A Thousand Times No

We finally received enough snow today for the middle of the city to see some accumulation on the streets and sidewalks for the first time this winter.  The sound insulation from nature’s blanket on this federal holiday left the streets hushed and slowed.  I walked through town wrapped in the abundant, familiar stillness of all my childhood winters.

You don’t often think about the sound of a snowy day when you live in a relatively warm place.  You forget what it’s like for the snow to be a constant, day in, day out.  Yet when the snow returns, cool and unassuming, you instantly recognize the soundscape when the cacophony falls away.

I hear there may be snow in the nation’s capital tomorrow…

In the past several years, Philly has become thick with specialty yarn stores.  A conversation during a holiday party prompted me to organize a yarn crawl for several of my crafty friends.  As with a pub crawl, a yarn crawl involves plummeting levels of inhibition and a great deal of ogling and fondling, and the group dynamic encourages everyone to consume as much product as possible.  (Yes, being an agent of economic stimulus is a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it!)

Despite the freezing temperatures yesterday, and thanks to the spectacular good fortune of having a magical minivan, we descended on all four of the major yarn shops in central Philadelphia: Loop, Rosie’s Yarn Cellar, Sophie’s, and Nangellini.  My indecisive wavering over various shades of orange yarn (pumpkin? copper? paprika? mango? canteloupe?) for a gift project became a running joke over the course of the afternoon.

After nightfall, our travels ended with a bang and a whimper:  I managed to smack my left knee full force into the side of the minivan as I attempted to step through the door, which was so painful that I used some choice language and nearly doubled over.  Fortunately, the quick application of ice, elevation, and an anti-imflammatory pill resulted in a small, concentrated bruise; my knee remained fully mobile and pain-free afterwards.

Which is good, because literally crawling as a result of shopping for yarn would have been a bit over the top.

Readers, I missed him.  Hoping to catch a glimpse of Obama’s motorcade this morning as it crossed the river, I trotted out in the coldest morning weather yet this year and watched my shadow as it blew little shadow-clouds of air while I ran.

I knew he was nearby from the police helicopter hoving overhead, and from the uniformed and plainclothes officers spaced out along the streets and bridges.  (How do you spot a plainclothes officer?  He’s the one standing around in a single spot on a bridge ramp during a day when the seagulls are skittering across the newly iced-over surface of the river and everyone is staying in motion to keep warm.)

When I finished my run, I went up towards the city’s central train station and asked a group of police officers where I could stand around and wave.

“Sorry, he’s already inside,” one of them replied , “and you won’t be able to see him.  Get out of the cold and watch him on TV.”  As I waited for a stoplight to change, a young couple stood shivering next to me.  They told me they had managed to see the Obama daughters riding into the train station.

While I’m disappointed that we didn’t have a kickoff rally here, I’m also a realist and a fiscal pragmatist.  The fact is, the city of Philadelphia is facing a mammoth budget shortfall that threatens to close libraries, pools, and firehouses.  We don’t have the money to drop on securing a huge public event — and due to a shortage of private Inauguration contributions, neither does the Obama camp.

If that leaves us out in the cold as far as ceremonies are concerned, so be it.  In a time of hard choices, I’d rather not see one more library close, or have this city go down in history as the placed that botched the protection of the incoming POTUS. As long as Obama stays safe and can get on with the business of governing the nation, it’s all good.

Barack Obama arrived in Philadelphia this evening under an extremely tight security detail.  As I type, he’s cosseted away in a hotel room about a mile away from my home.  Which means that when I haul my tired and frozen hindquarters out along the Schuylkill River for yet another morning run tomorrow, he just might pass on one of the bridges overhead.

Or so I tell myself.  Whatever it takes to lace up my shoes.

It was chilly outside this morning when I awoke, with a few sparse flakes of snow falling from the sky.  I had overslept, swaddled in the newfound warmth of my bedroom after a plumbing repair in my building had raised the indoor temperature by nearly 10°F / 6°C.

The mental bargaining began nearly immediately:  Can I run tomorrow rather than today?  How about if I do something after work?  Maybe I could spend time on the treadmill this morning instead?

What?  The treadmill?  A little voice in my head was actually lobbying to get on the Boremaster?  I had to figure out a convincing incentive to get vertical in The Great Outdoors, and fast.  Otherwise things might get completely out of hand, and I’d wind up giving serious consideration to other heresies, like regressive taxation or putting milk in my tea.

So I bundled up, went to the gym to stop shivering, and got out and hit the asphalt.  Usually, I run around the back of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, but today for the first time it was straight up the front way — the staircase better known and much loved around the world as the “Rocky Steps.”

In the raw morning air, long before the Museum opened its doors, I had the staircase entirely to myself.  While I didn’t throw my arms up in the air at the top – Do I look like a tourist?  Have you seen my city wage tax receipts? — I managed to clock my fastest mile yet coming home.  Chalk one up for the underdog.

The details of the Obama-Biden whistle-stop tour were finally announced this evening and…there is no public rally scheduled in Philadelphia.  Wilmington, yes.  Baltimore, sure.  But no love for us here in Billy Penn’s fair city.

Harrumph.

During the past few weeks, my left thigh has become increasingly insistent in its bid for attention.  At first, it simply seemed to fatigue earlier during my runs than any part of my right leg.  Then came mild, almost imperceptible muscle twitches that would visit when I was sitting quietly afterwards.  Now I feel a twinge in my leg whenever I first begin jogging.

We’ll see if the odd sensation eventually goes away.  When I first started jogging, almost every session out on the road involved tolerating some discomfort: tired ankles, flaming shins, burning lungs, creaky knees.  Somewhere along the way, things settled down, to the point where experiencing a slight thigh cramp now seems eventful rather than part of a series of routine aches and pains.

I suppose that counts as progress.

President-elect Obama is slated to hold rally in Philadelphia in just five days, but it has yet to be publicly announced where and when the event will take place next Saturday.

I can only imagine two locations that might qualify:

• Benjamin Franklin Parkway, where Bruce Springsteen held an impromptu concert in support of Obama last October
• Independence Hall, where Obama himself appeared during a campaign rally last April

The Parkway can hold more people, but it didn’t exist in Lincoln’s day, so I’m guessing that it will be the Cracked Ding-a-Ling just after the crack of dawn on a very chilly day.

In which case, I’ll be there with bells.

When I woke up this morning, I still felt quite tired, as though I had a liter of cleaning solution sloshing around in my stomach.  For several moments, I wondered why my stomach was being so sour and temperamental.

Then I remembered my late-night battle with the PHP files.

It took me a while to recall what had happened just before my head hit the pillow.  I’m not always at my sharpest in the mornings, and my memory was hindered by a recent lifestyle adjustment:  I’ve stopped using my laptop while lying in bed.

(Yes, I’m that much of a geek.)

In an attempt to create a more placid bedtime routine, I’ve banished the little white electronic chiclet and its accompanying lap cushion to the confines of my corner easy chair.  This change has been met with instant results on the slumber front — I now find myself dozing off while lounging in the chair, with the laptop serving as a cozy electronic blanket that lulls me to sleep.

So much for keeping tabs on my Intertubes habit…

Damn.  I somehow broke this blog’s RSS feed.

Sorry, everyone.  Working on getting it fixed.

Update:

–Begin goobledegook–
After poring over several files in search of the elusive blank line that was rendering the XML declaration invalid, I finally smooshed everything together in the suspect locations.  It appears that my mistaken use of a UTF-8 character in a recent post triggered some sort of seizure in the feed file(s) in PHP.
–End gobbledegook–

Problem appears to be fixed, and the situation is slowly but surely returning to normal. Simply by trying to write “8½,” I think I prompted this blog to begin devouring itself.  Somewhere in the Great Beyond, Fellini is laughing his culo off.