nawl

This snow thing is, in my humble opinion, a vast improvement over the dead winter look that the campus had been cultivating of late.

The morning after it snows is particularly lovely--everything fresh, and clean, and sparkly, as snow-clouds rain off of the trees in the wind and everything begins to melt in the sun.

Nature must realize that I approve, since it's snowed three times in the past week.

The first day it snowed, I decided it was a good excuse to break out the real winter jacket. I put my hands in the pockets and pulled out: 103 forints, a receipt for a purchase of 1884 forints made at Rothschild Elelmiszer at 11:04 pm on March 14, and a folded-up flier about Hungarian freedom and March 15.

It's like an annual time capsule.

The temperature hovers just around freezing, slightly above during the day, slightly below at night. The snow does this charming thing where it melts into puddles during the day that refreeze into ice slicks at night, ready to kill the unsuspecting victim who walks down stairs a little too quickly.

Fortunately, the Princeton University Printing & Mailing found it appropriate to email all faculty, staff, and graduate students on "Avoiding slips and falls this winter". They take such good care of us here. I've already mastered the compacted-snow shuffle, despite the fact that my boots were recently derided as "fake".

They're also incredibly fastidious about the plowing. There are armies of workers out in trucks, tractors, with shovels. It's like aural confirmation of a snow in the morning, the rumble of the plow motor interspersed with the bang! bang! bang! that it makes when it jerks the shovel to detach the snow.

Apparently the golf course separating the grad college from the rest of campus is the premier (read: only) sledding spot in the area. My way to class is obstructed by crowds of bundled-up children with plastic coasters and sleds and inner tubes and fake snowboards who go down the hillside over and over again until the snow has been stripped down to the grass.

Manhattan is a mess of slush. In a moment of distraction, I stepped ankle-deep into one of those dirty slush-puddles whose bumpy black surface looks, to the untrained eye, exactly like asphalt. Fake boots to the rescue.

(I'll be slightly more open than usual and give you the following real translation of this entry: "I've been working just about nonstop every day for the past two weeks, breakfast to bedtime, meals and an hour of Norwegian exercises before bed my only recreation. I went to a couple of nice talks this week, though, including one at IAS where I took a few pictures on the walk over. I would have posted about Thanksgiving, but I ended up pulling two semi-all-nighters sandwiching my flight back to New Jersey, so that went right out. Grad school isn't that bad, though. Assuming I don't fail any of my classes.")