The winter of our Web content

Since I last blogged about Portland’s winter storm, the snow and cold temperatures have continued (and continued), resulting in the longest spate of winter weather I’ve ever experienced.

I realize “bad winter weather” is all relative, and many from points north and east of here would scoff at what we’ve been going through. Still, you can’t argue with the effect the weather has had on Portland, shutting down various aspects of it because, well, we don’t get feet of snow very often!

Anyhow, things were actually looking pretty good through the end of last week, such that, while Julia was off every day due to school being canceled, I made it in to work along with everyone else in my office. This was mildly disappointing, not only in that I begrudged Julia’s ability to stay snuggled in a warm bed while I went off to work, but also because, after walking over the ice and snow and then hopping on a bus with chains, I was kind of hoping to find the office empty of less stalwart folks who weren’t nearly as brave as I’d obviously been. Turns out everybody who rides the bus was equally brave, which is to say that it wasn’t that brave after all.

They’d been forecasting bad weather over the weekend, so we weren’t surprised when the predicted snow hit Saturday morning. In fact, the heavy snow was charming in the way only that ironic things that you’ll later come to fear/loathe can be.

But all the nearby restaurants — or at least the ones within a shortened walking distance — were open, and I consider this a win for local businesses. The employees could walk or bus to work, and so could we. And boy, were we happy to see them open! Given that we were flying out on Monday (he said, ironically foreshadowing … perhaps), we hadn’t stocked up a lot of food at home, so our food options were a meal at Sckavone’s or Detour Cafe, or … whatever odds and ends just happened to be in our fridge or pantry, the true details of which I am too embarrassed to admit.

Anyhow, Saturday passed without problem. Julia went to a prenatal yoga class, we had lunch nearby, and then we went over to the Kunze’s for the night. Not the sort of stuff I’d usually blog about, except that every trip, every meal seemed exceptional, hard-won, a victory over the snow continuing to pile up outside.

Church was canceled Sunday morning, which was not at all surprising, but frankly a tad welcome, given the previous week’s adventure. With the extra free time, I engaged for only the second time in my life in shoveling the walk. After only a few minutes of this activity, I was glad I’d only done it twice so far — that is hard, aerobic activity. Nothing like sweating while cold! I was even feeling so charitable that I shoveled most of the neighbor’s sidewalk, too, though this was only marginally useful, given that most of our neighbors did not clear any snow away. Heck, I had to borrow one of our neighbors’ snow shovels just to do my bit.

Lacking any other plans besides sitting inside and looking at a computer screen, I decided to light a fire — another surprisingly rare activity in my life. In our house, the fireplace is somehow designed to completely fail to heat the room, so we only light them when it really suits the moment. Basically, it’s the thermal and visual equivalent of one of those fireplace DVDs.

We’ve never bought any firewood because whoever rented the house before us left a few dozen logs in the garage (along with other things — there were dishes in the dishwasher and clothes in the dryer; one wonders exactly how quickly she left and under what circumstances). There were also a few pieces of scrap wood which we used for kindling.

But, to be honest, one of the main reasons I wanted to light a fire was to destroy documents. See, we’ve had this ever-increasing collection of papers with sensitive data we’ve meant to shred for several years. At one point, it would have been manageable, but as it grew, it became obvious it was simply too much for our dinky shredder to complete in a reasonable amount of time.

Of course, why shred things when you can spend an hour balling them up and throwing them into the fireplace, I always say? With a soundtrack of Mussorgsky playing in the background, I felt legitimately sinister, as if I was nefariously destroying crucial evidence of my own malfeasance. In reality, I was burning tax documents from 1990, when I didn’t even have a job and hadn’t graduated from high school. If the IRS wants those, they can now piece them together from the copious amount of ashes in our fireplace. Along with too many credit card offers to mention.

And while Julia got no warming benefit from the fire, I, seated mere feet from the flames while I tossed paper wads in, found myself sweating for the second time that day. I sweated more on December 21st than possibly the whole month of November.

We woke up on Monday to see that even more snow had fallen, rendering the previous day’s shoveling largely undetectable, and the previous day’s shoveler a bit cynical about the whole process. “Well I’m not going to bother doing that again!” Everyone was trudging through the compacted snow of the street, anyhow, the sidewalks being slow-going due to the deep snow.

It’s not the most exciting story ever, but given the relatively historic nature of the weather, I wanted to have some documentation of it. Other, of course, than the hundreds of largely-white photographs I took, which I will inevitably upload to my Flickr account in, say, several months.