Reflections on Snowmageddon: Community

As you all know, the Washington, DC area is now finally beginning to dig out of the 3′ blanket of snow that was laid upon us in the past 7 days. It’s been a lot of fun on my end, actually. Here’s some reflections and memories that I wanted to share.

There’s so much that I think I need to break it up into multiple posts.

Topic 1: Community

As February 5, 2010 dawned, I was slowly becoming aware of the magnitude of the situation that this snowstorm was going to be. Two days prior I had received an email from Craig who lives with one of my CCC teammates and a pretty good friend. Craig is usually pretty calm, but he has his things that he can get excited about; this was an entirely different kind of excited. Here’s my favorite part of it (emphasis his):

I hope this storm is not a bust, but we cannot take anything for granted. I will say I cannot recall a time when nearly all models and every [meteorologist] was in agreement on a MAJOR winter storm over 48 hours in advance. Likewise the NWS posted up to 20 inches merely in their watch. This language in a watch is unrivaled.

This email was only a harbinger of things to come. Over the past week I have spent a lot of time with a smallish group of people: Carrie (my wife), Craig, Jake, Steph, Erin, Maegan,  and Bethany. There were a few more people that joined us occasionally or just for a time: Lulu, Matt, Jeff and Scott.

Regardless, we have had a lot of fun and have rejoiced in fighting our cabin fever together. On Saturday we walked the mile-and-a-quarter on unplowed roads to the Ballston Metro to get to the epic snowball fight at Dupont Circle, we ate together, played a lot of board & card games together, cooked together, had home church together, some of us went sledding, trudging to the store, watched Lost, and waited expectantly for Craig or text messages to tell us that schools or the Federal Government was closed.

It has been a lot of fun to get to know people better and rejoice in our collective quirkiness. I do have to say that I think the think that has been the most enjoyable for me has been watching Craig get really excited about checking “meteo” sites and updating us every five minutes on the latest forecasts, weather-blog posts and news regarding our pet snowstorm.

We’ve loved the time off school, work (for some of us) and the pressure that this city can lay on us. It’s been fun to watch Fenty bungle his way through it as usual as well.