EL NIÑO!

We are expecting a major snowstorm here in the national capital region this weekend; the local News4 weather guy kept insisting during the commercial bumpers last night that the storm would be “CRIPPLING”. Fortunately, my family is not planning on moving this weekend! Thus it’s a lot less stressful than the last time a blizzard was in the offing. Moving in a whiteout is SO 2009.

Speaking of period-specific trends, the news media is starting to throw their weight behind stories about El Niño, which apparently is the root cause of this snowier-than-usual East Coast winter. This has me thinking about the last time El Niño was in the news, which was … I want to say the mid-90’s? I’m pinning that assumption on my memories of Chris Farley on Saturday Night Live doing his impression of the atmospheric phenomenon (“I am … El Niño! Which is Spanish for … THE … Niño!”), and the fact that I’m essentially including every year from 1993 to 1998, so I can’t be too far off. In any case, approximately fifteen years down the road we haven’t come any farther in our weather-control technology, which is somewhat disappointing. We still have to cower in fear of two feet of accumulation and know there’s nothing we can do about it.

Well, the one thing I can do about it is leave work early today, which I am absolutely going to do. And I will pick up my little niño and get him home hopefully just around the time the snow actually starts to fall. It will actually be nice to spend the whole afternoon with the little guy, because yesterday I didn’t get to see him at all (except for a quick tiptoe into his room on my way to bed). My wife and I are both getting pretty used to interacting with the boy during very brief intervals on the days we work; I leave the house before he gets up, so I only see him between daycare pickup and bedtime, whereas my wife gets the mornings from waking until daycare dropoff, and then gets home from work after he goes to bed. But yesterday, as I got off the Metro on my way home, my wife called to let me know she had heard on the radio about a multi-car pile-up on 66 and to suggest I come home via a different route, a suggestion I agreed with wholeheartedly. Sure, there were traffic lights on the back roads, but it had to be better than the standstill squeezing past the blocked highway lanes, right? We will never know, but those back roads were bumper to bumper every block of the way, and the driving part of my evening commute took close to two hours (instead of the usual 45 minutes or so) and I got home after the little guy had been laid down for the night. It was bound to happen sooner or later, but it was still decidedly unsettling, including rampant, ridiculously irrational thoughts along the lines of “He’s gonna forget who I am!” But as I said, I’ll see him earlier than normal today, and we’ll be snowed in all weekend together, so I’ll at least be able to reintroduce myself and then we can reminisce about old times, like … Wednesday.