Snow is falling,
All around us,
And it won’t bloody leave.
I had initially began this particular blog entry by talking about how, even though it hadn’t snowed in weeks, the roads were flanked with snow that had frozen solid and offers many opportunities for shenanigans on the way back from Mary Ann’s bar on a Tuesday night.
However, as I sat down to write this entry, the view from my window reveals millions of snowflakes driving towards the streets of Boston to take the place of their brethren who have been shoveled, salted and ploughed off the roads since their arrival. Of course we know that
anything more than a light dusting of the white stuff in Ireland can cause everything to shut down for at least a few days, Boston is ready for the snow. If this snow sticks tonight (there is a chance that it won’t, seeing as it rain quite heavily today) then tomorrow there will be trucks with ploughs mounted on the front clearing the roads and throwing so much salt, you’d swear they were trying to keep them from going off. But because these ploughs are attached to the front of regular trucks, the people driving them are regular people, and as regular people often do, they can get into slight fender benders once in a while. The problem with a small collision is that they have the aforementioned enormous plough on the front, so having a small crash with a snowplough is similar to the saying that the Egyptians are having a slight disagreement with their government. I say this because a friend of mine was in a car over the Christmas break and their car was hit by a snowplough while they were on their way home after a day out. Luckily none of them were hurt, but apparently the guy who hit them got out, looked at their car, looked at his and then laughingly made a comment about how his car wasn’t even scratched. He then promptly hopped back into his unscathed truck and headed off on his merry way. Even though this seems like and extraordinary incident, when I told Jay 
about the crash, he told me that a friend of his was hit twice in one week by a snowplough. It seems that this is an altogether regular occurrence, or more likely, the people I have surrounded myself with are terrible drivers who insist on playing chicken with snowploughs.
The beginning of this semester has been so framed by the snow that I have come to accept it, and even embrace it. The main advantage of having snow outside is that you are aware that it is cold out, before the break it had begun to fall below 0 Celsius but it looked beautiful outside. There was nearly always the vast blue sky, punctuated only by the yellow blob of sun and maybe a few lonely clouds, but once you stepped outside, you were reminded that it was winter. When I look outside now, I still see the clear sky and the seemingly warm sun, but the white blanket that spreads out to the horizon deceives it. When I step outside now, all my senses know that it’s going to be cold, especially when we can hear the strong Boston wind attempting to smash through our windows on the 12th floor.
Obviously, because it is so desperately cold outside, I am spending a lot more of my time indoors and I realised that I have been focusing on the Boston that exists beyond the doors of my apartment. While I was thinking about this, I realised that this is the first time I have lived with a group of lads. In my first year in Maynooth, I lived in the legendary Rye Hall with Louise, Catherine and Andrew. In second year I lived with Eleanor and Maura in the only dodgy estate in Maynooth- Old Greenfield. The differences between each of the three have been huge. When I lived with girls, places like the bathroom tended to be cleaner, now, when people come over to our place, I imagine that many choose to hover instead of sitting on the throne. There is always beer to be found in our apartment but rarely in the fridge. We once found a Budweiser can hidden in a pop tart box in our kitchen. It then mysteriously vanished a few days later. I can only hope that someone at a party in our place had a thought process that went:
I’m hungry.
Ooh Poptarts!
Aw no poptarts.
OOH BEER!
Again, I am only speculating, but I really hope it went something like that.
And just in case we you think this is a once off thing, we currently have another can of Budweiser in our bathroom. The really strange thing is that none of us drink Budweiser; we have a strict Natty Ice, Busch Light and PBR diet in this apartment
The most exciting thing about this week is that it’s my last week before Spring Break, and to quote the guys organising the trip to Brunswick, Georgia for a weeklong Ultimate Frisbee tournament “SPRING BREEEAAAAAAAK! COLLLEEEEEEEEGE! So hopefully I’ll have another entry about that when I get back. My first and last Spring Break better live up to all MTV made it out to, or at least I can get to play a lot of Ultimate in a place where snow is as rare a Jets fan in Boston.
By the way, not a bad view from my bedroom window!
