Snowloween Blizzaster 2011

How was your Halloweekend guys? Mine was full of snow.

On Saturday the lovely state of New Jersey got hit by a snowstorm of epic proportions. Granted, the Garden State is no stranger to winter blizzards, but this was a blizzaster of the kind that we have not seen in decades. We have been caught by it completely unprepared, and with our pants down. The frozen sky water fell upon us like the Spanish inquisition – no one expected it to be so bad. Normally his kind of thing happens much later in the year. Our trees only begun shedding their summer leaves last Tuesday, and most of them still had lots of green foliage. As you can imagine heavy snow accumulation in the leafy tree crowns was a bit of a problem, and most of the load bearing branches were not prepared to carry the extra weight. So in addition to a sudden snowpocalypse we have been also experiencing a branch breaking bonanza.

Driving on Saturday was an exercise in dogging falling trees while trying to maintain minimal amount of friction between your tires, and the thick layer of ice that covered all the streets. Most highways looked as if the drivers suddenly decided to re-enact scenes from Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. Salt truck and snow plows were nowhere to be seen – probably still slumbering in their subterranean lairs where they spend all summer. If mother nature wanted to give us all a fright on the weekend before all hallows eve, it certainly succeeded. That fateful night, the air was filled with snapping sounds of angry trees lashing their breaking snow covered branches against defenseless power lines. Regular humdrum of highway traffic was replaced by skidding sounds and metallic crunches as automobiles collided on ice. Instead of trick or treaters, the streets were full of snowpocalypse refugees, being frozen out of their own homes – cut off from the electric grid by the frozen claws of the local oaks.

On Sunday morning, most neighborhoods looked like Isengard after the Ents marched through it. Broken branches, overturned power lines, lifeless homes, and wrecked cars on the driveways. Among this destruction frolicked kids, unaware and unperturbed by last nights events. Spider Man, hand in hand with a woodland fairy and Batman whose cape was tucked in under thick winter jacket all hopped over the splayed cables, and threw snowballs at each other as I drove by.

Me? I have spent most of the weekend without power, and freezing my ass off. In fact, this very post was typed up with my frost bitten hands, on my laptop (thankfully fully charged the night before) which somehow managed to pick up an unprotected Wifi connection of some more fortunate, and electricity wealthy neighbor. For once in my life I am thankful for living near really stupid people. It is completely beyond me how you can exist in the year 2011 without ever realizing the folly of using an unencrypted wifi connection but, I am grateful for this sort of reckless idiocy. It comes in very handy in a pinch. Plus it feels great to be on the internet while the house is blacked out and without power. The only thing that does not feel great is typing in a sub-freezing temperature, as your hands slowly transform into numb and solid claws.

As you probably know, I do most of my writing on the weekends, but unfortunately this post was about as much I was able to get done under these circumstances. I will probably have some new content for Wednesday and Friday, but it may not be high quality stuff. For this, I apologize but I don’t have the power (as in electricity) to do more.

How was your Hallowweekend? Hopefully better than mine. Do you celebrate it where you live? I know it is a popular holiday in most English speaking countries, but when I lived in Poland we never really bothered with it. If you do celebrate it, did you dress up for a Halloween party this weekend? Are you dressing up today? And is your costume geeky or not?

I wish I could tell you that I had an awesome costume, but I didn’t. I was browsing reddit the other day and I was totally jealous of all the awesome video game/pop culture inspired costumes people were sharing. Sadly, these sort of things take effort and dedication to pull off and I am way to lazy and unmotivated to even consider it.