Back In The Final

You know what is worse than shoveling snow? 

Shoveling snow after you've already shoveled the same spot a few hours earlier. What should you do? 

Are you a "shovel every few hours" person or a "wait until it's all over and then tough it out, even though the snow is really heavy by then" person? 

TigerBlog isn't sure what the exact snowfall totals were outside his house. He does know that it was a lot, easily more than a foot. 

He's always been a  "wait until it's over" shoveler, though this time he went out Sunday afternoon and cleared off a bunch of it, mostly because there was freezing rain and sleet in the forecast. It was a good thing he did; when he tried to open his screen door yesterday morning, it was frozen shut. 

So now what to do? He considered tossing boiling water through the screen, though he ultimately figured that three things would happen, and only one of them was good. First, it would melt the ice to allow him to open the screen. That was the good part. 

The two bad outcomes, though, were that 1) it would refreeze and turn his front porch into a mini Baker Rink and 2) he would almost surely get half of the scalding water on the outside of the screen and the other half on his feet. 

Fortunately, before it came to that, his neighbor wandered over and chipped away the ice with a crowbar. Of course, his neighbor is a 75 year old woman, which made TB feel a tad guilty that he was simply standing on one side while she did all the work. At the same time, he realized that she was pretty handy with the crowbar, so he better stay on her good side. 

Also, in fairness and in the spirit of being neighborly, TB did offer her a Snapple. 

TB also needs to give a shoutout to his friend Todd, who said that he was very confident that TB wouldn't lose power in the storm. He said that given that it wouldn't be windy and wouldn't be heavy weight snow, the area would be fine — and it was. 

TigerBlog thought that if the power was going to go out, it would have been Sunday at 3, right at the start of the football games. Fortunately, that wasn't the cae. 

As an aside, the Super Bowl will be Seattle against New England and not TB's preseason prediction of Detroit against Buffalo.  

Meanwhile, on the subject of championships, the College Squash Association individual final — known as the Ramsay Cup in honor of Princeton head coach Gail Ramsay, a four-time individual champion — will be held today at 1:30 at Grand Central Station. If you forgot, the tournament was first held on a special court at the famous train station. 

In fact, a year ago, TigerBlog's colleague Jon Kurian attended that first edition and wrote this in a guest entry afterwards:

Squash is a great sport to watch. Watching it played in a glass court is really cool, but watching it played in a glass court in Grand Central Station was truly surreal. In my opinion, a venue as majestic and grand as Grand Central Terminal was the perfect spot for such a huge event. As I watched, I could not help but notice the enormous crystal chandelier that hung over the court, or the crowd of people walking behind the court on their way to or from the train, or the many people who stopped to watch on their way in or out of the world’s largest train station. 

Last year's winner was Princeton's Zeina Zein, who rolled to the championship without dropping a game. She is back in the final today after winning an all-Princeton semifinal, taking down her teammate Alex Jaffe in four games. 

Zein is a junior from Alexandria, the one in Egypt, not Virginia. Jaffe is a freshman from Philadelphia, the one in Pennslyvania, not in ancient Constantinople.  

The championship match pits Zein and Harvard sophomore Caroline Fouts, who was a high school classmate of Princeton field hockey goalie Olivia Caponiti at Sacred Heart Academy in Greenwich, the one in Connecticut, not England.

Zein is seeking to become Princeton's first back-to-back women's champion since Julia Beaver won each year from 1999-2001.