One of my nice neighbors mowed my driveway with his snow blower. This made the overall task of making my front door accessible to the world a whole lot easer. This is just one small piece of evidence which suggests that humans are fundamentally good. I will be singing a different tune the next time some asshole cuts me off on the freeway of course.

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.