Snow Day!

Ah, a snow day!

Coming at the tail end of a very hectic beginning of 2018, it was greatly appreciated.

Though my lower back doesn’t seem to think so …

Why so hectic, you may be wondering, Joker-like?

Let me tell you: Drove 865 miles north on Saturday; up late Sunday for New Year’s Eve – though not drunk; in to work by 11 am on Monday when everyone else had off to process a week’s work of blah; a full day on Tuesday doing payroll for 650 individuals, followed by two hours in the evening starting up the tax preparer job; a slower day on Wednesday followed by two hours at the tax job; snow and its requisite clean-up yesterday on Thursday.

It was a fun snow day, I’ll grant you that. But it didn’t start out that way.

I woke up at 3:30 a.m. – that hamster got a corn a-rollin’ in its wheel again. Noise kept me up and I couldn’t re-enter Nod. So I did something new. I pulled out the laptop, wrapped myself in blankets on the couch, plugged in the headphones, and watched Mystery Science Theater 3000 on youtube. It was 1978’s Incredible Melting Man that was parodied. I was in chuckle heaven.

When I realized wearily I was up for the day, I glanced out the window. No snow. And it wasn’t snowing. By the time the Melting Man had completely melted incredibly, however, it was a swirling whiteout out there. The school robo-dialed us at 6:30 that it would be closed. My boss texted me not to come in at 7:45.

The girls were up and about, flitting here and there, chowing down cereal, excited to have the day off. The wife’s NYC meeting was canceled, but she had home-office work to do, so she shuffled down to the basement in her PJs. I went upstairs to take a cat nap, but sleep eluded me.

So I watched the guys from MST3K make fun of Laserblast.

Then I watched the guys make fun of The Mole People.

I shuffled downstairs around 1 to make myself some soup, but we had none. Thus I had a hearty meal of ziti with tomato sauce which my detoxifying body wasn’t used to. Believe me, I suffered for it.

The winds whipped the house so hard I thought we’d be sucked up into a giant ice tornado, kinda like the Wizard of Oz revisioned by Roland Emmerich. There’s a door on our second-floor master bedroom that leads out onto the flat roof of our garage. I think you know where I’m going with this. Torn off three of four hinges, slamming against the door frame. I braved the snowstorm to take out the two glass panes, which alleviated about 95 percent of the flailing wreckage. The rest’ll have to be looked at once normal above zero temps flow in.

The digital clocks struck three and I decided to watch a movie with the girls. Turns out we had DVR’d Nicole Kidman’s somewhat creepy 2001 flick The Others. We watched it, and the girls seemed to enjoy the twist ending. Afterwards I noted the storm had stopped; Patch and I went out to shovel and dust off the cars.

Back to work at both jobs today, and the only memory of the great Super Bomb Blizzard of ’18, aside from the five or six inches of icy snow laying all about, is the small ache laying about my lower back.

Did get some interesting reading done, and listening to some interesting jazz.

More on both, later …