At Home in the Huddle 2011: Remember the PTA Bottle Drive, this morning, and....

.. don't forget to

SPRING AHEAD

TONIGHT!

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33.9 degrees at 7:45, and a bit of light snow fell during the night.

From WKTV: "Rain and snow showers are in the cards for Saturday. A cold front drives through on Sunday, perhaps bringing a few snow squalls.

Cooler, sunny weather on Monday, before a significant warm up is expected by mid next week."

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GOOD NEWS

Jamie Dowd, quoted in an article in this morning's Observer-Dispatch:

At roughly 10 a.m. Friday, Oriskany Falls native Jamie Dowd was in the unenviable position of driving toward a 3½ -mile tunnel connecting San Francisco and Oakland, Calif.

“They didn’t issue any stops on it, and it’s kind of discretionary, but do you really want to be under water with a possible tsunami coming?” Dowd said during a telephone interview.

Though disruption in the Bay Area was minimal, Dowd said residents were taking caution. People there are used to the earthquakes, but they’re also leery about the onset of a major disaster, he said.

“Everybody panics,” he said. “Watching the news makes you do so. I’ve lived in California for 10 years, at least through a couple earthquakes. The big one’s going to hit sometime.”

“They’re saying ‘don’t panic, follow instructions,” Dowd said. “And then every once in a while, they’ll say, ‘This is crazy. There is no historical data on how to operate if we did have something catastrophic.’ There are two bridges and one road to get out of the fourth largest city in the country.”

Dowd, 32, went to Waterville High School and in 2002, he moved to California, where he works in the biopharmaceuticals industry, doing sales and recruiting."

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From Peter Bocko, in Tokyo:

"Yes, we (my wife Andrea & I) are fine. It was quite a shake. You get used to the tremors here, but this was something else in its intensity and duration. I was in my office building corner office and at the worst could not stand up. We are surrounded by 40-50 storey buildings and the amount they were swaying from my window was absolutely surreal. The ANA InterContinental hotel was in a twisting mode. Generally people in the office were tense, but very calm. I was issued a hard (hat) when I first moved to Tokyo and put it on. Heavy aftershocks continued for hours. I have not seen any physical damage here in Central Tokyo excepts some popped ceilng tiles in the office and lamps in my apartment were knocked over (and precious smuggled 150 3-way bulbs broken). Of course the city is a mess transportation wise, most trains are not running and most flights are canceled." A graduate of WCS, Peter Bocko joined Corning in 1979 and was appointed Chief Technology Officer - Japan in October 2007.

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As many people have remarked,

"It's that sort of disaster that reminds us how small our problems are!"

Part of ending Winter and starting Spring is "flooding" .............

Loomis Road is closed and the Route 12 Underpass is creating a real slow-down as drivers crawl through the pond, there, not really knowing how deep it is.

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ELSEWHERE, ON HIGHER GROUND