Soul Sucking Winter

This has been a weather week to be remembered. It has snowed off and on for the whole winter and frankly, I'm over it. We've had another 2 big snowfalls in 5 days. It is always pretty when it first snows but then just gets ugly quickly. It warms then melts then snows again---followed by an arctic deep freeze. I don't quite know how it happens, but it always snows a s#%tload during the night and ALWAYS when I have to get up and drive in the mess on my way to work. I only work 3 days a week so I am pondering why it always has to snow on those days.


Wednesday, I was off and we had a "surprise" snowfall that I got stuck in. I booked an appointment for highlights, lowlights and a haircut at the Douglas J Institute. I got to Royal Oak a half hour early so I could buy a skein of Mountain Colors Mohair in my favorite LYS then get to my appointment on time. Little did I know that I was in for an ass-numbing 5 hour color job with a relatively new cosmetology student. Because she was a student, I knew she would be a bit slow, but 5 hours? She was awesome and she did a very good job on my hair but it took forever. I was grateful to have brought a couple of knitting projects with me so I should have been thankful for the 5 hour knit-in. Instead, I was worried. The whole time she was doing my hair, I was watching it snow outside. It just kept coming and coming and coming. Fat flakes, wet thick rainy flakes that fell on top of sleet. We had sleet and freezing rain a whole hour before the snow came. Five straight hours it piled up. The buzz around the salon was that this had been deemed a "snow emergency" and the school would be closing. And me? I still had foils in my hair. I was a virtual prisoner of the salon. When I got out, I couldn't wait to get home, but it was rush hour. What is a girl with new hair to do?



I walked (slipped was more like it) across the train tracks and down a half a block and slid into the door of O'Tooles Pub with a half inch of snow piled on my new do. I looked like a wet dog but was met by my lovely daughter and her friends who had lucked out with a "snow day" at the Douglas J. I had decided to wait out rush hour traffic here but there was no waiting out the weather. It just kept coming. The TV weatherdummies (who were totally perplexed at having been blindsided by this surprise weather event) kept saying 1-3 inches total while I could clearly see it had fallen an inch an hour since I had arrived for my first appointment. Hmmm. I can do the math. 5 hours mind and butt-numbing hair appointment and 1 hour in the bar. 6 x 1= 6. Six stinking inches of new snow on top of the "3 to 5 " that fell last Friday.


Here is the view from my car window--driving home from O'Tooles behind the crazy driver who had his emergency blinkers going the whole way down. No s#%t sherlock. It is a snow emergency. Not only do I have fat flakes in my windshield, but I have your annoying flashers to look at too!And this morning? This is my backyard with my dobie Duke who hates the rain but loves the snow. Who is Duke yapping at you ask? Why, that would be my neighbor who obviously has nothing better to do and is snowblowing the snow out of his yard. Not his walk or drive. His yard.

**********NEWS FLASH**********

UPDATED POST

In a phone conversation with my brother Freddie, it would appear that my neighbor who snow blows his YARD is not the only one with too much time on his hands. Fred likes to snow blow his YARD too. Let me tell you, his YARD is huge. He (who is afraid to leave his own comments here) also told me to quit whining because he got a foot of snow. Awwww. Wouldn't seem so awful if you hadn't been compelled to snowblow the YARD too.