I don’t know how bad it is around the country, but in Boston it is nasty out there. I just got home driving at 20 miles an hour making sure I ONLY stuck to the back roads on the way home. Normally I like to take the back streets of Cambridge because it was a bit faster; tonight it’s because I didn’t trust the roads to be on Mass Ave (for those not Boston literate that’s Massachusetts avenue). And it’s not because I don’t think Mass Ave was well cleared, but my car was not in the best way to be riding in. Two hours after my friend left work, he called to tell us that he just got home because his car sputtered to a stop on Storrow Drive (horrible place to stop) and a statie had him towed all the way to his house at a cost of $250. I was more worried about just getting over the snow bank from the snow plows that usually block my driveway this time of night. However I wasn’t expecting ice—on my windshield. I mean sheets of ice covering all windows of the car. Suddenly I’m living the scene from Fargo where Gunderson is shaving the ice off the windshield. After I realized that I would be at the office for another half hour scraping the damn thing in the bitter cold, I wound up shaving the driver’s side and a small porthole in the right passenger window to see oncoming cars. The car only has a rear defroster. So I drove VEERRRRRY cautiously back home. And I still got stuck on the frozen mini-snow bank blocking the drive. The problem with Boston wasn’t so much the snow itself—we didn’t get a ton of it—but the fact that it mixed with freezing rain to form… well, cement really. The snow you see on the ground will stay in the very form it’s in for the next month if it doesn’t warm up soon.
UPDATE: I’m sure you all know that Turner Broadcasting will be paying Boston $2 Million for it’s marketing stunt (that’s basically a $1 million markup from what they paid to get rid of all the Lite-Brites). Peter Berdovsky still faces criminal charges for his part in the whole thing. He’s now in trouble for videotaping the police taking down one of the lite-brites and blowing it up. Since he’s a video artist, he was doing what he is (kind of) paid to do. But he never notified the police that it was all a marketing stunt. However his lawyer says there’s no chance of him getting deported for all of this. Which is good because really it was the media and Boston local government who made a big deal of of a bunch of Lite-Brites. Meanwhile we’re a laughing stock of a city throughout the country.