Weather, the College Years

Ahhhh, college. I grew up in Barfalo, NY, which was a great place to grow up if you liked weather. We had all kinds of weather. We had clouds, rain, wind, heat, cold, humidity, sleet, and of course snow. Lots of snow.

We didn't have this thing called "sunny and warm." No, it wasn't until much later that I discovered the joy of "sunny and warm". But that's for a different story.

I decided to go to the local state university, UB, mainly because it was cheap, and I had no real desire to go out and explore the world for exotic colleges in faraway lands with their funny, native names like Ithaca or Syracuse or Binghamton. Gosh. Every time I say "Binghamton" I think of dental work. Do you, too? "Oh, there's some troubling Binghamton in the upper left quadrant. We're going to need to keep an eye on that."

And it's not just because I went to the dentist this morning.

Syracuse, on the other hand, makes me think of steaks. There used to be a "Syracuse Restaurant" in Barfalo that my parents used to go to whenever they got a babysitter. I got to go there once or twice, but I think I had the chicken.

What do you think of when you hear "Syracuse"?

I spent four wonderful years at UB. The first three, I lived on campus in the dorms, and the fourth off-campus at an apartment not too far away. Most of my excellent weather experiences occurred during the times I lived in the dorms, as I was under 21 at the time, and thus drinking had not yet replaced my love for the weather.

Both make unpredictable mistresses, I might add.

The UB campus at which most classes were held was a big, sprawling mess of a place that was apparently designed by hiring a different architect for every single building, and then laying all the building out in a big, long row that was called "The Spine." This was in great contrast to all your older, more famous universities that are laid out as a rectangle with the space in the middle usually being referred to as "the quad". UB's campus was designed around the time all those wacky leftist hippies were always having riots at universities because they somehow though that (a) professors had some kind of great political power and (b) people other than those affiliated with the school gave any kind of a rat's ass about what hippie college students thought. So, the campus was specifically designed not to have any place that could naturally serve as a congregating point.

All that is well and good. Until the winter. Then you realize that the spine is a mile long and in the middle of a wind swept tundra with nothing but acres and acres of parked cars to block the weather as students attempt to get back and forth from one building to the other for classes. Even for someone who liked the weather, like me, walking back and forth for a total of like 5 miles every day right in the middle of it in the dead of winter wasn't as fun as it might sound.

So the brilliant architects decided to connect all the second floors of the buildings together with "tunnels" that were actually glass-enclosed bridges, which, though designed with heaters, were never heated because it was a state school, and Mario Cuomo was always too busy handing out welfare checks to crack addicts in Brooklyn to think about spending money on heat.

A second floor, unheated glass tunnel turns out to not be a bad place to observe the weather from. So, after my first couple treks across campus to experience the weather each day, I resorted to the tunnel system for the rest of the day. I could keep an eye on the weather from there without my tongue freezing to the roof of my mouth.