Welcome to Gaia! ::

This has been the worse weekend in a long time.

David was supposed to be here last night, but Western NY, as usual, had a freak early-october snowstorm.

It was horrible. End-of-the-world s**t.

The problem was not the ammount of snow. If all it was was the snow, I would have gone to school today.

No, the problem with the snow was the moistness of it and the timing of it. All of the trees still had leaves on them. The wet snow stuck to the trees and made them too heavy, causing branches to break and crush cars, pull down powerlines, and smash into peoples houses. Power was out all over, with branches blocking the street and wires sagging down. With the darkness and the thick snowflakes, it was like some kind of nuclear winter.

The conditions were still drivable when we left for the airport to pick David up, but by the time we got to the area around the airport, it wasn’t. Mom was having trouble navigating around the streets with all the dangerous traffic (hardly anyone had their snow tires on yet), so she had to take a turn down a side street after missing a turn. She must have ran over something hidden under the six inches of snow, because her back tire pretty much exploded. I told mom that it sounded like she hit something, but she thought the sound was the fall of a distant branch. So, she drove down the street on her rims until we heard the horrible sound, and had to pull into a hotel parking lot across the street from the airport.

Considering the weather conditions, mom decided not to change the tire herself and called someone up. We had to wait a while, with trees falling and power failing all around us. It was pretty cold. I was fine with my hat, scarf, winter coat, and especially my wonderful hiking boots, but mom was not. I went and got the emergency thermal blanket for her to wrap up in, then had some fun brushing snow off the car and out from around the flat tire.

While the guy was fixing the tire, I helped push a car out of a snowbank. The poor girls were all wearing open-toed shoes and skirts because they were in a wedding. They were pretty impressed with me, I guess, for digging their car out by myself and then helping push with the two guys.

Sometime durring this mess, David called. They had diverted his plane to Rochester, so he was at the Rochester airport. Great. He told us that they were waiting for the runway to get cleaned up so they could send the plane back to Buffalo, and that would take about an hour to get set up. So, once the tire was finished, we went to look for food.

There was no food, since power had gone off. We hung out at a different hotel until David called to say that the plane was about to leave. We spent the next two hours hanging out in the car in the airport parking lot, leaving every half hour to drive out and back in to take advantage of the automated free 30-minute parking.

Finally, at the airport at around 2 AM, the loudspeaker went off to announce that the flight from Rochester turned around and went back to Rochester. Great! We’re ******** going home.

It was crazy driving home. If you live up north you probally know this, but for all you southeners, heavy snowstorms at night usually give off an orange glow that lights things up reasonably well. But electricity was out all over so there were no street lights up, and all the street signs were covered with a thick coating of snow that made them impossible to read. We ended up getting lost for a while. It was spooky, being alone on the road with the near-blinding snow. We drove past graveyards where the graves were completely burried with snow, and trees had colapsed everywhere. The sidestreets were even more depressing, where trees were just laying across the road with a jumble of power lines about them.

There were points in time on the ride home where we accidently drove over burried branches and fallen powerlines, but thankfully we got home okay. We finally found a street we recognized and were able to get home by 3 AM.

Mom couldn’t drive me directly to my house, which is on a side street, so I walked it home. It was scary. Dead silence, except the cracking of the branches hanging above me. One falling branch, or one misstep onto a live powerline, could have killed me. But I wanted to be home.

I spent the night sleeping in my 0 degree sleeping bag on the couch. My power hadn’t gone out at all, and my internet was only down until I started typing this entry up. My mom’s house lost power, though, so my family is staying at my house right now.

David’s still in Rochester, reasonably more comfortable in a hotel room provided to him for free. There’s a travel ban in Buffalo right now and lots of roads are parking lots, otherwise we would have driven to Rochester to pick him up. He’s looking to get on a train and get here tonight.

So much for our camping trip.

Ugh, I feel miserable. Me and Dad don’t get along being in the same house together. I already screamed at him once for pushing my stuff out of the way since he thought it was “messy”.

I want David to be here.