I Own This Blog!

After some sort of earthquake knocked the site down and with it, my posts, I really should put something up here. Luckily for me, I have a copy of my last post, which I crossposted to one of my vanilla blogs.

So, without further ado, here is "Snow Warrior..."

The snow is deep. Really deep. It fell all night last night and I'm pretty sure I heard thunder. Thunder and lightning isn't so obvious in a blizzard -- all the snow hides the flash and sucks up all the sound. There is no crack, just a sort of a thump. You're never really sure it's actually happening.

I stand out in my garage, my snowblower pointing down the drive, and pull the cord. It starts the second try. The snow is actually deeper than the snowblower is tall, so I have to rock it back and forth to chew through the snow.

Blizzard snow isn't like normal snow. It's wet and heavy, thick to work through. It's not the fine powder of the ski slopes, it's more like someone came along and smeared the world with a thick layer of white frosting, like a wedding cake. And it forms into clumps, like those frosting flowers along the edges of cakes. I work my way forward, shooting out roses and ribbons of frosting, making progress so slowly it feels like I haven't made any progress at all.

So far, I've got a strip down the driveway, the sidewalk, and the apron at the end of the drive cleared. I'm wiped. This thing is kicking my ass. So I quit. I don't like to stop the snowblower -- it's designed to start in the winter and won't start again once it's been running -- but this job is just defeating me. I'm stripped down to my shirt and I'm still sweating. The machine will probably be cooled off before I am.

Inside, I drink coffee and watch the neighborhood kids build snowmen and throw snowballs. It's a snow day. Schools are closed. Hell, Wisconsin is closed. The whole place is just shut down. No buses, the highways aren't being cleared.

But the city snowplows are still working and I watch one turn down the street, it's blade rumbling louder than the thunder I may or may not have heard last night. It pushes past my place, dumping literally hundreds of pounds of frosting ribbons and flowers at the end of my recently cleared driveway.

Mother Nature is totally kicking my ass today.

So there you go. If you want to read some of my older posts, you're shit outta luck. Lucky for me there were only three...