Mt. Sidewalk

It doesn't snow very often where I live. But recently, we had what was considered a doozy of a storm. The news (which I was watching [on accident] due to watching the Olympics while quilting) dubbed the weather cycle the "winter blast." I'm not sure I would agree, but it is the first time I have been snowed in like this. Didn't know it just took six inches to do me in, but it did.

First, it was cold. Really cold. Then I flew to LA while it started to snow, and had a "Winter Blast" of an interview, but that is another story for another day. My flight landed smoothly - a miracle, considering that there was already four inches. Several flights were canceled, but mine got in safely. Huzzah! Being without a coat because you weren't watching the news and you figured you would be fine in the few feet from the terminal to the shuttle bus and fine from the shuttle bus to the car is really silly, by the way. Then came the de-snowing of the windshield, and the fun trip through the winter wonderland that was the parking lot, and then onto the big main drag which had lots of traffic on it, and then to the freeway. Only once do I remember driving when the freeway was white. Dad had taken us to see LoTR in the stadium seating, so we had gone downtown. It was a little dicey, but we made it. Here, there was not a snowplow in sight, although it was clear that there had been one about an hour ago...on one lane of the freeway. The temperature had risen to about 25, but there the Ice-Wind Gnomes were marching from their Norway, and there were ghostly swirls of white headed every which direction. They were beguiling and suspiciously fractal-esque in their iterations, and I'm sure many a driver would have focused on the swirls in front of him and been lost, falling to the sirens, and failing Lesson #1 of Driving 101: Look as far ahead of you as you can, always.

It took almost two hours from when I got off the plane to when I got home, but I did make it safely. Only a few spinning spots. I took some extra precautions and I was really grateful...I saw a few accidents and several cars on the side of the road, but I was able to get home. Having no lanes while driving makes "passing" a little difficult. But I managed not to get hit, or hit anyone else, on the drive home.

It continued snowing and blowing all night, and when I woke up and started quilting, <--it looked like this.
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Then more snow came...and then freezing rain...and in the meantime I quilted and watched Olympics and was a little worried that I would run out of food, but kept warm and dry and mostly scare-free. I did do the prudent thing and make sure I knew where my flashlight was in case the power went out. There was one moment when the entire ice chunk that was the awning over the deck slid 8" down the roof, making a wrenching noise that scared me silly, but other than that I was scare-free...mostly because I didn't leave the house. At all.

On Monday, I was getting stir-crazy and so I went to shovel. This is the leavings of the sidewalk, piled up...drumroll, please: Here is Mt. Sidewalk! Looks suspiciously like Rainier to me, but whatever. Thank goodness S&J keep a snow shovel. It actually was a good thing I hadn't shoveled before, because the snow underneath the ice crust was still powdery...but if I had shoveled, it would have gotten iced and been at least 3x as hard to shovel.

Here's my handiwork. I sent this picture to a friend, with the caption, "Where I come from, we don't just shovel two little lines down the driveway so the car can get out. We shovel the whole driveway." It made me glad for all those hours we spent together as a family shoveling snow. Turns out shoveling is like riding a bike...once you know how, you never forget. I'm glad I learned how to do the job good and proper-like.

The next day, the streets were a bit slushy, but maneuverable. The day after that, the snow was gone. Mt. Sidewalk is no more, but there is a lot of green moss left behind in memoriam.

Career Choices

Recently I took one of those quizzes that has been floating around on facebook. This one was about what your career really should be. I don't know what the choices were, but most of the people I know who bothered to post their results got "writer." For my own part, I would have expected to be a writer, or a man-of-all-work. But no. Instead, I got "athlete."

Yep. The girl who consistently got "needs more coordination," and "she's very smart but needs to improve on her physical skills" got the one career she would be doomed in.

It occurred to me that although I would love to be a gardener, quilter, photographer, organizer, assistant, consultant, teacher, singer, or analyst. Or writer. I could be a blogger or a short story writer or a memoir maker or a fantasy saga extraordinaire writer. I could write speeches, news articles, or historical fiction. Or even poems! But one thing I couldn't do is write mysteries. I was thinking today, after watching one of the Cadfael disks my mom sent me...how do they do it? How do mystery writers formulate the story? How do they leave clues? Is it really just that your brain knows the formula but knows the enjoyment of "discovering" the answer again, so you can just read mysteries over and over? How do they decide the sequence? The weapon, the circumstances? How do they keep enough suspense to keep you interested, but keep the story believable? I could never write mystery. I have no secrets. My face shows everything I am thinking or feeling. I am incapable of throwing people off the scent. I spoil all surprises for people I am trying to surprise.

So I guess I might not be cut out to be an athlete, but I'm not ready for the mystery world either.

I do have some career choices coming up. Wonder what I'll really end up being when I grow up?

Steady as the Sun

I listened to a song that had a chorus with lyrics talking about what makes a man strong. (Incidentally, "Strong" is the name of the song; Will Hoge sings it.) It's a country song, and today was the first time I heard it. I didn't hear the whole song, but what I did hear went like this:

He'll pick you up and won't let you down
Rock solid inside out
Somebody you can trust
Steady as the sun
Ain't nothing gonna knock him off the road he's rollin on
He's strong



There is more than one way to interpret some of these lines.

He'll pick you up and won't let you down
The first is negative: He'll pick you up like a sack of potatoes, throw you over his shoulder, and won't let you down even if you pummel him half to death and kick and scream.
The second is positive: He'll pick you up, emotionally, and you can always count on him to do what he says he's going to do, when he says he will do it.

For the record, I prefer the second interpretation.

  Rock solid inside out

First: he has a stomach of iron and is super chiseled.
Second, he's immovable in his opinions, only slightly worn down by weather and elements.

(I'm not sure I like either of these.)

Somebody you can trust
This one, there aren't two ways, so I like the only interpretation there is.

Steady as the sun
I view this as being "steady as the sunshine," which, if you live where I live, can really only be called "steady" about two and a half months out of every year, and I don't exactly call that steady, especially since only one of those months is guaranteed, and everything else kind of fluctuates. I get that the sun is burning up there in the sky in its happy gassy way, but if I can't see it, sometimes it's hard to remember it exists. Especially around December the twenty-first. I turned to my friend and said to her, "I don't want a man who's steady as a Northwest sun." Indeed, the first thing I thought of was that I would rather have a man who's like a neap tide...slow, inexorable, his love washing over me. Of

Ain't nothing gonna knock him off the road he's rollin on
Either he's opinionated and you can't get him to think beyond the idealistic road he has been "rolling on," meaning that he's completely narrowminded and never seems to think of even looking out the window to see if he missed something.

Or he is steadfast in purpose and he overcomes adversity and keeps going, rolling with the punches and always stands up for his moral principles, and values things like truth and justice.

Either way, he's strong.