Surviving the Storm

Phew!  What a week.  I am just now get­ting back to my com­puter to work again.  I can’t believe how much trou­ble a lit­tle snow can cause.  I grew up in Syra­cuse, NY.  Never heard of it?  Well, it’s known for hav­ing excep­tion­ally high lev­els of snow dur­ing the win­ter.  Actu­ally, it has been known to get more snow than any other U.S. city. Not sure if that is still true after the past few win­ters.  Buf­falo, NY has really been giv­ing Syra­cuse a run for its money.  This is all to say, I am famil­iar with the effect of a heavy snow fall.  Been there, done that.

You might imag­ine how odd it felt last week to pack up my kids and drive the 4 hours to Syra­cuse to escape the 15–20 inches of snow at our home in New Eng­land.  My Syra­cuse friends did not miss the irony.  Accord­ing to New Eng­land news­pa­pers there are still peo­ple with­out power now, 8 days after the storm has ended.

Truly mind bog­gling that an early snow storm could cause such dev­as­ta­tion. Snow is sup­posed to arrive, make things beau­ti­ful and quiet, then set­tle down for some hiber­na­tion.  Even now there are still tree branches lin­ing the sides of the road await­ing the arrival of some­one with a truck, lift­ing tool and able-bodied hands to take them away.  The weather this year has given those of us liv­ing in New Eng­land plenty to talk about.

Being away from home and out of our rou­tine, work­ing on my blog and post­ing was dif­fi­cult.  Com­pound that with return­ing home just in time to plan my children’s 4th birth­day party and the arrival of fam­ily from both sides, I have been miss­ing my com­puter.  It feels great to sit down and get a chance to sort out my thoughts and write again.  After many years of ignor­ing my writ­ing skills and tak­ing time for granted, I find myself being drawn to the com­puter, almost des­per­ate to write.

Writ­ing has a way of pulling you in and demand­ing atten­tion.  The words need to find the page to be expressed and ulti­mately read.  Even now this post has taken on a path of its own.  I set out to talk about the weather and how much I love my new refrig­er­a­tor because it kept every­thing cold for 2 whole days with­out power.  We didn’t lose any­thing. And here I am talk­ing about how much I missed writ­ing blogs and work­ing on the computer.

Even two years ago I would not have believed it if some­one told me I would be so moved to write.  Although I have always been able to write well and I excelled at it in school, I never pur­sued it as an action to take with­out the demand of an exter­nal entity, usu­ally teach­ers.  I saw writ­ing as some­thing I had to do rather than a need to express myself.

Goes to show how much I “know”.  Now I nego­ti­ate and bor­row time to write when­ever pos­si­ble.  Get­ting the words onto the page are impor­tant to me and I am will­ing to relin­quish many other mun­dane tasks to get in front of a com­puter with energy and brain power to spare.

So what does all this mean.  Noth­ing I guess.  Just to say that I’m so glad the power is back on, the party is over and get­ting back to “nor­mal” feels great.  I have some great things in mind for this month.  I hope you, kind reader, enjoy the sur­prises as much as I am.  Thoughts?