That’s the best name that anyone came up with for Chicago’s recent run-in with Mother Nature, SNOMG. I wanted to call it Snowbamapalooza, but it never really caught on.
So we finally got the alley shoveled out this morning, with seven adults and teens working on it. Has the city plowed our street yet? Ha. We’ve been getting nice little emails from the alderman about the standard rank of priority plowing, but no sign of it happening. The sidewalks are all passable, because basically no one went to work yesterday, and we all got out and pitched in. You can tell which neighbors were drinking when they snow-blowed, because their paths are a little more twisty.
But what the hell? Third biggest snowfall on record, and they can’t plow the sidestreets yet? What a bunch of clucks.
On Tuesday night, when the storm was just beginning, a neighbor, my wife and I strapped on the XC skis and headed up the block to a park. It was so totally awesome!! The wind was probably between 40-60 mph, but it helped immensely to have ski goggles. The wind blew the snow over the baseball diamonds ferociously, and you could easily imagine documentaries about the Antarctica with the sinister way the snow traveled. The wind chill might’ve been pretty low, but with windproof clothes, it wasn’t bad at all. Sorry to have forgotten my camera, but the pictures wouldn’t have told much. The park is small, with only a couple small hills or berms, but the thrill was being out in a tropical snow storm, with THUNDERSNOW lighting up the night.
We saw a couple other people out for a gambol, and a few brought their dogs out VERY briefly. After about 90 mins, we three came back and found a guy who’s SUV was stuck in the alley. He had to go all of 75 yards, and he still managed to get himself stuck three times. And this was BEFORE the snow got heavy.
The kids and wife have had two days off of school. Tomorrow, the regular schedule kicks in again, and this will just be an inconvenience to deal with, but for 36 hours, it was one of the wildest events ever in Chicago. (As long as you weren’t marooned in your car on Lake Shore Drive. For some great pictures of that, check out the Facebook album by my friend Will Byington here.)