A windblown blogger..

..is what I am. Temps today for my part of Ohio were (at 7am) 3 fahrenheit. At 8, it was 12. But with wind chill, close to zero. And next week, without wind chill, forecasts are for lows of -4, with wind chill, -15 BRRRR!

Although you wouldn't be able to guess this from these views..
What you see above is a 200 year old stone church, gradually being enfolded by the big city.
Below is a view of the city, from around the corner..
What you can't see are the snow powder-devils whirling around on the sidewalk. It was so windy, my eyeballs dried out and starting freezing.. OW!

In case you were wondering what I was doing downtown, allow me to spin the chronometer back to this morning...


Whoo Hoo! A Cleveland Tour, in a comfy Stretch Limo, sponsored by Rockwell. How lovely!
Because our tour vehicle was a limo, most of what I was able to see out of foggy windows was sidewalk, storefronts, bundled legs, shopping bags, road, construction sites and snowblown cars, all lovingly enunciated and elocuted by our tour guide.

We did manage to escape from our rolling prison though. One such stop was the Cleveland Rock n Roll museum, where we saw props from rock concerts, thoughtfully discard..um donated by Rock artistes such as this food item:
and this disco device:
Interesting diversion, but that's it. Oh, but this marks the 2nd time I have visited an I.M. Pei building, the first being the Lourve.. see the resemblance here?

After a really average lunch (with a weird rendition of beef horfun), the tour ended. Inspired by our whirlwind tour of Cleveland, three of us decided to go visit the Cleveland Museum of Art.

That well-intentioned move was doomed from the start. Aside from the gale-force winds scraping snowflakes into the car's paint job, almost everything at the museum was closed!! They are gearing up for the Monet exhibit later this month, apparently. So what did we do? Followed our Singaporean indoctrination of course! We shopped! I bought a post card, maggie-nets and a battering ram.

This greeted us outside the gift shop.
After a long, cold day, what better food to have than a nice carbo-ey soup?!
If you're thinking it looks like a steel doggy bowl, you're right! Only $2, it's large enough to house soup, pasta, veggies and meat. Yummy slurpy hot stuff on a freezing day!

Who Moved the Arctic?

Ice Burger with economy-sized Oreo-stuffingtopped Hostessvtwinkies..


OK, with that out of the way, let me just tell all y'all that I AM FEELING COLD!
For those of you who know me, you know it's darned cold when I say it's cold! It's 12 fahrenheit, and probably near zero with the wind chill factor! Brrr! There's so much wind, patches of grass are bare - they had two feet of snow blown off! Trudging my way from apartment to dinner, I observe climatic conditions normally seen from the sunny comfort of my TV. The chill wind cuts right through my thick jeans, creeping painfully freezing tendrils into the thermal cracks of my corporate parka and drying folds of neck fat.

After losing feeling in me hands and variously miscellaneous parts of my lardy anatomy, pepperdemon, FragrantRoomie and I scurried our way toward the 5th Avenue deli near Eastgate...

Friday: All you can eat Beer Battered Cod! Juicy chunks of Cod, painstakingly bashed with premium cans of beer and lovingly tenderized by rolling bottles of ButtVisor; yummy hot food rewarding butt-frozen explorers, along with 5th Avenue's warm, inviting hospitality.

More pics to follow!

My Toes are frozen

Ice cream cone, marshmallow topped cupcake, or stone seat meringue?:
An MNC's On-premises geo-psychologically-engineered geyser "new faithful", fallen micro-mini-"Honey I shrunk the Galactic artifact" underwater blackhole, or the early beginnings of Hidero-Fontaine Lollipop Nebula in its star-cradle?

Spoor-trail of: 1) an unknown quadrupedal Abomininumamlnemul Snowman 2) chemically snot-fused-pseudo-siamese-twinned snow bunnies wearing 36 inch platform boots or 3)the U.S. government's new All-Terrain boot-covered Sno-Unicycle on field trials?
No matter what your choice, or what you think the answers are, it's painfully obvious that
Ohio got hit by a whole lot of snow, and temperatures are plummeting closer and closer to zero fahrenheit! It's still a fun experience, but I have to devote more and more brain power to make sure my ears or toes don't just freeze and drop off.

Perversely, the office thermostat is out of whack. Temps in the office are worthy of dry sauna. So much so that I have to take freeze breaks. While pepperdemon takes a nicotine break, I go out and infuse my chinky-pores with cold, dry Ohio air, enough to last me long enough to do some decent work. Here's what else I see on my other butt-chilling breaks...

the office frozen-over lake

Sqweasel sno-blower paths running in straight lines from tree to tree...

Bridge over frozen waters - two feet of snow on the grounds blocks off access to this bridge for anyone who doesn't mind cold feet...
More? Boy! I'm glad you asked..
The remnants of ploughed snow for this week.
The driveway to my apartment is now in a white valley fifteen feet deep. Mayfield Canyon!

Minosian Burps

Had a nice treat today, Kind Boss brought Pepperdemon and me out for a concert and dinner. If you're thinking it was an ordinary concert and ordinary dinner, think again..

The concert
========
I got to hear the Hilliard Ensemble at Harkness Chapel (at Case Western Reserve University)! They were practically flawless. Audience was good too, they waited for the end of a piece before coughing and shuffling. Well behaved civilised concert-goers, unlike the savages back home. Kind Boss brought her husband and kids along (Hi Tom, Sophie and Daniel!). You can sorta see them in the pic. Sorta. If you think this pic is bad, it's because of mini-hail pelting my head, and a very very cold wind freezing my hands when I take them out of my pocket for more than 5 seconds.

The interior of the Chapel is rather nice, if not quite 'authentic'. Apparently, a lot of the original sandstone was replaced, due to discoloration. Acoustics were still good though... Wonder if Organ Mistress knows of this pipe organ here.. An exterior pic - taken in haste due to cold, and ugly generator near the side..


After a very nice medieval a cappella concert, we went to this nice-looking Greek/Indian restaurant in our portable-petroleum-powered igloo. Owner's Greek and wife is Indian, so they have both Indian and Greek dishes on the menu. Did you know that Pakoras actually goes quite well with Hummus? Here's a pic of my Island of Minos Stir-fried-Steak-and-shrimp.

Yum!

My morning view today - we haven't had any direct sunlight for a while, so this was welcome.. except when I tried to watch a borrowed DVD in the sunlight. bleah.

So why Yum?

Lunch! Roasted red potatoes with Country-style pork ribs, marinated with cajun seasoning and dijon mustard, roasted to just-cooked tenderness...

While I'm warm and well-stuffed:
It's snowing again! Dunno if you can make out the mini-snow flakes - they're so fine, it looks foggy.

Chipotle in the Snow

Boy was I productive today!

Not only did I finish doing my laundry for the week, I also washed out the microwave roomie had been polluting for two weeks, and collected the freshly roasted UnCharredbucks coffee I ordered a couple of days ago. Yum! This day is so exciting! I even used the large commercial-grade dryer for my non-delicates! Wow!

Plus!!! My skin is flaking off! Who'da thunk it? OK, so maybe that's not so exciting. Just bothersome, having to lube up so often.

Pepperdemon and I decided to get some air, exercise and groceries this afternoon, all at the same time! We walked 1.5 KM over rough, undulating terrain. Only careful podiatric placement and split-second nap-of-the-earth navigational strategy served to keep two butts from causing serious damage to an iced-sludge-topped-with-white-snow-encrusted road.

On the way back, JavaMaso and PepperChist jointly decided to refuel at a local(what else would it be, Intergalactic?) Tex-Mex place:
Can't see the name?
The nappy.. um, napkin is saving the Fajito Burrito from stage fright, but it's under there.
Word to Spice-heads out there: Order the Hot salsa. Don't even bother with Medium - there's barely a buzz.

Now over to Pepperdemon, who will now talk about the pseudo excitement somewhere near our apartment building... sometime soon.

Veni, Vidi, Amex

This is the last of the "Great Caesar" quotes... at least for some time.

But it is accurate though. Why? Because I finally found my XXL Weatheredge 3 System parka, that's why! When I post pics of me in it, you'll see it. I have finally managed to fully utilize my Winter Allowance®! In the meantime, stay tuned, and Don't Touch That Dial! (er.. mouse.)
Pepperdemon (not pictured) and I were mercifully driven in slo-mo by our gallant and discount-hungry roommates to yet another Prime Outlet, but this time, somewhere around Medina or Burbank, Ohio. Going Southwest too, not Northeast (or some other random cardinal direction) to Amish Country.

Other than boring highways and being sucked in by hypersonic 18-wheelers, we saw a lot of:
After doing some guy-style-shopping (go in, try, buy, get out), I parked my frozen butt (did I mention that Prime Outlets advocates a distributed store policy? You have to walk more than you shop) on a cafeteria seat, and:
Hey, I gotta live up to my name right? By the way, at 7pm, this Americano sucked big time.
Speaking of which, time to go down to the apartment lobby and see if my coffee package has arrived. Yup, after suffering a pound of Charbucks®, I ordered from a local coffee roaster.

Field Report pending!