Here’s a little experimental photography for you. Something tells me the sky will look a lot like this a little later today (read: on my drive home). *sigh*
Stupid weather. I’m supposed to go to the park for a play date! Go rain elsewhere!
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the picture. Let me know what you think below!
(c) 2013. All rights reserved.
Only in Iowa can it be 80° one day and snowing the next. While it wasn’t 80° where I was yesterday, it was in other parts of the state, according to two of my friends down in southern Iowa. And rumor has it that the temperature dropped 40 degrees in four hours. That’s pretty quick!
So, to recap: The weekend and the first part of the week were sunny, warm, and absolutely gorgeous, leaving us all thinking that winter skipped spring altogether and decided that summer should just follow directly this year. But now Winter, she’s a-back. With a vengeance.
Me no likey.
I took all these – and a few others – over the course of the morning.
Snow Cat (Photo credit: clickclique)
I’ve had it with winter. Specifically, I’ve had it with all the white crap Mother Nature keeps dumping on us. I nearly got stuck at work yesterday because the city does such a lousy job clearing the streets, and the same thing happened again today. After narrowly avoiding the embarrassment of having to ask my boss to give me a push, what happened? I came home and promptly got stuck in the mouth of my driveway, with the back end of my van sticking out into our very narrow street.
I was stuck so tight that after the kids and I tried to get out for about ten minutes, I went across the street and asked the neighbor for help (Seymour wasn’t home yet). It took the two of us a good half hour and maybe a little more to get my van free. The city I live in (yes, I know, it’s a small town, but that’s how we refer to our municipal government) doesn’t do any better when it comes to cleaning streets than the city I work in. So in short, I’ve had it with winter.
Now, don’t get me wrong. When the sun shines on newly fallen snow and it sparkles like a thousand diamonds, I love it as much as the next person. I appreciate the beauty of snow. However, I hate dealing with it. I hate driving in it. I hate shoveling it. I hate cleaning it off of my car.
But at times like these, I often think of a joke my dad shared with me once. It’s about winter in Iowa and, given the trials I’ve had with the snow today and the fact that it was three years ago today that I lost him, this seems like a good time to share it again. I’ve posted it before, but here it is again in all its snowy glory:
Tonight on my drive home, I was able to see the lines on the road for the first time in 48 hours. It was an amazing feeling, knowing where I was at and where I was going. If only I could feel that kind of certainty all the time.
(c) 2013. All rights reserved.
Today has been a day of dashed expectations and…interesting results. If you follow me on Twitter, then you’ll know that today’s forecasted 30% chance of a trace to an inch of snow turned into yet another raging blizzard. We’re supposed to get five to nine inches now, we’re in a winter storm warning till noon tomorrow, and the wind has once again been blowing like a banshee. This time the speeds have been around 20-30 mph with gusts a little higher. I left work early after hearing how treacherous the roads were; it was a nightmare of a drive that necessitated some cookie therapy.
Once I got the boys up from their much-delayed naps, I started on supper. Since both the older kids are with their other parents today, I had to leave Cricket and Thumper to their own devices in the living room where they could be contained while I threw some chicken in a pot with some rice and cream of mushroom soup (delish, by the way). When I came back, I found them sneaking out of my book collection, phone and books in hand, and Thumper pantsless.
Well, the Class 3 Kill Storm arrived in the night and is even now shrieking outside my window with a passion even a banshee would envy (or possibly admire). Since I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hades of getting to work today, I am snuggled up under my favorite down blanket while the boys play games and Seymour bakes Christmas cookies (I’m still sick – I have no business baking).
I’ve seen worse winter storms, but this one is truly nothing to sniff at. I braved the weather to make a quick trip to the grocery store for chili supplies and go juice with a side trip to the gas station to procure some go juice for the snow blower as well, and it’s fierce out there. I’m glad I decided to stay home today and not brave the weather all the way to work and back. I’m even more glad that Seymour was able to turn around safely and make it back home after the snow plow he was following got stuck. For the record, that was the third one this morning – two others went in the ditch just outside of town early this morning and the accident shut down the highway for a while.
I started this nice little post about this article I read this morning after following a link someone posted on Facebook and it was really very touching, so it made me want to write my very own little post on the same subject but then I got busy at work and didn’t have a chance to get back to it and now I have the time to work on it, but since I have neither the inclination nor the capacity to do so (although I suppose it could be argued that the coherence of this incredibly long run-on sentence means that I very well could write the dang post – I’m just too lazy to make my brain cells actually work), you’ll just have to wait till tomorrow to read it when hopefully the kids will won’t have a snow day and I can get some rest and kick the crap out of this stupid bug that has me in a choke-hold.
(c) 2012. All rights reserved.
Oh, Gretchen, how we miss you!
Make new friends,
But keep the old,
One is silver
And the other gold.
I learned that song as a Brownie, I think, and I’ve loved it ever since. The trouble is, though, that I’ve always had trouble making new friends. All of my friends (except for you, lovely internet friends, and I love you all so very, very much ♥) are friends that I’ve had since childhood – my oldest friend and I go back…um…*counts on fingers*…23 years now. Holy crap, we go back 23 years?! That’s kind of a scary thought!
You know, I’ve had something brewing in the back of my mind for quite a while now as a blog topic and some of the posts I’ve been reading lately on T.L. Tyson’s blog have more or less cemented the idea in my head. However, I’m not sure it’s fully fermented yet and at any rate, I received an email over my lunch break that pretty much blew said idea sky-high. Any thoughts I might have otherwise entertained posting about today were blown to smithereens when I read the following words:
…I’d love to see the whole thing…
It’s five o’clock somewhere, right? Why the heck can’t it be five o’clock here? I just want to go home and sit in my lovely air-conditioned living room and relax with my guys. *sigh*
Also, check out The Page Turner! It’s a super cool blog run by a great gal and one of yesterday’s posts featured The Lokana Chronicles! Needless to say, I was pretty stoked. Be sure to check out the pages 105 Tips for Writers and A Page Turner for a look at the awesome Page Turner software. The software isn’t live yet, but it sounds like they hope to start beta testing pretty soon. I personally can’t wait to start playing around with it.
And now, I think I’ll try to rest my poor sun-fried brain. It’s another scorcher out there today and another one of my kids has another ballgame tonight. Tadpole played a doubleheader last night (won one, lost one) and Tomcat has a game tonight (not a doubleheader, thank goodness). I missed out last night because it was too hot for Cricket and Thumper to be outside and I think I’m going to miss out tonight, too, because it’s actually hotter today than yesterday (mid-nineties for temps, heat indices in the lower triple digits, humidity levels approaching 100% – yesterday was pretty similar, but with 30-40 mph winds all day long on top of all that). Blargh.
(c) 2012. All rights reserved.
Suddenly they all died. The end. 