Sunrise Over Black Friday

We are back in Easton again, for the T**********g (sorry, lads) long weekend.

But I was surprised to see that Britain's having Black Friday too. And behaving very badly over it, as happens whenever we take on American customs, Halloween being another example. What with the Archers staging a turkey pardon, we'll soon just be one country and this blog will be obsolete.

The T Word

 In deference to my feathered friends above, I will not be mentioning T**********g. But I hope everyone else has a happy one all the same!

In Post-Apocalyptic Buffalo

Where we ventured for some Christmas shopping, the roads are mostly clear. It was odd how there was hardly any snow until we reached the southern suburbs. Then, suddenly, there it was.

 At City Hall, what looks like an operations centre was winding down

Though the TV crews were still hopeful ..

(I sympathise but let's hope they'll be disappointed)

In places, mopping up was still going on

Some names suddenly looked appropriate

 

 Though getting to them might be an obstacle course

 TJ Maxx car park was a maze..

Though the piles were being efficiently despatched

And looked quite orderly

 If a little grubby

In places

And in Starbucks, life went on.

The Entrepreneurial Spirit

  Lives on in America.  Hubby returned from the office with a fistful of faxes (remember those?) that had suddenly started clunking out of his dusty machine. "Don't Be Caught With Extra Weight On Your Roof!"  "Free Estimates on Roof Repairs and/or Snow Removal!" "Roof Collapses Are Happening!"  "With More Snow on the Way, then the Addition of Rain and Temperatures Expected to Rise, the Weight on your Roof will Cause it to Fail!" "Emergency Snow Removal and Roof Repairs!" "No Job Too Big or Too Small!"  
  As they say, if there's a buck to be made........

A Big Thank You

 To all the kind people who've been asking me if I'm OK. Apparently the Buffalo Snowmageddon has hit the headlines in London, Prague and Ljubljana as well as the rest of the world.  I have to say, very sheepishly, that we have got off lightly. Only about six inches last night.

 And that's probably about it for now. It's warming up for a few days - though that will spell trouble for the areas that got eight feet. Where's all that water going to go? The irony of it is that our local ski resort - the one place that could have done with it - didn't get a piece of the action.* They must have been cursing. Of course they could always get a helicopter with a giant scoop, hoover up the snow from the Buffalo Bills' stadium and dump it on Holiday Valley. Just a thought. *UPDATE I have since been corrected by intrepid friends who actually skied today. It appears they had a bit of snow after all!

He's all right too.

 So's Woody...

Snowmageddon

  Winter Storm Knife, Snowvember, A Significant Weather Event, whatever its latest moniker is, we in Cattaraugus County haven't had a piece of it. Yet. Our snow covering is still relatively meagre.

On the other hand our friends in a village near Buffalo just told us they got five feet in one day and could barely get out of their house. They heard a big crash and a snow-covered branch fell and pulled down their power lines and the box from inside the house. A heroic utility crew managed to struggle up their extremely long drive on foot in chest-high snow and fixed it.
   There's been plenty to take away from the news reports in the past couple of days. All the neighbours helping each other. The chap with the backwards baseball cap taking in a stranded motorist. Baby Lucy Grace delivered in the fire station by two nurses who just happened to be stranded there as well. The TV reporter sticking his hand into a snowdrift and saying, "This is no ordinary snowdrift - it's got a car inside it." I wonder how many takes (and snowdrifts) before he got that one right.
  My favourite bizarre bit was when Governor Andrew Cuomo got taken on a tour of the trucks stranded with their drivers on the New York State Thruway (sic) which I thought was supposed to be closed to all non-essential traffic. TV cameras showed him knocking on a truck cab window. "Just imagine", I said to hubby, "You're a poor stranded truck driver; you wake up from a snooze and see Andrew Cuomo banging on your window." For some reason he thought this was terribly funny.        

But I Shouldn't Complain

  Since just an hour north of us in the south Buffalo suburbs, they are in the middle of an extraordinary "Snow Event." (The British have blizzards; Americans have Snow Events.) There's a state of emergency, a travel ban and they're calling in the National Guard.
  Some places are expecting no less than 70 inches in the next day or so. Cripes. Down here in Cattaraugus County, we're suffering Siberian cold but that's about it. I'll stop complaining. For now at least.