Nanook of the North

So, I got to the used bookstore today in time to be handed a Memo from the mall office, declaring the mall closed. Everything was closed, not because of the snow we've gotten, but because of the impending storm.

So, happy and puzzled, I closed up the store and got a ride home with the girl I would have been taking over for. In the time I got there until the time I got home (maybe twenty minutes) an inch of snow had fallen. By the time I'm done with this blog post, another two will probably be down on the ground.

I cannot see across the street. I just see a wall of fast-moving snow mixed with ice that turns everything into an impenetrable wall when it hits.

The grocery stores are closing, the banks are closing, the mall has closed.

The city and county have run out of snow plows and snow plow drivers. The shift they have going now has been going since four this morning. They have no choice but to stand down and go home. They have no one else to send out. The roads and streets are therefore (as of four o'clock) completely unplowed until tomorrow, when this same shift comes back to work.

I LOVE IT!

I adore this kind of bad weather. I love bad weather in general. When thunderstorms turn the skies strange shades of green and yellow and silver, when the thunder is something you feel in your feet and the lights flicker in time with the lightning, I'm happy as anything and prowling the house. Or I'm out walking in it, if I can get away with it.

With blizzards, I would bundle up and go out, but blizzards like this one would white things out enough that I'm not confident enough to be roaming the country-side. I like the bad weather, but I'm not stupid. I have no desire to get turned around and freeze to death.

Still, I'm happy as anything.

We have over a foot and a half of snow on the ground. We're predicted to get another twelve inches, but the prediction keeps rising. The Doppler radar shows a long and mostly verticle strip that's passing up, straight through us. And it's swirling too, so it'll come get us before too long again.

Hooray!

I'll report further, unless the ice kills the power. In which case, I'll get my notebook and my fountain pen and get a ton of writing done instead. There's no downside here.

Babies and things.

Well, so myne wyfe and I went to the doctor's office the other day, which is always a very silly experience for me. I get very bored in doctor's offices, and that means I get goofy. I realize that it's probably useful to have a Scheduler on staff, but the concept of it just strikes me as amusing, when I've been doddering around the clinic ("medical plaza" the sign says) for an hour.

The nice thing about pregnancy, I've discovered, is that mostly by the time the "pregnancy" bit occurs, I've done my part and am in the clear. This is very good, because there seems to be an inordinate number of needles that need to be stuck in people.

I Do Not Like Needles. Terrified of them. My right arm, when I was a teenager, needed to be stitched back together after a nasty accident involving some very old and brittle glass. The anesthesia wore off halfway through and the next dose they give me didn't kick in until they were done. This means I felt at least twenty-four out of the forty-some stitches. Therefore, terrified of needles.

(another aside, since I'm meandering: this is actually the reason why I only type with nine fingers. My middle finger on my right arm is useless, except for gestures. My right arm still doesn't support weight extremely well.)

Anyway...the point I was getting at was that I dislike needles, and they seem to be taking enough blood out of my wife to start a blood bank. She says I'm doing that "exaggeration" thing again, but I maintain it anyway.

If ever you need to sneakily clone someone, just tell them that you need to run Important Bloodwork and then take a pint of blood and be on your way. THey won't even remember you amidst the rest of the hospital staff, the building which I affectionately call "The House of Knives."

This is all a round-about way of saying that we went in for an ultrasound the day before yesterday, and the doctor-guy tells us that Tzinski 2.0 is a boy. All I saw were a series of moving gray blobs in different positions (and, once, hauntingly enough, a face) so I'll take the doctor's word on it.

That said, the doctor's assured my parents that I was a girl, and they swore up and down that my sister HAD to be a boy...so I'm hardly basing my color choices on this doctor's testimony. I'm not entirely certain, but I think that mostly in Medical School, they just teach you how to keep a straight face while you use silly words and point at blobby things and wonder what to do with the pounds of money you made this hour. At night and on alternate Tuesdays, Medical School doubles as Clown College.

But I disgress again.

Baby = 50% Chance of Boy.

There.

It's also snowing, again, which means this may also be my last message to you lot. We're supposed to get upwards of eight inches. So I may have to go feral and herd wild attack moose while living in a cave in the mountains, like Jeremiah Johnson, a movie I reference all the time that no one but me has apparently ever seen.

There again. I'm off to write.

The Day After Yesterday

So, three days ago I was wandering around the world in barely a sweater, it was warm and sunny, everything had melted, and life was nice.

Then, the storm hit.

We have, on average, around fourteen inches of snow on the ground. In places where it blew or could pile a little, it's easily twenty to twenty-two inches deep. It took me twenty-five minutes to shovel out the car so my wife could go to work. The wind is still going at ten miles an hour, but yesterday it ranged between twenty and thirty miles an hour.

Alas I have, when supplying my house, completely neglected the whole Snowshoes-and-dogsleds area, which could prove problematic. Fortunately, I have enough supplies (viz. popcorn, books) that I can hold out until help arrives.

Later, I will begin digging a tunnel under the snow, with holes for air every dozen yards or so. In this manner, I hope to reach civilization again.

Excuse me, I must go chop off my left frostbitten foot.