BLIZZARD!

Our flight Friday was preemptively cancelled. Airline, website, email, twitter, text all say it's cancelled, as well as all of the airline's other flights out of Chicago. Annoyingly, travel booker insists it is not cancelled. We've been either on hold or on calls literally for hours now. High volume, for some reason ...

What airline / airport?

Supposedly my parents are flying in Saturday morning. Status still says on time. American / O’Hare

ANA/Air Nippon Airways.

Good evening! International Bad Weather Alert for DEC 23. Chicago(ORD) : all flights has been canceled .
Latest info: https://t.co/gfUVeWjlbX ✈

— ANA Flight Info (@ANAFlightInfo_e) December 22, 2022

Just got back from a walk to the store for some last minute provisions, since we had intentionally gone through most of the important fridge stuff thinking we'd be gone. It's wild to think it's going to go from as mild as it is (32, snow just barely started, didn't need a hat or gloves, or even to zip up my coat) to, like, -8 overnight. Reminds me of a day decades ago when I parked in a puddle and came back a couple of hours later to find the wheel literally frozen in place.

It’s so nice out right now, 32 with pretty flurries and no wind.

Crazy that at 12:30 p.m. it was 29 at O’Hare and 11 in DeKalb (with a -3 windchill).

And now we’re in it: 10 degrees colder in the past hour, wind up to 16 mph, falling snow still pretty.

And my dumb kid just went out to meet a friend for coffee. I told her it was literally getting worse by the minute, but ... kids.

It is absolutely bonkers how long our travel bookers (wherever they are located) kept insisting our flight was not cancelled, despite us sending them screenshots of texts, emails and web updates from the carrier saying the flight is cancelled. It went on forever. They finally relented and re-booked us for Sunday, but when we tried later to see if we could get out a day earlier, on a Saturday flight, the process began anew. "Our system is showing the flight is not cancelled" etc. Like, look at the news, dummies.

Christmas Eve gonna be a flashback to peak covid Christmas Eve, when we bundled up and had drinks with friends in their backyard despite it being -2 or whatever it was. The shrimp and oysters (remnants of a truncated Feast of the Seven Fishes) literally froze, and we had to thaw them under the same ad hoc conditions (fire pit, heat lamp) that we were desperately enlisting to keep ourselves warm.

my stepmom just cancelled her flight to Duluth to see the grandkid for Xmas... -37 with windchill

In Miami it will be a bone-chilling 43 degrees on Xmas Eve.

I was just on a zoom with a colleague in Atlanta, and she said there was a darn good chance of snow down there

tiny flurries on the afternoon walk in brooklyn

It is currently 14 degrees Fahrenheit in the ATL.

a bland balmy 60* in Oakland, we're missing out on all the fun

no one asked you, andy

heh.. we see NO SNOW here ever so I guess I'm a little jealous

To be clear, we got next to no snow here. Inch and a half? 2 inches? It's mostly really cold.

After tons of time and bullshit and money, we managed to reschedule (most of) our trip. But just to show how the universe works, because we were stuck here another couple of days I was here to hear what sounded like water running in our neighbor's backyard. It sounded like a hose or sprinkler, which is not something you want to hear during frozen temps, so I investigated with a flashlight. And indeed, they had a outdoor pipe under their stairs spraying water all over the place. The twist? They had literally left for Hawaii a couple of hours earlier. Fortunately we had their house key, so I was able to go in and turn off their water main and (checks notes) save Christmas.

Meanwhile, the stories from places like Buffalo are horrifying, as were the videos of parked cars in Seattle just sliding hundreds of feet down icy hills, hitting car after parked car, like a huge, expensive pinball machine.

just coming up for air this morning in sunny Buffalo. my wife wanted us to go visit family in texas for christmas but i talked her out of it... "who wants all that hassle of travelling during the holidays", i said... wont write a novel about it here but just say that ive lived through plenty of huge snowstorms here & this was just on another level completely, never seen anything like it. sad times here.