhouses across from me are white up to their knees. The snow’s still coming down confetti-like. It looks like it might take us a while to dig out. DC’s lone snow plow can only do so much, you know.
DC residents were well-apprised of this probability. TV told us to prepare to SHELTER IN PLACE, which made me suspicious that the local news had a mutually beneficial agreement with Harris Teeter. To have gone to market to pick up odds and ends Friday morning was to have seen competitive, fear-propelled hoarding that recalled Supermarket Sweep. Carts spilling over, people fidgeted in line as if trying to get home once the snowfall had started meant certain doom. DCist reports that a woman screamed at the uncaring facade of a closed Whole Foods, “Let me in! I don’t have any coffee at home!”
I’m holed up now, drinking lots of tea and trying to psyche myself up for the first shovel of the day. Working from home means I spend most of my life, you know, home, so getting snowed in should differ only in the picture out the window, right? But the difference is a matter of choice about when you come and go. Deprivation of that choice is the factor that threatens to turn Jack Torrance into Heeere’s Johnny!
So we snow prisoners need distractions. I love sledding, but my neighborhood is flat. And when you say “snowball fight,” I hear “broken nose.”
I take walks, but most of my kicks are kicked indoors. What to do? Taxes beckon and the tub wants regrouting, but why spoil a perfectly dreamy weekend with thoughts of suicide?
The internet, as always, wants to play, but you know you need to take a break from the computer when you gaze dreamily at the little asterisks of snow floating down and think, “That looks like a screensaver.”
So let’s put our heads together and come up with some ideas about how to enjoy the time. I’m snowed in alone, so I leave out lots of appealing plus-one options like Scrabble, dress-up photo shoot, zombie makeover, mind reading, and bedroom exploits.
1. Read. I know–booooring. But seldom do we get whole days to guiltlessly spend in bed when we aren’t too sick to hold up a book and make sense of the little black hatches. I’m finishing Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist.
2. Play Stump the Chef. OK, you’ve got Sriracha, several packets of miso, dry lentils, canned tuna, pink sea salt, a brown banana, some kale nearing the end of its youth, a sense of loss, onion skins, three D vitamins, mint floss, a turtle’s foot, cherry LifeSavers, Gran Marnier, and a jar of sand from Kitty Hawk. Make lunch.
3. Pull out the Arts and Crafts stops of your childhood. Dioramas. Potato stamps. Friendship bracelets. Origami. Tie-dye. Papier mache dinosaurs. Take your pick. I like to make little watercolor paintings from photographs, which often makes me feel like a mental patient, but it’s wonderfully involving and sometimes they turn out well. And hey, maybe when the post office opens again you can sell some stuff on Etsy, the retailer fearlessly exposing the flaws in democracy.
4. Organize yours books by spine color. This doesn’t count as a clean-up activity, really, because it’s fun and totally unnecessary. I know people who organize alphabetically or by subject, but books look sculptural and pretty in rainbow order, and you’d be surprised how easy it is to remember the color of a book you’ve read. Also way easier to maintain organization this way.
5. Write real live letters on real live paper to real live people you’ve been meaning to email. This is a radical suggestion, I know, and it tows behind it the threat that you’ll have to keep doing it in the future. But remember how nice it used to feel to get handwritten letters in the mail, instead of just water bills and coupons for Papa John’s?
6. Tackle that 1,000-piece Taj Mahal jigsaw puzzle. Because this is the only time in life it will be acceptable to do such a thing.
Now there’s a mountain of snow I’ve got to suit up to shovel (pom-pom hat, down coat, wool gloves, swim goggles, landlord’s Levis for ease of motion). Stay cozy out there, and please add your thoughts about how to beat back cabin fever. Really. Help. I need more ideas.
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I’m rather partial to your stump the chef activity. Don’t you have some toothpaste somewhere?
This could be the time to learn a new foreign language. Have you tried Aleut?
Outdoors: build an igloo. If your power goes out I heard the temp inside your new home will be in the mid-60sF.
Plan your next vacation. You know where.
Igloo, fabulous idea. I’ve always wondered how rectilinear blocks form a curved dome, and now I have a good excuse to find out. But don’t I need like whale blubber or something to keep warm?
And we’re on the same wavelength again, GS. I don’t have any Aleut tapes but I’ve been practicing my French today. Il fait froid.
Also turned up the pointless but pleasant “mess with different hairstyles” (30 min) and “piece together new outfits in existing wardrobe” (1 hr).
In response to another comment. See in context »>But don’t I need like whale blubber or something to keep warm?
Whale blubber couldn’t hurt, undoubtedly. I wonder if Trader Joes carries that. Still, my 1st year in Des Moines some family was featured for their annual snow shelter construction. The dad’s an engineer doncha know? Anyway, the kids would hang out in their playhouse for hours because it was so temperate.
Only 30 minutes on hairstyles? I should send you some weird combs and my braiding book. Your hair looks long enough for hair yoga and some funky patterns.
Felicitations pour tes études! Ecrit ton article prochaine en français.
In response to another comment. See in context »ooops – grammar police: “Écris”
In response to another comment. See in context »I like the Igloo idea. When will you ever get the chance to build a functional Igloo in DC. 1 shoebox to make snow bricks, and you’re off…and when you are done, you get to decorate the interior!
I used some of the enforced “in time” today to hand wash some sweaters. I figure as they’re drying they’ll add moisture to the air. Boring, I know, but it had to get done
Hey all you-all, snow is a point of view.
I’m from NO where it snows once in ten-years and we use brooms to sweep the streets until the Sun burns it off by 11:00 am.
My first experience with real snow was in Madison, Wisconsin. A TV announced 2 to 3 feet of snow was due. I was in shock. My team mate, Charlie Oldenburg, told me not to worry saying up there they don’t pay no attention to weather forcasters otherwise they’d crawl into their holes in October and not come out until May.
Charlie was right. Snow never slowed down the people in Madison.
At Chicago, roads took a couple of days and banquetts took somewhat longer or the sun. But that didn’t slow people down.
If you want to build an igloo without a supply of ice, an extended cold period is required. For the ice bricks, use wood crates sized around 2 H X 2.5 L by 1.5 W (in feet) and tightly pack wet snow. Let it freeze. Use a sharp knife to shape the top of the Igloo. Wet the surface and plaster on snow caring to recut the sections to show the bricks. Igloos are naturally warm inside.
So all you-all, get out and play. The snow won’t last long.
Having never grown out of playing video games I think I could happily be snowed in for a week. As a homeowner there is no shortage of things to fix or enhance. But I’ll say that since I have a good sized backyard igloo/snow castle sounds pretty fun.
Question: if you rent why are you shoveling? (Or grouting?) One of the benefits of renting is that someone else is supposed to do that stuff.
By the way, how’s the igloo project coming along? Soon you wont need the igloo just hollow out a snow cave at the rate you guys are going. You wont need to sweep off any steps…there wont be any (less work, more play time)