January 4, 2018

It has been a busy few months since I last posted here. Since October, I've had my first apartment since May of 2011. About 2 months after I got the apartment, a new landlord bought out the building and changed the rent payment dates. I got to spend about a month alone before a nosy neighbor moved in.

That nosy neighbor, known as Misty the Cat, has proven difficult to evict, even after she misbehaved and disfigured my face with her claws.

For the first few weeks, she was a indoor/outdoor cat, due to the fact that she had been living outdoors for several days to several weeks before she barged into my apartment. She now spends her days indoors, using my tv stand as a lookout post and using the crawl space underneath the kitchen sink as a hideout whenever she hears a plastic bag crackle or hears boots stomping on the floor.

I've been wearing my boots a lot due to the weather- snowstorm after snowstorm since early December, and 2 weeks plus of sub-zero mornings. The snowstorm today qualifies as a blizzard (probably more so than last week's Christmas storm that dumped a foot plus of snow on my neighborhood).

If I didn't have an apartment, a needy cat, and a high paying job 23 miles from home, I'd consider moving to the warmer climates of New Jersey or Pennsylvania. But all this may come crashing down if my 16 year old Taurus (with 220000 miles that has never experienced these kind of weather conditions before) stops running.

January 29, 2014

New year, same old problems. I am unemployed again- because 5 months worth of sub-minimum wage commission delivery work did a number on both my wallet and my right knee. I started the new year in Rockaway Park with my sister and nephew visiting from Dyersburg, TN. This was the first time I had seen either since my 30th birthday- in May 2002! Not long after they got here, a major snowstorm socked NYC with 6-12 inches of the white stuff.

My nephew, of course, enjoyed it. I nearly got frostbite taking those pictures.

On the way back to Pennsylvania and Tennessee, my sister got trapped in an ice storm. About 2.5 weeks later, another snow storm of around a foot hit NYC.

Supposedly NYC is not the only place in North America with horrifically-below-average January temps. Austin had temps in the 20s- a good 20-30 below average (and a humanitarian crisis with 4000+ homeless flooding the shelters that were designed for one tenth that number). Colorado Springs had major snowstorms. Minnesota had days in which the high temperature was below 0. And the Southeast got paralyzed this week by snow- albeit far less snow than what NYC has seen this month. Even Florida and Texas can't escape this cold. The Super Bowl will be held across the river from NYC on Sunday. I hope the NFL knows what it's in for- cold (although 30s by then will be a heat wave compared to most of this month), chance of snow, unfilled seats because few sane people want to pay 4 figures to see an outdoor game in the cold. Even the hotels (which unlike Met Life Stadium do have heat) are having trouble filling their rooms. I can see now why Liz Stonehill (an EMT dispatcher whose office is probably warmer than my room in Rockaway) considers snow to be a 4 letter word.