I’m Just Sharing

Anniversary Of The Big Blizzard of ‘93

Posted by Mitch on Mar 12, 2008

I live in central New York, where we’re fairly used to snow. Some areas get more than others, but all of us get more snow than pretty much anywhere else. Syracuse is the annual leader in snowfall for cities with more than 100,000 people, yet with our 115 per year average we don’t come close to some of our neighbors a few miles further north that average over 300 inches a year.

However, one thing we really don’t get all that often are blizzards. When everyone else gets pounded, quite often we only end up with remnants of those storms. I’m not sure why, but it’s probably a consequence of our usually getting at least a little bit of snow every day during the winter; at least it seems like that.

Yesterday was the anniversary of the worst storm in our history, the Blizzard of ‘93. How bad was it? Where I live, a suburb of Syracuse, we got 43 inches in 24 hours, and another 18 the next day; that’s pretty bad. Thing is, we already had 4 or 5 feet of snow on the ground, so when that came, there was literally nowhere to put it. At the time I lived in an apartment complex, and I decided to get out of town to stay with my parents in the Rochester area; they ended up getting 26 inches out of the same storm. When I did finally come back home, I couldn’t pull into my complex because every car was buried, people were pretty much trapped, and they had only been able to plow out the middle of the complex and nothing else; that was something else.

Of course, come spring we had the worst flooding the area had seen until 2002, when the rainstorm of all rainstorms came through, but that tale is for another day.

Yeah, we’re nuts around here, because we celebrate the snow and curse the snow at the same time. But it gives us something to talk about.

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What The Heck Am I Dreaming About?

Posted by Mitch on Mar 1, 2008

When I started this blog, I said it was going to be many things, but I specifically mentioned it was going to be a personal and sharing blog. Today, it’s that, because I have to get some things off my mind.

First, I just came back from a long walk outside in the cold and snow. I went for a walk, not because I wanted to exercise, but because I had to walk off some frustration and disappointment. My college basketball team, the Syracuse Orangemen, had just lost an embarrassing game, and I was stunned. Felt like I couldn’t breathe, so I went for a walk to clear my mind. While walking, I was wondering why I seem to have so much passion for some of my favorite sports teams and not the same kind of passion for, well, almost anything else. What is it that makes us want to live so much through our favorite teams, or movies, or music, and not as much for ourselves sometimes?

While walking, I also thought about some of my recurring dreams lately. Every once in awhile I have recurring dreams, but not usually four at the same time. Sometimes a recurring dream is easy to figure out. For instance, one of the dreams I keep having is directly related to playing Scrabulous on Facebook (the online version of Scrabble that the original company might make Facebook remove) against a few people right now. My mind keeps trying to come up with different words, and I see the grid in front of me, and I always seem to be missing a letter somewhere; just like the real game.

Another dream seems to be somewhat related to Scrabulous is that there are conversations going on, sometimes mine, sometimes others without me participating, and there’s a rule which says that a person must pull one word out of their sentence, come up with another word instead, and then state the sentence again. In essence, it’s about communications and how we relate to each other, and I guess the premise is that sometimes we say the first thing that pops into our minds, but we may want a mulligan so we can try to better define what we mean, and that’s what this exercise is all about. I say “guess” because no one has explained the rules in the dream, it’s just something we do.

The third dream is about this one particular floor in some office building. What office building? I have absolutely no idea. However, over the course of a few days, I keep ending up on this floor at some point, only working in the very first dream, and people keep telling me that so-and-so can’t know I’ve been there, yet everyone is willing to go out of their way to help me along. Last night’s dream actually had Tom Cruise working for this same company, and he and I were interacting with each other as though we’d known each other forever. Only he wasn’t a movie star, but just some guy who happened to work on this floor. What work they do is beyond me, but every once in awhile someone starts talking some very complicated computer stuff, and I keep thinking I must know it because why would I be remembering it in the dream? Of course, I can’t remember the specifics when I wake up, usually because I’m going right back to sleep.

And now comes dream number four, and this is odd. Four nights in a row, my dad has appeared in my dreams, and in each dream he’s been in a hospital or medical facility of some kind, each time worse off than the time before. Thing is, my dad passed away in 2002, and we’re nowhere near the anniversary, and after the first dream he hasn’t been able to communicate with me, so I have absolutely no idea as to what’s going on. I keep trying to think if something happened in the last week that’s connected to my dad in some fashion, but I’m coming up with nothing.

So there you go. Four non-related recurring dreams, and a bad beat in basketball. This has to be one of the strangest blog entries in history, and I’m trying to figure out how to close it off with some kind of product. This is the best I have for the day: