It's been snowing here since late yesterday afternoon. The weather peeps had been predicting various amounts of snow for these here parts over the last week ranging from less than an inch to more than eight. I listened to wind howl and the snow hit the side of the house last night during my many and frequent bouts of wakefulness and I knew the accumulation was going to be towards the deeper end of those predictions.
I spent this morning bumbling around the house in my pajamas and slippers sipping coffee and teasing the dogs. I was goofing around on facebook reading the status updates from people extolling the virtues of the new-fallen snow.
You know who are you.
I peeked outside from time to time to watch it snow and blow. Stepped out briefly to reload the bird feeder and sprinkle seed on the ground for my junco, sparrow, and cardinal friends. I tried, rather unsuccessfully, to take a new profile picture for facebook.
As you can see, they are all of equivalent badness. So I made a bad collage framed in one of my favorite colors. I tried to tag myself in the pictures but I discovered that facebook won't let you tag yourself more than once in a 'picture'...go figure. I eventually chose the one in the lower left hand pane as the least bad of the bunch. A photographer I ain't. I am also not photogenic. I'm over it.
I spent a goodly amount of time editing the photos and it was then I discovered this in the background of one of them:
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| Mr. Wiggles says, "You're trying to trick me!" |
Eventually, I ran out of ways to screw around and had to face the unnerving task of seeing just how badly my car was buried.
After having found my boots and having donned my warmest winter weather gear (that I could find anyway), I trekked out to the porch and took a gander at the snow up close. It's really white. And cold. And deep. Knee deep in places. No matter how well you tuck your pants into your boots, the snow will get in there and make your socks wet and uncomfortable.
But that's okay. I didn't really notice the wet socks because the wind was freezing my glasses to the bridge of my nose. Then I noticed that the lenses in said glasses were going so dark so fast that I began to wonder if I might be having a stroke or if perhaps my retinas were detaching at exactly the same rate in both eyes simultaneously. Then the lenses fogged up to the point where I was completely unable to see through them at all.
*sigh* Dammit.
Peering over the top of my glasses, I trudged through the knee deep drifts over to where I thought my car might be. I was able to make out the general shape of the vehicle through the snow adhering to the sides and I began to sweep the snow from the car with my arm. The snow was at least six inches deep on the hood.
I fired up the remote start from just outside the driver's door and continued sweeping snow off so I could open the driver's side door and turn the defroster on the full blast 'inferno from hell' setting. The door was only stuck a little and I managed to NOT get a boatload of snow inside the car. I allowed the car to run while I finished clearing the snow from the windows and hood. Then, I turned and looked back the way I had come and began to ponder the situation.
Way back last summer during the heat of July, we bought a little electric snow blower on clearance for a remarkable price. I was thinking maybe I could try it out when the sound of the wind in the neighbor's 80 foot tall pine tree caught my ear. I stood and watched it sway vigorously in the gusty air. Behind me, I could hear the wind rattling the empty branches of assorted deciduous trees down the street. The wind was in my face and I was being pelted with tiny shards of ice.
I looked over at the car puttering quietly in the snow and I looked back at the sidewalk with its knee-deep drifts.
There was only one thing for it.
I hit the kill switch and locked the car up.
I went back in the house like any sane human being would.
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| The view from my inside my front door. |
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