Kate grudgingly admitted that men were good for shoveling
Earlier last week, Kate called to tell me she'd gotten tickets to this year's show where the Alloy Orchestra premieres a new silent film score. After how it went last year, I was surprised she was up for it, but as she said, this year she wasn't going to make the mistake of counting on some man to get the job done, and bought the tickets herself. Then she kind of paused and asked if it was okay for her to go off on an "all men suck" rant to me. Hey, I said, I remember Wei and other female friends doing that rant even though Martin was standing two feet away, penis and all. Oh, yeah, she said, "except you" is sort of implied in that case, but she doesn't want to sound like she's trying to convince me of anything.

I say no, go ahead, but if that's how you feel, I could set you up with my roommate. That, she responds, is being needlessly literal.

I kind of wondered if it might get called off for weather, but there was nothing on the website about it, so up to Somerville we went.

Pretty good show; not quite as good as The Black Pirate or The General, but Blackmail is not quite as physically exuberant a movie. It is Hitchcock, though, which is always a good thing.

By the time we get out (about nine-thirty), it's snowing pretty steady, and Kate asks if she can crash at my place tonight. It's just two stops away and she's got something of a phobia about getting trapped on the subway during a storm; it happened to her once and evidently nothing sucks more than being in a tunnel when the train stops and the lights go out. I can see that, so take the subway two stops and get off at Harvard.

I'm not a big fan of snow, and this is the first really substantial snowfall of the season; I think it wound up being a foot or so. It seems deceptively mild, since it's all fluffy stuff that's not blowing right into your face; it's not even that cold. Sure, it's cold enough to snow, but you don't feel snot freezing or anything.

It's steady, though. We could hear the wind all night, and it just didn't let up, dropping an inch or two every hour all night. When I got up in the morning, we could barely open the door.

Why were we even trying? Well, we wanted donuts and coffee and a paper, and we might as well see if the Brattle's running the Sunday morning movie in spite of the weather. By the time we went out, though, the snowfall was pretty much down to nothing, and the city was digging out. It's kind of fun to walk city streets after a storm like that; you can walk out in the middle of the road - and you sort of have to, since the sidewalks aren't shoveled - and it's quiet, although some hardy souls are still baking donuts or selling papers (but not running movies).

You've got to be alert, though. Kate made the mistake of opening an umbrella to keep the snow out of her face, but a gust of wind made it into a sail and dumped her into a snowbank. I probably shouldn't have made that crack about how it's okay to put a little weight on for the winter, because I wound up in the same snowbank.

Kate hung around most of the day; we were a little worried about Mo, but apparently if you're going to get snowed in, a luxury hotel is as good a place as any. Though she said it was kind of surreal, since the ARISIA sci-fi/media convention is this weekend, and, as she put it, some of the nerds were dressed for the occasion..

-Martina
- posted 7:17 PM - - (archive use only)