Snow days

The storm hit sometime this morning. Eor claimed it was afternoon here in East Bumfuck, but where I work (North Bumfuck, a half hour away), it was well started before lunch. In the weekly Thursday lunch meeting the site coordinator mentioned that they might shut the clinic down early. By the time they finally made the decision "early" turned out to mean 5pm, and since I normally leave at 4:30 anyway that was kind of useless. I really didn't want to drive in the snow in the dark, since I've only been driving for a couple of months. (Wow, I'm a driver... that still surprises me sometimes.) So after I'd finished today's filing for Medical Records I asked if I could go home an hour early. Which was good, because it ended up taking me an hour to get home, and it got dark soon after. Thirty-five miles and hour most of the way, stop-and-go on the highway (I thought the driving would be better there than on the smaller roads, but I can't prove that it really was), and I nearly got hit by a large pickup truck backing themselves out of a snowbank.

So I got home at least a half hour earlier than usual, which felt really cool, especially knowing that I don't have to go to sleep at my normal time, because I don't have to be in until 12:30 tomorrow.:) (For that priviledge, though, I have to work until noon on Saturday.) So I hung around switching between reading the book I got from the library the other day, and reading my favorite club on Yahoo. I've got "I Capture The Castle," - Dodie Smith. Really good, actually. Yes I am a bit amazed, because I generally prefer sci-fi and fantasy to 'reality' based stories. Although I thought the premis of this story was a bit far-fetched to begin with - an extremely poor family living in a dilapidated castle, the dad's a burnt out writer, the step-mom is a painter's model, and the whole thing is told as the journal of the younger sister - but it really drew me in and has been _hard_ to put down.

I did manage to get myself to go work on "picking on the stairs" (my sorry joke is to stand at the bottom and say "you're ugly and your momma dresses you funny). Eor for some reason decided he wanted to take all 5 layers of paint off and seal the very old wood with polyurethane. But the worn-out and rotted-out pits are so deep, and filled with paint. So I get to sit with a tool something like a dentist uses to scrape your teeth, and pop these little chunks of paint out. It's very contemplative work, and my finger-tips are getting calloused enough so I might think of taking up the guitar.

For some reason, though, I suddenly decided, almost an hour ago, that I had to go out to the barn and get more pellets for the stove. And while I was at it I just had to shovel the walk to the barn. I don't know if this was simple avoidance-of-work behavior or what... probably the former. But shovelling at night in a storm is really fun. With the falling snow and darkness all around, the area light from the barn doing it's job of only lighting the area, I felt almost like I was indoors. And it's so quiet. All I could hear was the flakes hitting my denim jacket; a tiney, brittle sound.

I'd better go put those pellets in the stove, though, and get back to the stairs. Or sleep.:)