Snow!

It’s been snowing here in Burlington since about 10:30 this morning and it keeps coming down. I’m mostly fine with this. Although we got tons of snow around the holidays, we’ve been in sort of a snow slump ever since. And really, when you move to Vermont, you naturally expect to be moving to something of a winter wonderland, so something about it snowing outside just feels natural.

But.

There’s a reason I’m “mostly fine” with it snowing. And that reason is what passes for acceptable road care during an incident like this. It’s not like we don’t all have access to weather.com; it’s not like we don’t know these things are coming. I’m used to local, county, and state road crews twitching  with anticipation, waiting only on the go signal to get out and do their work. When the flakes start falling (and sometimes before), they’re on the move salting, sanding, cindering, whatever. They don’t get it perfect and usually give us something to gripe about, but as the storm’s overhead, usually there’s at least the sense that they’re tryingI.

Vermont? Not so much.

Smaller state/smaller budget/less manpower? Maybe. But since we’ve been here there have been a few snow events in the immediate (say a day or two) aftermath of which I was surprised at how much snow was allowed to remain on the roadways. And yes, I know MD was a much warmer state, and yes I know that major snows will melt there whereas here they’ll stick around for much of the winter. I’m trying to compare similar-sized snow events with similar afterconditions (again, for a day or two) and so far my experience has been that the roads just aren’t as clear as they would be elsewhere.

So there’s that.

Other than my road-clearing agitation, this has been a pretty good week. It seemed to fly for me. Learned a little about railroads, taking attendance in my TA class is smoothing out, and I learned how to recreate a historic mortar based on a sample pulled from a building. Cool!

It really is quite a view. As I write these words, I’m looking out an office window down a snow-covered stretch in to the city of Burlington, out over Lake Champlain, and over to the Adirondacks beyond. It’s the kind of scene that makes you wish you had a camera, or glad you don’t as taking a snapshot would somehow take away from the uniqueness; or, possibly, you feel both ways at once.

A year ago, I was in Baltimore; a frustrated business analyst at an unrewarding job on a career path I wanted no part of.

My wife and my family and my friends were (and continue to be) great, but I was feeling a growing dissatisfaction with the size and the speed of the city and an ever-increasing realization that the job I was going to every day was not what I was supposed to be doing.

It’s hard to explain. Some people feel called to a certain profession, a certain vocation. They just know that they’re supposed to fill their time be doing something, it could be a priest, a teacher, a doctor…whatever. I was the opposite. Every day I showed up at work, I was receiving the anti-call. I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing but I knew that I wasn’t supposed to be doing this.

So I thought about it. A lot. I received encouragement from my wife. A lot. Many people have life changing moments, but I was given the luxury of choosing what mine would be and when it would happen.

So I chose.

I wanted to work in a field I felt called to. To do that, I needed a little background knowledge. And so, I’d be going back to school.

In the summer of ’07, we quit our jobs. In August we sold our house. We rented a truck and pointed it North. On August 27th 2007 I started the next great chapter of my life; I started working towards a Master’s of Science in Historic Preservation.

Perhaps in a later entry, I’ll go in to why preservation matters to me. For now though, it’s enough to say that I’m living a fairly different life than I was a year ago and I have absolutely no doubt that I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.

It’s a great feeling.

So, for now, that’s who I am. I’m 30 years old, with one career behind me and back in school with the goal of getting my foot in the door of a second. I’m not making much money and am incurring debt at a staggering pace. But I have a great wife, I live in a beautiful part of the country, and am happy.

In later posts, I’ll babble on about Historic Preservation, about my impressions of Vermont so far, etc etc etc…

But now I have to go crawl around a library and paw through hundred-year-old issues of journals with names like “Railroad Gazette” and “Van Nostrand’s Eclectic Engineering”.

How great is that?