White Out

It's snowing in New York again, and this time it means it. Apparently the snowstorm which began last night and is still more or less going is very nearly the heaviest ever to hit the city - close to three feet in under 24 hours. I realise that's fairly minor by Canadian or even (parts of) Tohoku standards, but hey, like I say, there's always something going on here.

I have to admit it's very pretty. I like snow, always have since my days growing up in Durham, and the CU campus looks great in it too. I passed people with sleds and even a couple on skis on the way over to the library this afternoon, and needless to say the students were making the most of it, sledging down the steps of Low Library and having snowball fights, playing snow football and indulging in a bit of snow wrestling. Photos below.

All of which, while a lot of fun for me personally, must have been a right pain for a lot of the attendees at the 15th Annual Graduate Conference on East Asia at Columbia, some of whom had come from as far away as Russia, the UK, Hawai'i and Germany. Not least because the snow shut down JFK for much of the morning.

The conference itself, however, went off smoothly enough; the sessions were interesting enough to be worth attending, and the paper I gave seemed to go down well - I didn't get shredded for it, anyway, and that's the most important thing. The evening saw festivities in Starr Library, culminating in dancing on the tables - and damaging a couple of the lights in the process. The place still smells of beer and Chinese food from last night, actually, and I have a feeling they'll need industrial quantities of Febreze there to get the smell out of the carpet...