Even Smaller

Becky and I were out doing some shopping today, and we stopped at the ***Apple Store|http://www.apple.com/retail/northshore/*** to buy ***Tax Cut|http://www.taxcut.com/***. While we were there, I got to check out the ***Mac Mini|http://www.apple.com/macmini/*** in person for the first time. It is even smaller than I had thought, from the photos I had seen so far. It literally fits in the palm of my hand (well, with my fingers stretched out at least). It’s ridiculously small. If we weren’t planning this darned trip to Russia, we might actually be able to afford one. 🙂 Here’s some photos I took on the olde camera-phone:

ppp|My hand can cover it upMy keys for comparisonThe Apple Mouse on top, for comparison|ppp

Not an Oscar winner…

..but it won my heart. (awwww!)

Peter and I went to see ***In Good Company|http://www.ingoodcompanymovie.com*** last night. I was pleasantly surprised by the film. I had a feeling that I would enjoy it, but it turned out much differently than I had expected.

The movie parallels the lives of a 51 year old Ad Sales Exec and his 26 year old new boss. (Peter leaned over and said, “that would be like if I became your Dad’s new boss!!”) Though they are in different places in their lives, they are both struggling with carreer decisions, money, life choices, etc.

The pace of the movie was often excruciatingly slow, and that only made the picture better. The soundtrack was slow and soothing and sometimes non-existant. I found myself noticing the sound of the Movie Reel Machine in the projection room. Still, if it had been loud and fast, it would not have been the heart wrenching film that it was.

One of the things that I liked best in this movie was that the main characters are good, honest people. And they make the right choices in their lives. Not necessarily the choices that would make them happiest, or the richest, but the decisions that make sense. I left the theater feeling as if a huge population (the honest, hard working, moral sort) of people had finally been represented in a movie.

This film won’t win any awards. Dennis Quaid won’t be recognized for his portrayal of a deeply emotional character. This may just be a stepping stone for a very classic looking Topher Grace. In any case, it was a great film, uplifting and funny,

St. George’s Church

Of all the TV shows I watch one of my favorites is ***The Amazing Race|http://www.cbs.com/primetime/amazing_race6/***. I especially like to see the interesting places that the teams get to visit all over the world.

Last week the teams were in Ethiopia and were instructed to go to ***St. George’s Church|http://taipei.tzuchi.org.tw/tzquart/2000fa/qf3.htm***. The church was hewn from solid rock and all that is visible from ‘ground level’ is the very tip of the roof. You must climb down through the cliff to enter the building. Very Cool.

ppp|St. George's Church|ppp

***The link|http://taipei.tzuchi.org.tw/tzquart/2000fa/qf3.htm*** above has some interesting information about Ethiopia, especially the country’s Christian heritage. You should ***check it out|http://taipei.tzuchi.org.tw/tzquart/2000fa/qf3.htm***.

Snow’d In

I took this photo on Monday morning, upon arriving at work on the first day after the blizzard. You can see about half of our building peeking above the massive snowbanks made by the plows. That’s a lot o’ snow. 🙂

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Letters of introduction

Have you ever been to a party where you know the host and maybe one or two other people, but not the majority of the other guests? It can be uncomfortable trying to strike up conversations with folks you don’t know anything about. Sometimes a little information can make it alot easier.

Maybe the “friends” links on the left side of this site are like party-goers that you don’t know. Maybe you might click on a name if you knew a little bit about them. I’m here to provide that information today.

***Amy|http://waltondammerunprwdot.org/g/*** is a high school friend of Peter’s from Mount Vernon, Ohio. Since attending Hillsdale College she has resided, with her husband Josh, in Rancho Cucomonga, CA.

Peter has known ***Arthur|http://kizoku.blogspot.com/*** since he had really long hair. They have been roomates, classmates and co-workers. He plays guitar and drums and lives a few blocks away here in Beverly.

***Bob|http://bobgolding.blogspot.com/*** falls into the catagory “Friend of a Friend”. He attended Hillsdale with ***Will|http://pulchersentio.prwdot.org*** and is now in Law School. He has given us some helpful car advice in the past.

Somewhere on the World Wide Web Peter ran into ***Chad|http://jayseae.cxliv.org/***. He shares Peter’s love of the computer. His site gives us a glimpse into Charlotte, NC life. Peter’s note: I first ran into Chad when I started using the ***Bloglines Toolkit|http://jayseae.cxliv.org/bloglines_toolkit/index.html*** Firefox extension.

I met ***Corey|http://corey.prwdot.org/*** about 24 years ago… in the Maternity Ward. He’s been my baby brother ever since. He’s into skiing, biking, and his new Mini. He doesn’t have a blog, but the site has pics and stuff on it. Check it out.

I haven’t yet had the opportunity to meet ***Hope|http://www.hopenatalie.com/***. I’ll have time, though, she isn’t even a month old yet. Her daddy, Chris, works with Peter and is a Gordon Grad. Find more of their story ***here|http://prwdot.org/?p=archives/002293***.

***Jackie|http://jway.blogspot.com/*** has blogged on both the left and right coasts of this great nation. She is a family friend from years past and is back in the area studying at Suffolk University in Boston.

I don’t know much about ***James|http://drjames.blogspot.com/*** and ***Jeff|http://gentry13.blogspot.com/***. They both work at CBD and live in Beverly. It is nice to read other reports from others in our fair city.

***Jennifer|http://junefourteenth.blogspot.com/*** is one of my closest friends from my college days. Before I met her I used to see her around campus wishing that she was my friend. I thought she was so cool. Then, our sophmore year, luck was with me and we ended up living on the same floor. We met, and have been bosom buddies ever since. She teaches Music in New Jersey.

***Jenny|http://www.ljcfyi.com/*** is a gal who’s site I came across on the web. I don’t know her and she doesn’t know me, but her blog fascinates me. She has a fantastic sense of style and keeps herself busy with crafts and taking care of her husband, house and pet pug, Oscar.

***Jenny R|http://www.livejournal.com/users/raingirl3179/*** is another pal from Gordon. Peter and I both knew here individually before we knew each other…but Peter was closer to her. She’s an English teacher in New Hampshire and is into LoTR and she writes fan fiction. Peter’s note: Jenny was one of my crazy friends from Ferrin Hall at Gordon. We spent many hours watching ***Neon Genesis Evangelion|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neon_Genesis_Evangelion*** and other Japanese anime, as well as playing cards and hanging out with other members of the close-knit Ferrin crew (***pictured here|http://gallery.prwdot.org/our_reception/DSCN1071***)

***Jeremy and Angela|http://www.thebiggspicture.org/*** are our close friends who live on Cape Cod. Jeremy and Peter were roomates at Gordon and in Woburn and they were in each other’s weddings. The happy couple are currently planning their escape from the Cape while being entertained by their two cats.

Jill and I have known each other for seven and a half years now!! She and I met during Freshman Orientation at Gordon and have been friends and roomates over the years. ***Jill and Ben|http://www.theholtsite.com/*** are currently revamping their website, but you can look forward to stories of their life in Bolton very soon.

Another Mount Vernon native, ***Jon|http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=thevalk*** is currently preparing for a new job in Columbus. He’s a Mount Vernon Nazarene University grad and likes to write poetry, song lyrics and dinosaur comics.

***Kathleen|http://www.rmfo-blogs.com/kathleen/*** is another friend of a friend. Our link is Gordon College. Her website offeres a peek into her married life and stories of her puppy Seamus.

***Laura and Johnny|http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=DimbyRVin*** are driving around the country in an RV. Laura and I were childhood friends who have recently reconnected. Their site fills us in on their journey and their search for the right place to settle down together.

Another friend of a friend, ***Megan|http://mego.blogspot.com/*** is a blogger from New Mexico. She likes riding horses, traveling to China and writing. She used to live in Massachusetts but traded up for a warmer climate!

***Michelle|http://mikao.blogspot.com/*** is a vetran blogger who’s site I found via Kathleen’s blog. If she didn’t live in Canada, and if I had ever met her in real life, I think we’d be good friends. I love having eyes and ears in another country and her posts are often entertaining and interesting. She’s always a good read.

I don’t know ***Mike|http://mike.refugeisland.net/*** but his website often has great links and interesting stories. Peter has chatted with him online, but we don’t know him in real life.

***Nikkiana|http://everytomorrow.org/*** is a prolific blogger who writes about technology, life, religion and everything else on her mind. I’ve met her once and Peter spent a day with her and her boyfriend in Boston. She’s a New Hampshire native who attends technical college there.

Last, but certainly not least, we have ***Will|http://pulchersentio.prwdot.org/***. Another Mount Vernon friend of Peter’s and brother to Amy (See above). Currently he is in Japan with the JET program. His site keeps us updated on his adventures there.

phew! That was harder than I expected it to be! I hope it gave you a little insight into the folks we link here at World Wide Wood. Questions? Comments? We’d love to hear them.

Comparison

This has been a pretty big storm, but it hasn’t been quite as bad as the Nor’easter of December 2003. The temperatures during that storm were higher, with wetter, heavier snow, which is much harder to plow. The inches of accumulated snow were probably about the same, but this year it was very light and fluffy and easy to move.

Here’s a photo comparison… December 2003 on the left, January 2005 on the right. 🙂

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Update
We’ve heard several mentions on the news of some big snowstorm in February of 2003, but we couldn’t quite recall the details. Well, thanks to a little searching of our own blog, I pulled up some blog entries for the storm of February 17, 2003 (which was nearly as big as this one and the one in December 2003): ***here|http://prwdot.org/archives/000692.html***, ***here|http://prwdot.org/archives/000693.html***, and ***here|http://prwdot.org/archives/000695.html***. For some odd reason, there are no photos from that storm. I might have to dig back in my iPhoto Library to see if I perhaps took some, but never uploaded them. However, I did find some photos from a snowstorm that happened about ***10 days|http://gallery.prwdot.org/snowy_friday_03*** before that one.

A Few Feet

8:30 a.m.
The temperature outside is 18.7F. By my measurements, we’ve got exactly one foot of fresh snow on the back porch since I shoveled it off last night at around 5:15 p.m. On the front porch, we have well over a foot. And it’s still coming down – we’re close to a band that could be dumping as much as four inches every half hour! Insanity! Becky is making cran-apple pancakes for breakfast, and then later we’re going to venture out to see more of the snow. For now, we have some photos shot from ***inside the building|http://gallery.prwdot.org/blizzard_200501***:

ppp|
Well over a foot of snow on the front porch!|ppp

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Outside on the back porch and a view of the Home Style Laundry parking lot.|ppp

10:00 a.m.
Outside temperature is 18.5F. Becky and I just got back inside from a little jaunt around the block. We cleared pretty much all of the snow off of our front porch. It wasn’t too difficult because the snow is very light and fluffy. Then Becky tried out her cross-country skis. The conditions weren’t quite right, because the snow was just too cold and not slick enough for her to glide. But we went around the block just the same. We entered the building via the Home Style Laundry parking lot, and had to climb over/through a massive drift of snow left by the laundry’s snowplow. I was sinking in nearly to my waist! The ***gallery|http://gallery.prwdot.org/blizzard_200501*** is updated with more pics.

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Becky shovels off the front porch.|ppp

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Becky parks on the side of Cabot Street, in front of the laundry’s parking lot.|ppp

11 a.m.
We’re watching ***Return of the King|http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0167260/***, the extended edition, including the drinking contest between Gimli and Legolas. 🙂 The snow’s piled up on top of our basement windows, so we can’t see what exactly is going on outside, but it sounded like someone has come to plow our parking lot. We talked to ***Corey|http://corey.prwdot.org/*** online. He came back from ***Sunday River|http://www.sundayriver.com/*** last night and is venturing out this morning to the local Arlington ***Dunkin Donuts|http://www.dunkindonuts.com/***. (Update: He just got back. They were closed. 🙁 ) We talked to Becky’s dad on the phone. He and Dianne are in Baltimore, coming back from a trip to Florida. Sounds like they’ll be staying there over night since the Boston area airports are closed.

Snippet from movie watching. Gandalf: “We have just passed into the realm of Gondor!” Becky, to the movie: “How can you tell? Did the roads get worse?” “Is it like when you are driving back from New Hampshire into Massachusetts?”

4:00 p.m.
We finished watching Return of the King, and shortly thereafter we heard the sound of a plow outside! One of our landlord’s sons was out plowing the lot with a Bobcat. We went outside and helped shovel out snow from around the cars, as much as possible so that we can get our cars out if necessary. The snow has pretty much stopped, but from what we hear, most of Beverly’s side roads are not passable… including ours. So we’ll be holed up here for the foreseeable future!

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Here’s what our living room windows look like from outside|ppp

6:46 pm
Becky’s Turn to Update!
We just got back from a nice drive around town. The roads weren’t too awful… The main streets had been plowed, but there was still a layer of snow on the ground. Hopefully the sand/salt trucks will be out soon.

The good news is… I only had to hop out of the car and push once!

Area Bloggers
Other area folk update on the snow: ***Arthur|http://kizoku.blogspot.com/2005/01/for-those-keeping-score.htmlhttp://kizoku.blogspot.com/2005/01/for-those-keeping-score.html***, ***James|http://drjames.blogspot.com/2005/01/whitewashed.html*** (both in Beverly), ***Chris|http://amusings.journalspace.com/*** (in Groveland), ***Jeremy and Angela|http://thebiggspicture.org/2005/01/blizzard-of-05.html*** (in Hyannis), ***Nikkiana|http://everytomorrow.org/archives/2005/01/23/randomess/*** (near Concord, NH).

Turbo Cracks

For the past few years, I’ve used Turbo Tax to do our annual federal and state income taxes. It’s pretty easy to use and I have not had any trouble with it. This year, I got a mailing that offered Turbo Tax at a discount, along with a few chintzy free software packages and free shipping thrown in, so I figured I would take them up on the offer. Couldn’t hurt to have it delivered directly to my house to avoid having to make a trip just to buy the software. Or could it? Well, it seems that I made a mistake when I placed my order.

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Apparently I ordered “Turbo Cracks” when I meant to order “Turbo Tax”. Thanks Intuit, this is going to be very helpful for getting my taxes done. Really brilliant idea to send your CD-ROMs in a soft-sided envelope with no protection whatsoever. I could blame the USPS for damaging it in transit, but instead I’ll blame you for not using sturdier, more protective packaging. Now the question is, do I forgive you, and just go out and purchase a copy of Turbo Tax locally, or do I spite you and purchase ***Tax Cut|http://www.hrblock.com/taxes/products/product.jsp?productId=34*** instead. It looks to be a better deal anyway, so maybe that’s what I’ll do. Bah.

Weekend Chill

When I got up this morning at 7:30, the temperature on our outside thermometer read -4.0F. At 8:30, it’s reading +2.7F. That’s without wind chill factored in, of course. Inside, it’s a little over +60F, which feels quite chilly. Our hot water baseboard heat doesn’t work all that well when it gets really cold outside, which is a sad irony. We have to get our landlord to send someone over to bleed the excess air out of the system when it gets like this. We can’t do it ourselves because that part is in a locked closet. *sigh*

We were just watching the ***NECN|http://www.boston.com/news/necn/*** forecast, and they showed a snow forecast map for tonight – Beverly is in the colored band that is forecast to get 24+ inches of snow! It’s almost as much as last year’s ***nor’easter|http://prwdot.org/archives/001506.html***. We’ll keep you posted on how it turns out. 🙂 Hopefully we won’t be getting any ***WIDESPREAD UNPLOWABLE GIANT BLOCKS OF GRANITE|http://www.boston-online.com/common/004451.html*** …

Update At Noon
As of noon, the outside temperature has reached 14.7 degrees. Light flakes of snow have started to fall in Beverly. Found this post here, getting into online gaming.

Update At 2:30 PM
The outside temperature is 16 degrees. There is still some light snow falling, but this is just ‘ocean effect’ snow, and not part of the actual impending storm. The National Weather Service has issued a ***blizzard warning|http://www.crh.noaa.gov/data/forecasts/showsigwx.php?warnzone=MAZ007&warncounty=MAC009&local_place1=Beverly&product1=BLIZZARD+WARNING*** for most of eastern Mass, in effect from 5 p.m. today to 6 p.m. tomorrow. Here’s what we can expect in Beverly, according to the NWS:

qqq|THE HEIGHT OF THE STORM WILL OCCUR TONIGHT AND MUCH OF SUNDAY MORNING. SNOW WILL LIKELY FALL AT THE RATE OF 3 INCHES PER HOUR FOR SEVERAL HOURS OVERNIGHT. … ALONG THE COAST…WIND GUSTS BETWEEN 60 AND 70 MPH ARE EXPECTED LATE TONIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING. … THE WINDS LIKELY WILL ALSO TRIGGER SCATTERED POWER OUTAGES NEAR THE COAST…AND TO A LESSER EXTENT INLAND. THE SNOW WILL LIKELY BE OF A SOMEWHAT WETTER CONSISTENCY…AND THUS CREATE THE RISK FOR EVEN MORE WIDESPREAD POWER OUTAGES. … IN ADDITION…THE COLD TEMPERATURES AND STRONG WINDS WILL CAUSE WIND CHILLS BETWEEN 10 AND 20 BELOW LATE TONIGHT. THIS WILL ADD TO THE DANGER FOR ANY ONE WHO VENTURES OUTDOORS TONIGHT. … TOTAL ACCUMULATIONS WILL BE ON THE ORDER OF 20 TO 30 INCHES…WITH
AMOUNTS AS HIGH AS 3 FEET POSSIBLE.|qqq

There’s just something about the NWS writing their warnings in ALL CAPS that makes it seem just that much more dramatic. We have plans to go out to dinner and a movie with some friends tonight, and at the moment I don’t think we’ll be calling it off. After all, we’re supposed to be hardy New Englanders – what’s a few feet of snow between friends?

Update at 9:30 PM
The temperature outside is 23.5F. There are 3.5 inches of fresh snow on our back door step, and I had shoveled away about 2.0 inches previously today, so that’s about 5.5 inches total thus far. The snow is supposed to continue late into the day tomorrow. Here’s an update from the NWS:

qqq|Amounts as high as 3 feet possible. The most vulnerable locations
for 30 inches or more of snow are Essex… Plymouth… Norfolk and
Barnstable counties in Massachusetts and Providence County in Rhode
Island.|qqq

Essex County – that’s us! Our friends chickened out and didn’t want to drive all the way to Danvers to see a movie, so instead we all watched ***Spy Game|http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0266987/*** on DVD here and had dinner at ***Siam Delight|http://www.nvo.com/siamdelight***. It’s all good.