Snow Days

 

Well, the good thing about the New Age of Telecommuting is that we no longer have to risk our lives driving on snowy, icy roads to punch in at a clock at work at 9 a.m. The bad news is that you’re chained to your laptop at home.

It really isn’t that bad a trade-off, though.

My “office” is in the basement. I share it with the wife’s “office” and the ever-busy laundry room. After eight hours at the laptop, monitoring email crises and doing various projects with Excel and two or three reporting software, my feet are cold and damp, my clothes smell musty, and my ears ache from listening to my overly extroverted wife’s several “touch-bases” and zoom calls with her sales teams. The girls self-manage their school day from their rooms, and when they’re done watch TV, get their homework done, and play together on their cell phones or just listen to music.

Is it ideal? No, especially for the little ones. They need socialization desperately, and I fear for their lack of receiving it. I really do. I can tell it’s not healthy for them. But again, thanks in part to the boomers and panic porn purveyors and those who never let a crisis go to waste, this is life in 2021.

For nearly 48 hours we were pounded with the worst blizzard since 2016. My house seems to have got three feet of fairly heavy sloppy snow. We shoveled Monday at 12:30, Monday at 6:30, and Tuesday at 4. I went out onto the horizontal garage roof and shoveled four inches of heavy sloppy icy snow both at 10 pm on Monday and 8 am on Tuesday. As a result, my back aches in at least three spots (recall my back issues from earlier in the week), my neck is stiff (how did I do that?) and my left forearm is throbbing from shoveling right-handed. Thank God for the girls, helping their dad shovel for the first time. Yeah, I had to shovel out $10 a piece for their aid, but they assisted me without complaint.

Normally I go in to the office Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. I am writing this at 5:30 am on Wednesday, having been up since 4 am. I am not going to go in today. For one, the roads are still a bit snow covered, and I can see my car received yet another inch or so overnight. For another, my body just physically needs to heal. I’m tired and exhausted.

About the only person who’s in heaven over all these events is our dog, Charlie. This thing humans call snow is absolutely fascinating to him. He races out on the shoveled deck and leaps into the unshoveled backyard, plunging in and out of the snow like a porpoise trailing a sea liner, up and down, all across the white expanse behind our house. Once the wife lost sight of him behind shrubbery and started screaming for him, thinking he was buried under snow and couldn’t get free. But we wave his favorite blue towel by the door and he comes galloping in, tail wagging at supersonic speeds, for a rub down.

Fortunately we gassed up the cars and did some major grocery shopping – along with the entire state – on Sunday, so we’re well stocked. I’m making headway through my various books and still work on my novel outline in between email crises. Oh, and on a whim Sunday I picked up an Astronomy magazine at the grocery store, probably still having Tabby’s Star echoing somewhere in the uncharted regions of my cerebrum. Each night I read a couple of articles and find myself fascinated.

The hopping continues … as does life in this weird limbo existence we live …