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mid-November blizzard
Thursday, November 15 2018
On the drive to work today I think I hit (and killed) a second squirrel of this commuting phase of my professional career. I was headed north on Hurley Mountain Road and a little red squirrel ran out in front of me carrying a nut that was so big that released it in panic as he decided what to do. I slammed on the brakes and what he ended up doing was diving under my car. I felt a distinct bump, though it was solid enough that I can comfort myself thinking it was the nut and not the squirrel.
This morning at work, I successfully made the last of the necessary modifications to the printer-driving Electron app I've been working on. When I later deployed it on the clients' computer and they tested it, it seemed to be completely successful. This helped justify a visit to the vegan burger place. I arrived at 12:00 noon exactly and was the only customer there for the time it took me to wait for the preparation of an Onion Lover burger and generous basket of fries (a surprisingly long time) and then also the time it took me to devour those things. There seemed to be at least two, perhaps three employees there, and the experience had me thinking they needed to work on their allocation of resources (and perhaps the burger assembly logistics). Though it took awhile to prepare, the burger was actually delicious when I ate it.
On the walk back to work, I passed a nail salon whose name was "A Nail Affair." It was easy in my mind to read that as "Anal Affair," so I snapped a picture to upload to Facebook for comments. When I tagged its location, Facebook helpfully alerted whomever maintains the A Nail Affair Facebook presence. Happily, this person (I'm assuming she is a woman) was not offended and left a good-natured comment of her own.
This afternoon, there was plot afoot by the one of the workplace factions to steal me away from the faction that hired me (a different faction) to work on a project related to the baroque juju of real estate assessments. Just for some background on this: the company is split down the middle, with one group maintaining and supporting a legacy client-server product while the other group (my group) builds features on a set of web apps using the more recent technologies I'm familiar with (particularly Javascript). My hiring was sold to the company by Alex, who runs the legacy product group, so we don't really work together much. But lately the guy I report to has been taking sick days and leaving work early in the afternoon, which means I'm not being supervised as much as I otherwise would be. This gives Alex a chance to scoop me up for a project such as his real estate assessment program. Today we had a meeting about it upstairs with just the legacy team (which includes a young developer named Hunter, who normally works remotely from Sacramento). The initial idea was that a C#/MSSQL application would be written to parse data out of a number of proprietary tax information files and then use it to update database tables. Though it might sound dry and dull for the average reader, it's actually the kind of project I like, though to me it sounded more like a Python/MSSQL project than one that would involve C#, though that's mostly because I'm still uncomfortable with C#, which I find an unusually ugly language. We had a good conversation about various arcane technical matters, and it was refreshing to finally be having such banter in this new workplace. Hunter spent most of the balance of the time leading us through a sample tax info document in one of the arcane file formats that need parsing, and it was fun at first. But then it got tedious. Why not just create a document describing what he knew? There was no reason to take up all our time demonstrating what it was. But that's a minor quibble. He's a smart kid, and it would be fun to work with him decoding such ancient Mesozoic data constructs.
There was a snowstorm coming, so I tried to slip out as early as I could. As I started driving, the first few flakes were falling. By the time I made it to the Route 199/Route 9G traffic light, snow was swirling in little vortexes over the surface of the road, though there was no visible accumulation. Still, cars were no longer driving at their normal speeds. Things were slow on the bridge across the Hudson, though I was able to go nearly normal highway speeds until I go to the bridge replacement on US 209. After that, I joined a long chain of motorists who were proceeding at about 25 miles an hour. There was only a half inch of snow on the ground, but evidently it was making people feel unsafe.
When I stopped at the 4-way intersection where Wynkoop crosses Old 209, I felt my car slide a foot or more beyond where I would've wanted to stop. I later fishtailed a little on the turn from Wynkoop onto Hurley Mountain Road. But that just made me be more cautious as I turned off onto Dug Hill Road.
By now the snow was about an inch deep, and there was only one track going up Dug Hill Road. I had no problem until I took that steep bend just above the bus turnaround. At that point I started losing traction. I also saw a car coming very slowly down the hill. I didn't want to get in that car's way, and I could see that tracks in front of me had started lashing back and forth, indicating that the car that had gone up this hill before me had struggled, so I came to a stop. After the oncoming car had gotten past me, I tried to get going again, but there was no way. Unfortunately, I was in the Prius, not the Subaru, and I was going to need more than two driving wheels to have enough traction to proceed. My predicament was actually even worse than that, as I discovered once I'd given up on driving up the hill. Because when I came to stop, I could then feel the car ominously sliding backwards, its four wheels providing insufficient traction for the car to even stay in one place. That was terrifying, because if I were to go off the north shoulder of the road, there was a deep ravine waiting to gobble me up. But somehow my slide came to a stop, and I was able to zig and zag until my car was pointing downhill. Then I proceeded as cautiously as I could down to the bus around. There I parked and locked the car, grabbed what I needed, and hiked homeward up the hill. Measured on Google Maps, that hike is 2300 feet, or 0.436 miles. This was only the second or third time I've ever been forced to abandon a car at the school bus turnaround, and one of those times was due to a slipping clutch. By the time I walked in the door, I was covered with snow and my hands were cold. But at least I was alive, and we still had a functional Prius out there somewhere. I updated my co-workers on the conditions via Slack, and in so doing learned that Joe (the IT guy) was stuck in 4 mph traffic on US 209 north of Stone Ridge on his way to the Neversink Reservoir (where he lives). His commute usually takes an hour and a half, though tonight it would take three hours.
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