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These are the buildings my parents worked in when they were post docs at Yale. It's in New Haven, where I first lived when we moved to the states (incidentally the house that I lived, and the school that I went to have shrunk since those days!). These buildings are right near the Peabody Museum, where my Dad used to take me to see the dusty old dinosaur bones, and the rare book library where they have translucent granite walls. This was taken last year, when Mum, Don and I went to New Haven to look at the dusty old dinosaur bones at the Peabody, look at the Gutenberg bible at the rare book library, eat white clam pizza at A Modern Pizza, and of course to reminisce about old times.

I don't know how they do it in the rest of New York, but here in the Hudson Valley they cancel all schools at the sight of a solitary snow flake. The main effect of that on my life is that back when I used to listen to rubbishy commercial radio they would spend hours listing all the schools which had been canceled when it snowed.

I have the option of working from home, so when we have lots of snow I usually do. I did eventually shovel my driveway at about noon. This was the first time that I really needed to shovel. Last year I moved into this place at the tail end of winter and missed most of the real precipitation. Anyway, I had a great deal of self satisfaction when I was done, so I took this picture before going to work:

The DacDriveway

I was actually somewhat surprised at how many people actually showed up for work. At the end of the day, when I was leaving, the night made everything look very cool, so I snapped off a couple more photographs:

They are a bit noisy (digital equivalent to film grain), since I had to shoot them at ISO800. Even so, the shutter speed was something like 1/4s for most of these photographs, so you can see how the anti-shake feature of my digital (Minolta Dimage A1) works in practice. Usually absolute slowest you can handhold a camera is 1/30s. I could have probably compensated for the red shift in these photographs (due to the tungsten lighting and long exposure times), but I actually kind of like what it adds to the mood.