Ice and snow

Ithaca is picture perfect when it snows. Cosy cottage like houses, pine trees and beautiful lonely lamps, all blanketed by white snow. Hurts the eyes by day, glows deceptively warmly in the moonlight and forms snow men when the university is in session. From the hilltop, you can see the world white. From the warm indoors, you know why the poet fluffs about fluffy snow. You can see the ploughs clearing the road and a lone hooded pedestrian walking through the falling cotton fluffs.
When you become that lone hooded pedestrian, you can hear the tobogganing and snow fight shrieks. You hurry and scurry, seeing the rabbits that dint hibernate. You get out of the falling snow, shake your shoes and reenter the warmth of the home.

When the mercury goes up, you can hear the snow cakes on the roof fall. You can see the snow on the trees cave in. As a few more days go by, a million salt whitened feet tread the road, turning snow to slime, making you wish that ice and snow could sublime. The feet that tread, encrusted white with salt, slip and slither down the sidewalks. The cold wind blows and the slime freezes into ice, tripping the lone walking man. Now, why dint Frost ever write about the downsides of snow and ice?

I am not yet bored of winter. It is dull and grey, but when the feather like snow falls to the ground, I am still enthralled. But not too long can the thralldom of winter hold me. Come March and April, winter will pierce my senses and make me long for the warmth and color. But then will come April and May with spring warmth, brightness and warm rain. And as they say, Rains in spring, flowers in summer bring.

I wait.

Graduate Student's Guide to Ithaca-getting here and geographical location...you know what i mean

Now now, getting to Ithaca is fun.Lots of fun. There are a lot of people who besmirch it by claiming that its in the middle of nowhere. But gentle sirs, apologies.....thou art all mistaken.Please note map above to find that we at ithaca, are not in the middle of nowhere...as a matter of fact, we are several miles from it...you know, that fancy measure of distance the americans use.
Anyway, getting back to the map, the blue lines are streams and lakes.Use this map to get to ithaca ofcourse. You will find the directions to the middle of nowhere in almost all tourist guides.

Transport to getting here: There are always a sufficiently large number of propeller driven planes ( were any of us born when they were still being used?) that land on an airstrip here that is like out of ones of those war movies...you know, secret agent lands on small airstrip, the brave pilot screeches his brakes to a halt, something along those lines. For the less adventurous, you can ofcourse just take the bus from the great port city of New York. You get into a bus, which goes in and out of a tunnel and drives down the highway for a boring 5.5 hours. However, do the trip by day and you get to see all the woods you have to get close to the middle of nowhere. You can then, call yourself a babe in the woods.
For the railroad inclined, we are sorry to you.We have a train, but its essentially a toy train.Ezra Cornell did once build a rail road, but quite a bit of it quit and became a jogging trail...very nice one at that too.
For the aquatically inclined among, you.....well, there is quite a bit of hope. Down, the hill,o'er the great finger of Lake cayuga, lies a path to the Eire canal...(well, it does get a bit eiree here, but we manage) and ofcourse from the eire, we can reach the sea...cant we?

If none of these things suit you, we are building a mass transference system...scotty,er...shall i say subramaniam ( from IIT, madras) beam ' em up.


ps- No offense meant to all ithaca lovers.