Snow-tober remembered

We haven’t really discussed the bizarre Halloween weekend snowstorm that crippled the Northeast. My elderly parents in northern New Jersey are still without power – no worries, they are doing fine thanks to a very safe natural gas faux fireplace and a very generous neighbor (who has power), who has allowed them use of a big generator. The problem there is they are the only ones on the street without power, so it could be a while for them!

At home, we were fortunate to only lose power for about 15 minutes. Others in our local family were not so lucky, and so our home became a “family flop house” of sorts for a few days, which was actually a lot of fun! We did lose Internet, cable and phone service for two days. In the overall scheme of things, this was mildly annoying.

On our Monday morning jog, Fast Tony and I had an interesting conversation. He had lost power at his home across town, but he was unconcerned since he has a wood-burning stove. I told him of our situation, and I said: “I’d rather have power than the Internet.” He disagreed, saying he would rather be without power but with some form of the Internet. Interesting discussion.

The historic weather had little impact on our team’s training. Our athletes were able to get the required mileage in over the weekend.

The two local college XC meets were impacted a bit on Saturday. Coach Horton reported that the SUNYACs at Bowdoin Park got off unscathed until the awards ceremony began … not a bad deal. By the way, Terry deserves huge kudos for setting up the excellent 8km and 6km courses used at SUNYACs, which was hosted by our friends at SUNY New Paltz.

The Liberty League, hosted by Vassar, was not as lucky. From what I heard, the snow was a definite factor in that meet over at the Farm. Congrats to our crosstown friends as the Vassar men got second place.

The unusual and unwelcome early winter weather in mid-fall gave us a small glimpse into what life will be like around here in a few months. I’d rather wait till January and February to deal with the elements, but we deal with them as we must.