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Dad arrived on Friday evening, January 21, 2005, to visit me during the week of my semester break, and just in time for the “Great Blizzard of ’05,” as it came to be known. By Wednesday the month had officially become the “snowiest month ever recorded” in Boston and Cambridge with 43" of snow. He flew in on a direct JetBlue flight from Oakland to Logan, which he found very efficient and comfortable, not to mention cheap ($79 + tax and fees!). For some reason there were no lines at the ticket counter or going through security on either end, unlike our experience going to and from Hawaii. It was such a nice experience that he said that he will try to visit me at Harvard often. They closed Logan Airport the next day, and the day he left a week later was the first day it got above freezing, so his timing was perfect both ways. He found that the living room now has much more furniture and thus is much more comfortable than when we arrived in the fall to a completely empty room (see page 1). Thanks to Mom, we now have a nice sofabed in the living room (in the corner, first photo above) for Dad to sleep on.
He just missed (by just a day) meeting last semester’s roommate Tiffany, who flew back home to Chicago and is now very busy interviewing for landscape architecture jobs. June 2005 update: Tiffany is working in Philadelphia for one of the largest firms in the country. |
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We awoke to find 26" inches of fresh snow had fallen overnight. This was the scene that greeted us through the glass of the front door. Fortunately the lid of my mailbox was closed, unlike my neighbors’ across the way (to the left of this photo), who awoke to find their mailbox overflowing with snow (“You’ve Got Snow”).
We had to use a trash can, a bucket (both of which cracked after being frozen — it reached a high of 1° later in the afternoon) and a dust bin to dig our way out the front door. (Dad said that we should have bought a snow shovel at the Portuguese hardware store at Inman Square.) Notice how high the snow had piled up against the glass of the front door. |
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Even after our neighbors and the property management crew cleared some of the snow from the path in front of the front door, it looked very different than it did in the fall (page 1).
This car was buried and was never moved during the week of Dad’s visit. |
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This is Francis Street, two blocks away, which looks much whiter than in the fall when Dad posed in balmy weather in his “Harvard Dad” T-shirt under the street sign (page 2)
A view of Memorial Hall from the GSD, with snow this time.
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 The campus looked very different with snow piled up all over. Compare these pictures of Memorial Church and the “Statue of Three Lies” to the scene in the Fall (page 1).
This is a sidewalk path through the snow — taller than I am — on the way from my apartment to school.
The Great Blizzard of ’05 was nice for us because the restaurants were deserted; it was difficult to drive, there was no place to park on the streets and even walking on the sidewalks was difficult before narrow paths were dug through the mounds of snow. Dad and I enjoyed a delicious meal at EVOO (“Extra Virgin Olive Oil”), a half block away. They gave us a freshly baked loaf of bread to take home because they would’ve had to throw it out otherwise for lack of customers.
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