Got back into town a bit past 1, home from office and Wegmans closer to 2. The trip wasn't without adventures after Nemo Junior was supposedly over in these parts. After leaving the hotel, where this view awaited first thing-



(but the staff had pre-brushed all the cars in the parking lot and the drive down the hill back to the main road was a lot less stressful than the climb up it the night before)- I quickly discovered that secondary roads were in better shape than the expressways. At 9 a.m.,  490 was still covered in a crusty coating of ice and salt, and I saw enough wipeouts on the side of the road to check in with the kids and see if they were up (and up for company).

They were. My driving, less so. Entering their complex, you have to choose between two sides of a median, the left leading to condos, the right to their buildings. I opted for the middle half and got stuck on the edge of the ditch that separates them.

As disasters go, this one was eminently bearable. I wanted to spend some time with them anyway, and AAA exists for this very reason; I even discovered, from all the times Em's called them in the past year, that her apartment is now the default address for our three-car account in their computer. They promised an hour, then pushed it back another 45 minutes when they prioritized members over me who were on sides of roads rather than in rooms with kittehs.

I like the people she lives near. At least three of them offered me help as I walked back and forth at various times to pick up and return things. And, turnabout being fair play, I brushed off their car while waiting for mine to be dug out.  Which it was, by noon, and by which time Crusty had melted away and the rest of my drive home was quick and painless.

Still being in Rochester at that hour, I got to listen to Whadya Know? for the first time in ages- and realized, hellz, I can listen any Saturday, since WXXI streams all its radio. (All The Good Stuff on WRUR, likewise:)  Michael's second-hour guest was a lawyer-slash-foodie-slash-standup comic named Eddie Huang, who got close to half an hour for some amazing stories about his life (which took him from Taiwan to Orlando to, now, Manhattan); he plugged his memoir which sounds like marvelous fun-



-and told tales about Manhattan roof gardens and Flyover Country green bean casserole that I found to be utterly endearing.

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Once home-home, I reacquainted myself with our own crazy animals, then went out and shoveled our walks. We got off relatively easy compared to some- our town, Amherst, officially checked in with around 7 inches of the stuff. The Rochester area got more, ranging from 9 inches at the airport (which is stupid, because I don't know anyone who lives at the airport) to well over a foot in some northern burbs.  But my younger niece wins the prize for Nemo himself- her home town of Hamden, CT made Good Morning America before I left the hotel this morning as getting the biggest dump of the entire Northeast- three FEET in all. And her kid, my grandnephew, didn't even want to go out and play in it. Philistine.

The only downside of my travels was that I came home computerless- at least My Computer-less. Monday, they say. So double that to Wednesday, at least, I'm betting. Meanwhile, a new Portlandia has arrived and we cannot watch it together; this computer (cranky old XP laptop) has sound but no useful picture (I got it to connect to the living room TV through S-video but both audio and video tracks are too hicuppy to sit through with the limited amount of RAM on this thing), and the half-decent monitor in Emily's room can stream it fine but that machine has no sound. So it's Stevie Wonder versus Garrett Morris for the time being- and we've decided to just hold on until we get either mine or a new one back, hopefully sometime by mid-week.