Subscribe to RSS Subscribe to Comments

George Schizas Blog

Days in the life of a clone

The Abominable Snowed-In Monster

This is how it all began: Snow.

IMG_0001 

A lot of snow. Me, living near the sea for most of my life (Piraeus) hadn’t seen much snow in my life. In fact I think that I’ve only seen snow maybe four or five times before this. So, now I’ve moved to the highlands of Gerakas, it seems that the weather gods saw fit to reward me with the largest amount of snow I’ve ever seen – and it also seems it was a lot of snow even for less snow-deprived people. How many times did I use snow in the last paragraph?

After that, it got worse:

IMG_0009

And worse:

IMG_0014

That’s a cheap thermometer on the ledge there. It went down to -4°C at least, maybe less.

And snow kept falling:

IMG_0315 IMG_0017

Until the next day:

IMG_0019

I’m sure there’s my car under there:

IMG_0020  IMG_0021

This is how high the snow was in front of my door. I would say it’s about 80 cm off the ground.

IMG_0022

You can’t believe there’s ground under there, can you?

IMG_0023 

The water supply pipes had frozen over, so I didn’t have drinking or any water at all.

IMG_0024

I almost felt like a primitive man, picking up snow or even ice blocks by the handful and melting in the water heater to make water (not drinkable), carefully counting how much water I have left in the fridge and rationing it to last for the longest possible.

IMG_0025

I didn’t make a snowman. I don’t think anyone should make snowmen alone. Even Calvin had Hobbes. I had enough adventures trying to restart the central heating (the lock had frozen over, so I had to melt the ice that had formed using a lighter to open the door).

Finally, this morning (Tuesday) the snow started to really melt. My cousin came over to fix the broken water supply.

Of course I had the whole distance from my house to the street to cover (or actually to uncover). I was very fortunate that a man in a private bulldozer came and cleared up in 2-3 minutes what would have taken me all afternoon.

Update: I had this post saved somewhere, and after some polishing, I’m posting it for real.

I won’t be going to work by bike for some time yet

I think I will be readjusting my goals. It was a somewhat hard winter, so I didn’t have the chance to be riding every week as was my original plan. Furthermore, the past month the road seems full of bad drivers. Cutting offs are very usual, noone seems to know what the indicator lights do, and I even got honked at because I wouldn’t pass to the other side of the road and be crashed by incoming vehicles. There are also some new traffic lights on the way, and I think the only way to pass them all without hitting a red light is to travel at warp 9, or at least 120 km/h – which is absurd on such a narrow street! Some roads are being “redesigned” for some weird reason, so that you have to go around and travel about 1 km to get 50 meters north!

I’m not changing my goal to be going to the office by bicycle, I’m just not confident enough to be going to the traffic just yet (actually I’m not even confident I can make 10 km twice in a day yet!). At least it was a bit warmer today, so I rode for a bit 🙂

© TerraSoft 2003-2024