Mr. Tumnus, Are You Out There?

I stray from my regularly scheduled topic of the day to post one more snow photo. And for a little bit of a wrap-up of yesterday's wonder of nature spoiled by idiots...but with hilarious results.

Those of you who are familiar with the street I live on will understand. And those who don't - well, let's just say that they don't call it "High Point" for nothing. I live on the slope, perhaps midway up to the "point" and I have a lovely view of what often seems like the first hill on any decent-sized roller coaster. And last night, as the sun was setting, guess what happened? All that lovely snow with all that wet, wet road beneath began to turn to...hehehe...ice! Oh yeah. As you can tell from yesterday's pictures, I am at the "T" intersection with another road, which does create a nice place to turn around and rethink the situation...or a place to slide backwards when you can't quite make it up the hill...or slide sideways into...or, hell, why not do all three? Yes, for about an hour I had a ring-side seat at no charge to watch crazy people try to negoitiate our hill. It would have been a perfect location for a web cam. I called my dad and narrated about ten minutes of the wackiness. And then he told me about his '38 Buick and how he did a 360 in it once when it started to ice back in RI.

Unfortunately, the temperatures weren't really cold enough to freeze the hill and, eventually, the slushiness did enable people to travel again but not before we had a fun time calling our friends and relatives to share the wackiness. The one car that resembled Austin Powers trying to park - yep, that was definitely a favourite.

To top things off, however, I was up at 5 am (yes, I had gone to bed around 2 but my sinus infection was about to do me in. My entire cheekbone felt like someone had taken a blow torch to it and I was literally taking every medicine I could find to get some relief. I was not a happy camper) and I decided to sit in the office/studio to read for a while in hopes that the many Tylenols would finally kick in and allow me to sleep again. I heard this weird crunching sound outside and thought that either we had some huge-ass squirrels wandering around out there or...oh yeah, my next-door neighbor was scraping the snow and ice off the car. Now, what's wrong with this picture? The fact that our entire parking lot was now icy slush and not just slushy slush? Yes, that would be it. And that my driveway goes uphill in order to get to the street? If I could figure out that just scraping the snow off your car was not going to result in an ability to drive wherever you wanted, why did my neighbor not come to the same conclusion?

So, I sat and drank my orange juice and read my book and listened to the sound of hacking at the ice for about ten minutes and then some really weird crunching sounds and then...spinning tires. Yep, lots of spinning tires. This scenario may have only been funny to me, as I was sitting bundled up inside my semi-warm house (don't get me started on the stupid heater) but I think even my youngest child could have figured out that this was an exercise in futility. But, once again, it made for free entertainment for about a half hour and, after being miserable with my damned sinuses and a lot of groaning and whining about that, the drugs apparently began to kick in a bit and I looked back outside right before I retired for the morning and, yep, the car was back in its parking place. You have to wonder what is going through some people's minds some days...

So, today I'm supposed to blog about my reading but that part of the post is actually quite short. I finished The Road and can say that I don't think I'll go see the movie. Even if they did leave in all the parts where the main character (played by Viggo Mortensen) has to get naked. A post-apocolyptic world is not my idea of entertainment. Not at the price of tickets these days, anyway. It was not an easy read not just due to the content but also the writing style. See, I'm happy when dialogue has quotation marks and contractions have apostrophes. So, for me, it was a bit of a challenge. I actually had to reread some passages because the lack of punctuation did not make things clear enough. As for the content, it was very moving. The story was very well done but please don't attempt this book if you're not on some strong anti-depressants, okay?

I have added Tirra Lirra by the River by Jessica Anderson to this weeks' reading and I'm hoping to finish up at least two non-fiction books and this one by week's end.

And now, off to find more Tylenol. The doctor can't see me until tomorrow. Grr...You can probably hear the gnashing of teeth all the way wherever you are. This is going to be a very interesting night tonight - let's see if I can avoid a trip to the ER.