Unless you are living under a rock (or on the West Coast, possibly), you know my fellow mid-Atlantic-dwellers and I are currently experiencing a record-breaking December snowstorm, which the Weather Channel has dubbed "a winter wallop." Now, aside from the obvious grumbling that this had to happen on a weekend and couldn't buy us all a few days off work by doing its walloping on, say, a Tuesday, I've learned a few things in the past 12 hours. With the exception of a year and a half I spent being a Viking in Copenhagen, Denmark, I've lived in the mid-Atlantic region (Maryland) since I was nearly 8; the better part of, um, 15 years?! Eeep. Anyway, my point is not to age myself. My point is to illustrate that I should have a basic understanding of what you need before -- and what you need to do after -- a major snowstorm. Here's a list of things I've come up with of basic things responsible adults need to do before a snowstorm.
Things Adults do Before and After Snowstorms
1. Buy salt for sidewalks and walkways.
(I live in a house, not an apartment where they have groundskeepers to "de-snow" for you). I realized we should probably get salt for our walkway around, oh, 9:30 last night, after it had already started snowing. I needed to go to the grocery store anyway, so I thought it wouldn't be a big deal to pick a bag of rock salt for the walk there. Unfortunately, rock salt is either hardware store-exclusive or they were completely sold out of three grocery stores. I'm guessing the latter, considering it was already snowing and meteorologists have been predicting snowpocalypse since Wednesday. More on grocery store madness in a minute.
Anyway, being the resourceful Bob-Villa-cum-McGyver that I am, I picked up a $.52 container of table salt and decided that would work for the walk (we don't have sidewalks in our neighborhood and thus aren't bound under sidewalk clearing laws -- in my parents' neighborhood, they have to be cleared within 12 hours of the end of snowfall). I came home, ripped the spout off the container and "liberally" "sprinkled" the walk. When I woke up this morning and saw over a foot of snow outside my bedroom window, I ran to the front door, anxious to see my salt at work, doing it's chemical-melting-thang on the walk. Um, no. EPIC FAIL #1.
2. Locate your snow shovel. Place it by the front door, ready for action.
Last night, I was explaining my brillant table-salt-on-the-walk idea to my roommate (sounding overly pleased with my "resourcefulness," I'm sure). I distinctly remember saying something along the lines of "No worries if it doesn't work, we have a snow shovel." Well. Thing I've learned number two is that you need to know where your snow shovel is to USE it. Like, if it's sitting out back, leaning against the side of the house, maybe go grab it before there is over a foot of snow on the ground. Now I have no idea where our snow shovel is and the table-salt-on-the-walk brilliant chemical reaction isn't working. EPIC FAIL #2. This will probably become EPIC FAIL #s 3, 4 and 5 when my roommates and I need to "dig" our cars out.
3. Go to the grocery store, stock up on necessities, like bananas.
Wait, bananas? As mentioned above, I did have the foresight above to go to the grocery store (after it had already started snowing) to get some "necessities." "Necessities" for me included soy creamer for my coffee and cottage cheese. Normal people's snow storm "necessities" include things like soup, milk, eggs and bananas. Wait, bananas? Yes. Man, it was crazy. I just wanted two or three bananas to go with my greek yogurt and oatmeal and you'd think that bananas are out of season on the East Coast (haha, wait a second...!). In all seriousness, though, three out of three grocery stores I visited were completely out of bananas. In two of the three, the banana area of the produce section looked like the water aisle at Harris Teeter in Charleston after Hurricane Hugo. There were ripped open banana boxes everywhere and not a banana in sight. When checking out of the second store, I spied one lonesome, already-browning banana right by checkout. I grabbed it. The old woman in line in front of me was like "Wow, where'd you find that banana?" I was pleased to have gotten what was probably the last unclaimed banana in three states. In retrospect, I probably should have offered to give it to her. Oh well.
It's still snowing, so this list will probably grow once it stops. I'm going to gear up and go on a Snow safari to find the snow shovel and, once I do, pretend the excursion was my plan the whole time. Maybe I'll also go visit Mike Seidel, Weather Channel's on-location reporter in Tenleytown (about a mile from me) who just said "oops, I tripped over slush" on the air. Maybe I can audition to be the next Jim Cantore. Where is my favorite meteorologist, anyway?
Stay safe, DC. Don't let your white pets out in the snow. Enjoy your bananas.
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/08/01/magazine/the-way-we-live-now-8-1-99-encounter-love-is-all-around.htmlLove Is All Around
Orrin Hatch is a distinguished U.S. Senator who is running for the Presidency. But what he really likes to do is sing sweet songs of love.
By Jeffrey Goldberg
The New York Times, August 1, 1999
Midway through a conversation about his quixotic bid to be the Republican Presidential nominee, Orrin Hatch, the grim-faced Mormon patriarch who serves as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, asked a question no other United States Senator has ever asked. Or, at the very least, has asked me.
The question: “Have you listened to my love songs?”
I had not, in fact, listened to his love songs. I was familiar with his gospel music—he has a new CD out, “Put Your Arms Around the World,” featuring Jesse Jackson’s daughter Santita—and I have listened to his patriotic songs, including “You Gotta Love This Country.” But I had not yet been exposed to his love songs.
Orrin Hatch, the senior Senator from Utah, is not associated in most minds with romance. Orrin Hatch talking about his love music is sort of like the farmer in “American Gothic” jumping off the painting and saying, “You know, what I’d really like to do is go to an all-night rave.”
Hatch asked me this improbable question as we walked through the Hart Senate Office Building. His press aide had warned me against bringing up Hatch’s budding career as a songwriter, on the grounds that he would never stop talking. The Senator loves talking about his music, so much so that he barely noticed the Secretary of State walking by. “Hi, Madeleine,” he finally said. “Keep up the good work.” Albright looked as if she might have something to say, but Hatch’s mind was elsewhere.
“You know, some of my songs are written just for Barbra,” he told me as we continued walking. Barbra, as in Streisand.
Hatch once wrote a song in honor of Ted Kennedy and his wife, Vicki, called “Souls Along the Way.” “Oh, he loved it,” Hatch said, speaking of Kennedy, his sometime legislative partner. “Everybody loves that song. Everybody in the industry thinks it could be a major hit.”
“We are souls along the way—in my heart you stay/You know my secrets, I have cried your pain,” the song goes.
I asked Hatch if he thought the Republican Party would expel him for writing songs for Ted Kennedy and dreaming of working with Barbra Streisand. “I’m not prejudiced. I love Democrats. One of my favorite Democrats is Gladys Knight.” On an album of inspirational music, Knight sings “Many Different Roads,” a song about Mother Teresa and Lady Diana that Hatch wrote the lyrics for: “A princess and a pauper/Walked the lonely roads of life/In many ways so different/And yet so much alike/Many different roads can lead to glory/Many different lamps can bring the light.”
“The music,” Senator Kennedy told me, “is a side of Senator Hatch that not too many people know about.”
Hatch would like that to change, because this is all you need to know about Orrin Hatch: while he would like to be President—name a Senator who wouldn’t—what he would really like to be is Neil Diamond.
Senator Hatch, who is 65, has written poetry for a long time, but he branched out into music only a few years ago, when a Utah composer, Janice Kapp Perry, asked him one day if he would give lyric writing a go. One thing led to another, and soon “he was sending them in batches of 10 and 15,” Perry said. Their first collaboration was “My God Is Love,” a CD of Christian praise.
“This is a way of getting my feelings out without hurting anybody or irritating anybody,” Hatch told me. “Well, some of the songs might irritate people.”
His music is a little bit country and a little bit rock-and-roll. A very little bit: though he professes to be an eclectic listener—I like some of the rap music”—his music fits comfortably into the easy-listening category. Everything rhymes, more or less, and subtexts are nonexistent. I asked him if he would ever write about darker subjects, like his poverty-stricken childhood (the Senator once worked as a janitor), or about controversies in his public career. But Hatch said he had no plans to set the Anita Hill episode to music. His music is straight uplift. “I wake up in the middle of the night and write things that are beautiful,” he said.
Listening to his Christian music gave me an idea. I have been on a 10-year campaign to encourage the writing of better Hanukkah songs. The current Hanukkah catalogue, Adam Sandler’s songs excepted, is insipid and shopworn. Perhaps, I suggested to Senator Hatch, he could write a Hanukkah song to go along with his vast repertory of Christmas music.
“I’m going to show you something I don’t show everybody,” Hatch responded, and pulled out from under his shirt a small mezuza on a chain.
Hatch cottoned to the idea of a Hanukkah song; some of the themes of Hanukkah, the quest for religious freedom most of all, echo the story of the Mormons. He said he would give it a try and invited me to return to his office later that week, to talk about the Hanukkah song and to—and there’s no other way to put this—kick back and listen to his love jams.
So one weekday morning, when the other dozen or so Republican candidates for President were presumably squeezing donors for money—Hatch is roughly $36 million behind George W. Bush, though he has asked that one million Americans contribute $36 each to his campaign—the Senator sat in his office for an hour and listened to CD’s.
“Do you like Sting?” he asked me as he began playing “Whispers of My Heart,” one of the love songs. Yes, I said. “This is Sting,” he responded.
It is?
“Well, no. Actually it’s a kid from Utah. But he sounds like Sting.”
I had prepared, at Hatch’s request, an outline of themes for his Hanukkah song. I would have suggested the title “Light My Fire,” but Orrin Hatch plays things straight, so I thought better of it. He read the outline carefully and said, “I think we can really do something here.” I recommended getting the song out in advance of the New York primary. But he said he doesn’t mix politics and music.
It is not entirely clear why Hatch is running for President. Unlike the other Republican munchkins, he has stature to lose. He has an impressive legislative record and the chairmanship of a powerful committee. He is running, he says, because he is the best alternative to George W. Bush, and because he could do a good job as President.
But then I put this question to him: If he had a choice between the Presidency and superstardom in the world of popular music, which would he choose? “President,” he said. With all due respect, I didn’t really believe him.
