Petunia rambles on and on….

This morning, I was standing at my kitchen sink, finishing the last of the coffee in my cup and looking out the window. Ahead of me, my last day to work – oh, I’ll have to come in next week, just to sit by, in an on-call sort of way, in case there’s a problem, a failure, some piece of equipment overheats, whatever technical issue might come up that would cause a default of everything back to us.  Clearly, THEY feel this is being overly precautionary, unnecessary in fact. They assume that all will go well amd we won’t need to do anything except watch the clock and kill time.

And then I saw my first robin of the season, hopping about, bouncy and hopeful. I was a bit envious of his obvious delight in damp grass (the promise of a worm being a perfect start to his day, if not mine!) and the prospect of sunshine. Would that I could be so joyous over so little.

But maybe it’s a sign that more may change than just the seasons. Maybe…

Survived the blizzards. Got the heat back on.  A great deal of no fun all the way around.

Just two days ago, it started again. Snow. All we do now is just hunker down in a corner and cringe.  And whimper.

And this is the mountain of snow that I see when I look out my front window. If I got down in the snow at the base and with the right lens, I bet I could make it look like Mt. Everest.

I should have gotten more household chores done while I was snowed in the house and out of work.  I had the time. They didn’t get done.

I did knit, though.  Made up the Diagonal Lace Socks from Wendy Johnson’s “Socks from the Toes Up.” Used KnitPicks Essential in Mermaid and did them on a Magic Loop with sz 2 needles.

That black fluff at the top of the picture is not an old dirty mop, even if the resemblance is similar.  It’s the poor overgrown fancy-dame poodle, Sophie, who used to go to the Poodle Spa regularly for her grooming appointments far  more often than I went to the hairdresser. When word came down about my impending job loss, I figured this was one expense where I could cut back and save money. Usually the poor dog went to the groomers right before Christmas, assuring that she’d look pretty for the holidays and freeze her skinny butt through all of January and February.  She didn’t go for the elegant holiday ‘do and now looks like this:

Looks much like a bag of black, dirty rags, doesn’t she? But she probably is a lot warmer when she goes out to “decorate” the snow. With all the cold and wind and snow and sleet we’ve had this year, an abnormally ugly winter so far, I bet she’s glad she’s had all those sweaters left on.

And I made Pop a new warm wooly hat – last year’s hat, a stranded one, was fine for one of our normal winters here. Clearly, this one hasn’t been normal and that hat just wasn’t enough. His new one is warm enough to wear on a trip to the South Pole if he ever wants to go.

Three weeks left to work until shutdown.

It started late Friday afternoon, before I left work. And it just kept coming and coming. The never-ending story.

Not too long after dark, my car looked like this.

Sticking on the car. Sticking on the road. Not such a big deal yet. But this is only about 2 hours into it.

And it kept coming down. All night. All day Saturday.

And then my car looked like this:

That’s a red car there!

This is both our vehicles, my red Escape and his pick-up behind it. We thought of just leaving them there and moving to Fort Lauderdale. Sounded easier to pack our shit up than shovel all that.

Here’s something I never saw before. Snow so wet that it stuck to the sides of the house.

That makes it so much more fun to shovel when it’s that wet.

And all the snow on the roof apparently clogged our furnace’s Air Intake Pipe on the top of the roof (who knew about this?  all these years in this house, all the times it’s snowed, we never had a problem) So when the pipe gets clogged, it shuts down the furnace, which is a very good safety feature, as it prevents you from quickly dying of Carbon Monoxide poisoning, and instead allows you to slowly freeze to death. Hmmm……

And daughter is finally landed safely in Dulles, although her car is snowed in over at BWI. She’s had 3 sets of return flights from New Orleans cancelled, including ones later tonight. She took one into Dulles, desparate to get nearer to home!

The storm that’s supposed to start tonight and go through all day tomorrow may dump another 16 inches on us. There’s nowhere to plow snow TO as the sides of the roads are mounded with snow mountains solid as granite.

If I make reservations for that flight to Florida, at least Kate knows the way to all the airports now.