Totally Off the Subject

Sitting in a warm house in a basically paralyzed city brings back memories of snow days in Ohio.  Seattle has been shut down for 3 days with approximately 2-4” of snow and cold weather.  This is understandable considering the hills and amount of elevated roadway.  Come on people, if you really don’t need to go out, don’t.  All of you UW grads and your All Wheel Drive Subarus are just in the way.  Park that pile and go home and take your UW stickers and license plate bracket with you, because you don’t belong on the roads today!  Any good dawg should know how to stay!  As for the rest of you morons who think you need to be out, YOU’RE NOT THAT IMPORTANT!  This family however has Nutcracker rehearsals to go to.  PNB can cancel regular classes; but in no way, shape or form will they ever cancel a rehearsal or show.  Go figure?  See sentence in red!  I, on the other hand, can handle this weather but I have slipped a little.  Growing up in the Midwest I should not be so under prepared.  I have been to the grocery 3 times in 3 days.  Maybe it’s the over 45 male ADD kicking in, but I can’t remember shit anymore! 

Anyway, my sister (the driver) and I (the passenger) would drive to school in 4” of snow in a VW bug.  No heat, frozen windshield, bald tires on an unplowed road with me breathing in my coat just to stay warm and not fogging the windows any further.  Let me explain what paralyzing really means.  Winter in Ohio can be brutal.  There were winters when our family would be exiled from the big city (pop. 3,000) for days at a time.  Some drifts on our road would be impenetrable by normal plows.  The normal bad drifting area just west of our house would reach 12-15’ high.  We would watch out the window as the County Department would try desperately to get our road open.  The standard ODOT plow would hit the main drift, back up to get another running start and hit it again and again, multiple times trying to get through.  We would laugh and giggle while the frustrated workers fought the snow drift battle.  After hours of failure, they would finally bring out the big guns, the V-plow.  A few rams with this baby and POW our road was now clear.  Now it was my turn to do battle.  Our road being clear meant only one thing, THIS FAMILY NEEDED SPACE, WE HAD TO GET OUT, before all hell broke loose!  “Boy,” my dad would say, “get that driveway cleared.”  My days as a youth were spent shoveling our 60’ long driveway.  The need to shovel each time we needed to get out was exhausting.  This painstaking work was completed by the only shoveling apprentice in the house, just to go to the grocery for necessities, milk, bread and eggs.  In our case my mom extended our milk by mixing it with dried milk powder and water.  Now doesn’t that make you want to jump right up and do some shoveling?  Thank goodness we had some frozen ground beef in the freezer.  Watching it snow, playing outside, coming in for some Swiss Miss instant cocoa w/mini marshmallows was a pretty normal day for a snowed-in, apprentice one-handled lever operator.  I guess I didn’t have it too bad.