Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Make It Stop!

Not to sound über cheese or anything - but what a magical weekend! Definitely one of my top three New York City Saturdays.

Snow just makes everything better!

I didn’t think it was really going to happen. I mean, come on. When is the weatherman ever right?

He’s not! So you can only imagine my giddy schoolgirl elation when - hold the phone - snow it did. And a lot.

It was like the time Allentown got hit with a state-of-emergency blizzard and we college kids hit the bars instead of the books. Woody’s ran of out pizza. It was a-mazing. (Do any of you Muhlenbergers remember that?? So fun.)

Now I must say - I do hate it when people use umbrellas in the snow. It just seems so silly. It’s not raining, people!

But thank the lord Miss Cobb and I had the foresight to add umbrellas to our outfits before heading to the bar to meet our lovely lady friends.

(We poo-poohed all the peeps along the way who were complaining that it wasn’t worth the hassle...all from the semi-shelter of our ’brellas. How could you not go out??)

It really was a blizzard though - albeit an adventurous one. The wind! The freezing temps! The piercing little flakes!

It’s so funny how snow makes you want to stay up late. Maybe this is a lingering characteristic from school days of yesteryear, when snow meant no school (if you were lucky), and you could stay up late, late, LATE!

Well. We stayed up a tad later on Saturday than our 5th grade counterparts probably ever dared dream of.

Sleepiness aside, it was totes worth it. Such an marvelous experience - walking home in a New York City snowstorm at 5am.

The streets were so peaceful. Eerily quiet. Why does snow make everything so still? Very interesting.

There were but a few reminders that I was not, actually, alone in the city - namely, the scratchy shoveling and shovelers. Think Old Man Marley in Home Alone.

But all good things must come to an end. Sob.

What a difference some sun can make! We went to sleep Saturday night (fine, Sunday morning) - with visions of sugarplums and fluffy white flakes dancing in our heads. And when we awoke...oh boy.

Our saccharin-sweet dreams of snow, glorious snow!, were replaced with a very harsh reality. Viz.: a melting, dripping, dirty, slushy, sloppy, salty mess.
It had only been a few hours. Come ON!

Saturday night we were dancing and prancing around, so alive - like the toys in The Nutcracker (and yes, we were acting like nuts). Then Sunday morning, POOF!, it seemed like nada but a dream. Dreamy snowy dream.
And now we’re stuck with the sucky reality.
 
The reality, my friends, is that Manhattan is not so very well equipped to displace a colossal amount of frozen white flakes. 

350 days of the year, New York City is the greatest place in the world to live. Per my calculations, that’s -7 for temperatures below zero with a wind chill (holy wind tunnels), -3 for those intolerably hot, hot, HOT days, and -5 for days when you can’t escape the slushy, mucky, snowed-in sidewalks.
So as much as we all loved our little stormy city Saturday night, we awoke to something quite different. 

It’s not so very convenient to live on an island and rely almost solely on being pedestrian when the streets are covered in snow. In fact, it can be quite abominable - yep, just like that big, bad Snowman. 

Our NYC sidewalks went from fluffy, beautiful strips of angelic white...to super slippery, sopping wet runways of doom. 

Unfortunately we’re the passengers and our most unreliable footsies are our own worst enemies. 

Well, that and the bazillion other peeps trying to push and shove their way onto a (somewhat) drier path. That is to say, the path that’s sans 5-inch slush puddles.
When I was walking home from a lovely brunch at Kelly’s yesterday, an obnoxious ne’er-do-well actually had the gall to box me out of my own trajectory. 

Oh yes. 

There I was, picking and placing my properly Ugg-ed feet, mule-like, along the path of least-slushy-resistance, and she had the audacity to point and say, “Go that way.”
How about “Go to hell, bitch!” 

I joke, I joke. ’Tis the season of giving! Not name calling!
And so I gave up my somewhat less-flooded course in (dis)favor of a more contemptible one. And I reminded myself how much I loved the snow the night before.
It’s not fair. Really it isn’t. Why can’t we just have snow sans the messy aftermath. Why isn’t there some sort of invention that sucks all the dirty white shit back up into the sky once the browning begins? (Which, let’s face it, in this city isn’t very long.)
There’s no method to the madness. No reason whatsoever for the swamps of icky brown ice water that are concurrent with blissfully white blizzards. 

The singular satisfaction that I canst have tonight is the silly sound of slippery tires getting stuck in the slush.

HA, that’s whatcha get! Well that and this here adorable snowman in my courtyard.