Last Week's Snowstorm and Other Stuff

Other Stuff First.  My kid brother is Japanese. He studied Japanese in college (uni to Europeans and antipodeans), spent time there before graduation, and went there to work right after graduation, in 1973. He's lived in Japan as a permanent resident ever since. So last year he finally decided to apply for Japanese citizenship. There was lots of paperwork needed (including stuff like our parents' marriage documents) and two interviews. He was told he'd have a decision sometime between April and September. Possibly the caseload was lighter than average or possibly he really impressed the bureaucrat who interviewed him, because on March 7 he sent us an e-mail with "subject: I'm Japanese!" I have mixed feelings. He's been there so long, and it is really his home, so it makes sense. But in a way it's sad that he's not going to be my fellow citizen.

I have a pound of ground lamb which needs to be cooked fairly soon (two days beyond last sale date) so tonight I'll be making meat sauce as I did for my spaghetti dinner  that I blogged about last fall. I'll add a leek to it and probably use mint and possibly marjoram in the sauce along with the other herbs. But basically it will be the same recipe and it'll give me sauce for three meals. Then for tomorrow I have three chicken thighs to cook. I'll probably use my method for baking chicken in sauce. This time, though, the thighs still have their skin on, and the only condensed soup I have is cheddar cheese. I have some swiss chard, which I'd probs cook separately, but could go nicely with some of the sauce on it. Also I might use a different rice product. But again, the basic idea is the same. The only problem is that it may turn out to be too much for one meal, but scant for two. We'll see how it goes. Right now, I'm thinking pasta tonight, Thursday, and next week some day; chicken tomorrow and Sunday.

Last Week's Snowstorm.  The forecasts said we might get a few inches of snow. The snow began falling Thursday mid-morning. For most of the day, air and ground temperatures were warm enough that I was tempted to tweet that it was "slushing." Although there was white stuff on the grass, it was melting on the roads and sidewalks.  I, the evening it began to stick, and when I woke up in the morning it looked like a real storm — several inches on the ground and coming down moderately heavily. My parish doesn't have weekday Mass when the town schools are closed because of weather. And the schools were closed. So late in the morning, I decided I'd better shovel some of the sidewalk. I did about half of the distance from my driveway, around the corner to the neighbor's property line. That took me about 45 minutes, at a pace which didn't involve heavy exertion.

I had to decide whether to go into Boston for the concert that evening. One forecast had been saying that snow would last until late evening. The other kept predicting that it would end by 3:00 p.m. If the former had been accurate, I might have stayed home. But when I went out at about 2:00 to finish the shoveling job, I found that it had stopped snowing. The depth of the snow varied from 12 to 16 inches — not as much as in our "blizzard" of a couple of weeks ago, but enough so that the house looked about the same as I looked at it from the sidewalk. So I decided against taking pictures, as they'd look so much like the ones from the earlier storm — I'm afraid I haven't gotten around to posting any of them, but maybe I will sometime soon. Again the shoveling took about 45 minutes. I'd use my shovel to define a square, then lift and dump the top half of it, followed by two more shovelfuls for the heavier, more compacted snow beneath. With that completed, along with a walkway from the sidewalk to the front door, I enjoyed a cup of hot, malt flavored Ovaltine to restore the calories expended. I'm inordinately pleased with myself for being able to handle it so easily as a 70 year old man.

Then I was ready for my trek in to Boston. Not only did I want to go to the Harvard Musical Association concert, but also I wanted to get to the Symphony Hall Box Office to exchange a couple of my subscription tickets. I can't go to the concert this Thursday because I need to attend a meeting here in town. So I traded that ticket for one to the same show on Friday afternoon. Also, I won't be going to symphony on Holy Thursday: I'll be in church that evening. I exchanged my ticket for one for the following Tuesday (which will include two pieces from the February 28 concert but a different piano piece with a different soloist). I had allowed what I thought was more than enough time for all that, but the trip back from Symphony Hall was slow and I got to the Scollay Square a couple of minutes after my reservation time.

Saturday morning it occurred to me, and a lot of other people, that we got through the storm with a lot less anxiety and a lot less disruption that would have been the case if the forecasters had known how big it would turn out to be. Who knows — a couple more like this and we could be hardy New Englanders again, people who take normal snowfalls and keep on going.