Tag: st.-louis

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Heavy snow, RIM

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(Update Mar 05) My wife Shanzi had a nice write up (and pics) about yesterday’s snow. In Chinese.

(Original) We had a 10 inch snow (huge by St. Louis standard) today. It took me more than 1 hour to drive from my work place to home, which usually takes 15 minutes. Of course I took a different route since I don’t want to take the highway, thought that would be a huge parking lot. There are less traffic on those side roads, but I almost got stuck in snow twice when I tried to go up-hill.

After one hour struggle, I did not make it to my packing lot, because I could not drive up on my drive way, so I left my car there (see below).

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Lessons learned: do not take unfamilar side roads (especially roads with slopes) in snow. My car got stuck in Schultz Rd. and couple side roads along Schultz when I tried to cut across to my home. I saw other cars on the roadside, stuck in snow on the way. I should be more patient (wait on Page).

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Back to Shanghai (again)

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The local temperature is 29 to 38 Celsius, or 84.2 to 100.4 Farenheit.

Stock market: Shanghai composites is edging up to new high (at 4398.79 as of 10:25 AM July 30 local time).

I will talk about the craziness of “Crocs” in Shanghai later, and Sheng Jian Bao place.

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I think I will miss a few things on the other side of the ocean (definitely not work):

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We Lost Power Again

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Because of the weather. Just when I felt I was lucky last night (this morning) my condo did not lose power this time, oops, the storm hit us. So next time I should not feel too good about it. Some of the Panera Bread stores also lost power, e.g., the one at Old Olive (where I usually go) and the New Ballas store, finally I set down at the Olive and Woodsmill store. You can imagine this is a very crowd place. Because I am not the only unlucky person.

Interestingly, at Panera I noticed there are three young kids wearing Crocs. I remember the article at fool.com in which the author tried to count the Crocs and Heelys at Disney World in Orlando: an informal way to gauge the popularity of those products.

While power outage bring inconveniene to ordinary people, how will it affect the business? Obviously not good for retailers, restaurants and hotels, because they lose business on this. Some grocery store has backup generator (Schnucks) but they can not generate enough power for the freezers. I can only think of one business currently benefit from this: the tree and limb services companies. They are probablly the busiest people besisdes Ameren UE people.

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Snow Storm

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We had worst snow storm in my 6+ years stay in St. Louis. The thing makes life harder is the “sleeze”, or ice rain (instead of the snow). It freeze the car windows and doors quickly. I spent about one hour for normal 15 to 20 communte from work to home. This morning I spent another hour to scrap the ice on my car.

I also lost electrcity last night. This morning when I walked to Schnucks (the grocery store) for ice scraper, I noticed it is on its own generator.

====================================== 
Outage start date/time:   Thursday Nov 30, 2006 11:37 PM
Outage status:   Order is being investigated
Cause of outage:   Cause not yet determined
Estimated restoration time:   Not Available
Number of customers out:   112
=====================

On positive side, I tried to help pushing two cars last night. One van was successful, another car Ford Taurus not successful. I felt as good as I solved a hard problem when I saw the van made it out of icey driveway. So far I still see my plane to San Jose on schedule. I believe there are many cancellations from Chicago ORD and St. Louis Lambert airport these two days.