Saint Vitreous
23 February 2026
I led a ride last Saturday that I'm just now realizing I never got around to blogging about. I think it's because the photos I took of the eagles' nest off of Old Mill Road were blurry.
Plain Jim dutifully
blogged about it, so I'll leave the details to him.
It was the first road ride I'd done since mid-January, and, for some of us, the first road ride of the year. The snow had finally melted enough, and the temperature was above freezing enough, for us to do a short ride. The Twin Pines Federal City parking lot was not so much plowed as indented. There was a new couple on the ride. At the end, Plain Jim declared that he approved and they were invited back. The sky was clear blue and there was still snow in the farm fields.
Tom led a
ride this past Saturday. We left from the Peddie School because both gates at Etra Lake Park were locked (
Plain Jim has more on that). There were 11 of us and we got spread out a few times. It was a relaxed ride. More than once I found myself in the sort of conversation that one does not blog about. To me, that's a sign of good friendship, even if we don't see each other very much these days.
Last Sunday I'd tested my new GoPro again, on a solo ride. I captured 30 miles of video only to find out that I used too low of a frame rate for a Rouvy upload. I also hadn't set horizon lock on; Rouvy wants horizon lock.
It was just as well. My right glove and the top of Janice's radar receiver were in the shot. I had used the bar mount that GoPro sells. There were times that the camera was visibly vibrating, yet the video played back without a jiggle.
After much online hunting, because Rouvy doesn't make their requirements obvious, I figured out which settings I'd need to use. I switched to an after-market mount that sits higher and I could place closer to the center of the bars.
Tom's ride would be a test. I wasn't planning to record the entire ride. For that, I'd've needed to be out in front the whole time. Nobody wants to train indoors watching my friends' butts, and with the bar mount, that's what one gets. But the video snipped I dropped into the Rouvy Route Creator app met the requirements, so I'm good to go the next time I do a solo ride.
Which won't be for a while because we got hit with a monster storm yesterday. Jack was at a conference in Indiana and scheduled to land back in Newark at noon on Sunday. After both of us seeing how the forecast was shaping up, he managed to get himself on a flight that landed at 10:00 instead. The Air Train being out of service and NJ Transit being half out of commission due to a bridge repair and generally being NJ Transit, Jack opted for an Uber from the airport. He arrived back at the house at 11:30, when it was still only raining.
With a foot or more of heavy snow in the forecast, plus 60 mph winds, for the first time since it's installation in 2022, I took the vases off of Saint Polychromatous. The wind can be howling and this bottle tree will barely move. But with heavy snow and wind, I didn't want to take a chance. Plus, they needed a scrubbing anyway. I snapped this photo so I could remember where to put things back.
I left the other backyard glass outside. I don't care about those as much. I'd already taken the glass balloons inside before the previous storm, which was a good thing, because they'd've been half buried.
Anyway, with the vases washed and the laundry folded, I settled in by the new bow window and watched Clementine and the birds as the snow began to fall.
The township plows our street, which is good of course. However, they're very thorough. A single pass down the center of the road doesn't cut it for them. No, they have to clear every inch of blacktop. What this means for us homeowners is that we will be met with a wall of snow chunks at the feet of our driveways.
What I do to make this easier on my back is to get out there and shovel early in an attempt to minimize the height of the eventual wall. I'll shovel past my driveway and a third of the way into the street if the snow is going to be deep.
I heard the plow go past at 9:30 p.m. I suited up and started digging out. My neigbor revved up his snow blower. He told me in December not to bother clearing the sidewalk in front of my house. "My mother never let us play in the snow," he explained. "This is me playing."
I cleared my driveway and the walkway to the front steps. The bird feeders were coated in a thin layer of ice. I tried to clean them off a little. My neigbor went through with his snow blower. There looked to be about six inches of snow so far, and in the 40 minutes I was out there, another half inch had come down.
There's so much ambient light in our neighborhood, especially when it's snowing, that shoveling in the dark wasn't shoveling in the dark at all. My motion-sensitive floodlights are bright too, and the wind was keeping the crape myrtle branches moving.
I'd started from the back patio. I needed to dig a path from the door to the side of the garage so that I'd be able to drag my glassblowing toolkit to the car. I'd stashed the recycling bins on the patio too. Otherwise, they'd either get blown across the neighborhood or filled with snow.
By 11:00, snow was sticking to the window screens. When I woke up at 7:30 this morning, the snow was so deep I couldn't tell where the street began.
Jack took a picture of the deck railing from our kitchen window.
It was still snowing. I came down a few minutes later and framed the shot from a distance.
The juncos were at the feeders.
When we replaced our windows, we chose frosted glass for the lower half in the bathrooms. Now, the pattern I picked, which looks like frost, could easily have been the real thing. (And no, I didn't make that ornament.)
The plow had done a single pass several inches ago and didn't seem to be returning. At 9:45 I ventured out through the back patio.
Saint Vitreous survived.
When I opened the east door, there was a drift two feet high still standing.
Fortunately, the drift was fluffy, and digging out towards the side of the garage was easy.
The blowing snow had frozen sideways onto my neighbor's privacy fence.
I took the picture as I was digging out the driveway. The problem wasn't so much the depth of the snow (more than a foot, it seemed) as where to put it. I ended up carrying shovelsfull toward the fence side because there was already so much snow stacked up on the house side of the walkway that whatever else I added fell right back down. After I figured that out, I settled into a pattern of carrying or heaving depending on where I was.
Several things pass through my mind as I shovel. One is that I need to be very careful about my back. Another is that it's a good thing I'm not a fall risk (right, bird bones?). A third is that I'm glad I lift weights and do endurance training. A fourth is that I should get a snow blower already.
My neighbor was starting his up at the top of his driveway when I was halfway through digging out the sidewalk. First I had to find the sidewalk, because there was scant evidence that it had been cleared last night. A slight indentation was the only clue.
I was faster with the shovel than he was with his toy. The snow was wet and starting to melt. Nevertheless, I let him have the last few feet.
When I was finished, I checked the time. I'd been at this for two hours and fifteen minutes. I'd replaced Rockefeller's Teeth with the White Cliffs of Dover.
Saint Cullet survived.
I went inside, fetched a yardstick (it came with the house when we moved in back in 1999). In the back yard, the snow reached almost fourteen inches.
In the front, it was fourteen.
The snow on the deck railing had fallen off, except in one spot.
I was sweaty. After a shower and a big bowl of oatmeal, I looked out the window to see my neighbor snow-blowing our sidewalk again. The plow had been by and had undone the morning's work.
I suited up again. The plow had taken my streetside piles and distributed them evenly across the edge of my driveway. My neighbor was already going at it with the snow blower. It wasn't as bad as last time, when I had to use a steel shovel to heave chunks of ice out of the way. I cleared the mess relatively quickly.
My neighbor said, "I was standing in my driveway when the plow came by. He was gonna call the cops."
"For real?"
"It's okay. I set a Sicilian curse on him. He won't be siring any more children."
My neighbors across the street were extracting their plow wall as well. I went over to help them, because I was now powered by a big bowl of oatmeal. My snow blower neighbor took his toy across the street too.
Another neighbor, part of a big family that moved in to the house diagonally across from mine a few years ago, appeared with her shovel to find her sidewalk. After all this time, I finally got to meet her. With the help of a couple of neigborhood kids, we unearthed her street-parked minivan from its plow wall. We stacked the snow between the car and her neighbor's driveway. That pile is gonna be here til Arpil.
Now my back hurts, because duh.
