Reay for Winter?

winter has finally arrived here in Bedford Falls, in all its snowy glory. The white does serve to cover up the ugliness of the brown lawns, the debris of fall still in the gutters and the bland grey of the roadtop. The trees are clad in their crystals of white, branches heavy with snow where in the summer there were leaves.

And I'm face-up with my greatest dislike of winter: the weekend shuffling of the vehicles.

We're not allowed to park on the streets here during the night when there's snow on the ground, on the grounds that the city might eventually plow the snow. We have no garage, and a driveway that's narrow enough we have to park one vehicle behind the other. On weekends, the truck takes the off-position, as the van is the vehicle of choice. But every Sunday night I have to shuffle the vehicles because, in the wee hours of the morning, it's the truck that gets me to the bus stop. tonight, I had to spend about half an hour scraping windshields, brushing snow off roof and fenders and otherwise cleaning the white glop off the vehicles so I can get them ready for the morning.

I hate the scrape-scrape sound of the ice sraper. The cold of the snow eating through my gloves. And, since it's tradition to wear clogs rather than anything else in which to move the snow, I also hate the cold of the stuff getting into my shoes and soaking my socks. Yes, I could put on real shoes, but freezing my feet off is part of the tradition.

Is It Spring Yet?

Stumbled across this the other day, cleaning out a few files on my computer:

Still think he'd make a good site mascot. But then where would Nose Hair Man go? Nowhere. That's it.

Winter is still here. We had snow a few days ago, and the mercury's struggled to get above freezing this week. Our tulips, however, are still doggedly growing, even though some of their compatriots are still covered in snow we shoveled off the roof. Enough snow has disappeared I've finally been able to start taking down the Christmas lights. I'd like to get them off the cherry trees before they bloom, because those flowers are fragile as it is, without a bunch of lights banging against them in the wind. Of course, that's assuming we get summer this year, which we may not. Brings to mind the summer of 1816, commonly known among trivia nerds as "The Year Without Summer." Volcanic eruptions in Indonesia caused wild temperature fluctuations, June blizzards and iced-over lakes in August in the eastern U.S. and Canada, as well as northern Europe. There's more here, but, of course, I'm quoting Wikipedia, so I may be wrong:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer

Still, it's interesting. Makes you wish this whole global warming thing was a big sham. Of course, back in 1816, they were going thorugh a "mini" Ice Age, in which global temperatures plummeted. Ol' Mother Nature is a weird one.