December delivers

Cannot complain about snow in New England-one comes with the other in a manner of speaking. We had a good bit of snow here in my corner of the universe--the newspapers suggest about nine inches and that sounds about right. It's more at one time than I remember in a couple of years and when this happens, I always find myself going 'so what happened to global warming?' as if one has anything to do with the other.

Tried snow blowing some of it last night and overdid it a bit. Wound up getting all ghastly ghostly pale and throwing up (not in the snow) and the evening sort of blurred to an end. Not to worry. Much like you, probably, woke to more than enough this morning. Actually not too much more than we had last night, but not helped, in my opinion, by the lack of municipal snow removal equipment.

Nor pointing fingers (well, not much anyway), I drove through Norwich and Lisbon (not the one in Portugal) and Montville, Waterford and New London and never saw a municipal snowplow--or much evidence that they had been out with any frequency. The neighborhood snow removal was kind of fun, if that sort of thing can ever be fun, and put me back in touch with my neighbors with whom I rarely interact (not that they are upset about that).

Because we just got our snow blower repaired we were able to help out clearing some of the snow from alongside the cars parked on the even side of the street. Norwich has a sort of snow parking ban where everyone needs to vacate the odd numbered side of the street when snow falls. In theory, it makes removal easier, but I do think if the city, like NYC, went to alternate side of the street parking in two days, with everyone having to move their cars, we'd be able to clean up the whole street on both sides, though I'm not sure where we would put the snow.

Of course, since I'm still battling a cold that's left me woozy and dehydrated (or more woozy as my wife might point out), I may not be the ideal person to suggest how Norwich cleans its streets. But based on what I felt and saw today, we each have enough neighbors to lend a hand, or a shovel.
-bill kenny