The Great Bomb Cyclone of 2018

There are things you don’t want to feel while driving. Your car, moving 60 miles an hour, shoved about three feet to the left is one of those things.

The commute home wasn’t bad. At least in the Baltimore-York corridor, the Great Bomb Cyclone Blizzard of 2018 was a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It looks like the accumulation where I live may have totaled an inch. Possibly less; my usual parking space in the lot had no visible accumulation when I got home from work.

But the wind! The wind was fierce. It was fierce when I went to work this morning. It was fierce when I was at the office. (The utility wires outside my office window swayed.) It was fierce when I left the office. Suffice it to say, it was fierce, and the ferocity made driving through the wind feel like driving through molasses. And occasionally, the Beetle was buffeted by winds and shoved around the road, making for a stressful drive home.

The roads were dry, until I got onto the secondaries in Pennsyltucky, and those roads were messy, clear from traffic and not any deliberate attempt at snow removal.

The complex’s parking lot is gross, but it’s been gross since the last snowfall on Saturday. Nothing new there.


There’s a feral tuxedo cat that lives near the dumpsters in my apartment complex. She’s been there for a few months, and it wasn’t uncommon in the autumn to see her wandering around the parking lot, exploring and (presumably) looking for food, sometimes sitting on someone’s front step, then running away or skittering under a car when someone approached or called out to her. I’d see her when I took my garbage out to the dumpsters; she’d run up the hilly slope overlooking the dumpsters, then sit at the top and watch what I was doing. I would try talking to her, in a high-pitched voice that I used to use when talking to cats, and though she never responded she also didn’t run any further away though, sitting at the top of the embankment as she was, it wasn’t like I could get any closer to her. (I presume the cat is a her. I frankly have no idea.) With this arctic blast, I’ve been worried about her. I’ve not seen her around, and I hope she’s found someplace warm and dry. The other possibility is too horrible to contemplate.

Published by Allyn

A writer, editor, journalist, sometimes coder, occasional historian, and all-around scholar, Allyn Gibson is the writer for Diamond Comic Distributors' monthly PREVIEWS catalog, used by comic book shops and throughout the comics industry, and the editor for its monthly order forms. In his over ten years in the industry, Allyn has interviewed comics creators and pop culture celebrities, covered conventions, analyzed industry revenue trends, and written copy for comics, toys, and other pop culture merchandise. Allyn is also known for his short fiction (including the Star Trek story "Make-Believe,"the Doctor Who short story "The Spindle of Necessity," and the ReDeus story "The Ginger Kid"). Allyn has been blogging regularly with WordPress since 2004.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *