After a balmy, rainy couple of days, I knew I would have to bundle up this morning. It is winter and this is the Great Lake State and, well, you know… And so I did bundle up but I did not put on my YakTrax. When I peered out the front door at 0-skunk-30, it was snowing just a little bit and the pavement was dry with snow sort of lightly swirling across it. I hesitated about two houses down… Did I need my ice cleats? Naw, I’ll be all right. And really I was, except that shortly after that suddenly there was an inch or two covering everything and I totally lost confidence about where to place my next step. I made it around *most* of my loop by walking on the grass wherever possible and gingerly walking on whatever pavement surfaces I had to cross. People’s driveways are the worst. PLEASE SALT THE SIDEWALK WHERE IT CROSSES YOUR DRIVEWAY! Actually, it wasn’t slippery anywhere that I walked. I was just freaked out.

I saw WWMD’s lovely wife walking with her friend, like I do most mornings. (And she *is* lovely, a beautiful woman and very gracious, unlike yer grumpity old fav-o-rite blahgger.) I felt relief when I got home from that walk and, even though there was barely an inch or two of snow on my sidewalk, I shoveled it and then I SALTED IT. PLEASE PEOPLE, SALT YOUR SIDEWALKS! And then I ate my half-bowl of cheerios (am I turning into my dad?), did a typical round of chores and stuff, and headed over to work. My commute was pretty okay but a lot of people had horrendous ones, including a multi-accident multi-fatality mess somewhere over on I75.

When I got to work, I faarrrred up Freddy. He is a loverly old-coot Windows desktop musheen who seems to manage to fly under the mothership’s radar and was therefore available to me when I had to send my lemon back to the mothership for repair. He works perfectly but he doesn’t have Snagit or Visio or TFS, some of the major tools I use in my job. I am having to edit code in Notepad… (You guys, I know there are better utilities for editing code that I could download from them thar tubes. Except that I can’t download them to Freddy. Don’t ask and don’t suggest things. Love you anyway[smile])

I got a little bit lost there. When Freddy finally finished faaaarrrring up and I faaarrrred up my email, there was a message saying that WWMD and his lovely wife were spending the morning at the urgent care. She had *fallen*… On a hidden patch of ice… Under the snow… Don’tcha know… She broke her arm… Even though it was not her leg, I don’t expect to see her out walking for at least a little while. I’m sure she is feeling generally uncomfortable right now. I hope she does resume walking soon. I am pretty sure she owns YakTrax and I’ll bet she’ll be using them on days like today. I know I will!

I’m a damn Yooper and I’m supposed to like snow, and I do, when I don’t have to drive around with a billion yay-hoos on not-very-well-cleared roads. And nowadays so many of those yay-hoos are yapping on the damn phone while they are driving! How do they do that? When I am driving, I get into the “zen” of driving, if I can (not in snow/ice though, then I am on pins and needles). I HATE having to talk on the damn phone in any case… I miss the days when it would snow and I would shovel out The Landfill and then snuggle in with the beach urchins. Of course, I am sure that I am looking back on those days with rose-colored glasses and not thinking about the messes and fights and yelling and screaming and long TV-watching slodges that probably also went on [wink].

Everybody be careful out there. That is about all.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 31st, 2013 at 7:18 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.