It’s springtime in Wisconsin, and I’m not the first one to say it’s a season fraught with disappointment, nor the first one to say, “Fuck this, I’m moving to New Mexico.” In fact, I’d bet I don’t have anything to say about spring in Wisconsin that hasn’t been said a million times already, but I can’t help observing for the million-and-first time that it sucks.
We got enough snow this morning that I had to shovel the driveway and, in spite of being out of shape and just shy of my 62nd birthday I was able to clear away every bit of the heavy, wet snow, even the stuff that the snow plow shoved into the end of the driveway, without giving myself a heart attack, so I’ll just be kicking back on the sofa feeling smug about myself for the rest of the evening, thank you very much.
I thought I would have to fire up the snow blower for the first time in 2019 when I woke up in the morning of the very last day of that year to a fresh snowfall. My snow blower’s gasoline engine is reluctant to start after it’s been sitting unused all summer, so I dressed up in my warmest winter coat, knowing I could be out in the subfreezing weather for a while. As it turned out, I didn’t so much as lay a hand on my snow blower. There was less than a half-inch of snow on the driveway; if I had wheeled out the snow blower to remove that, it would have seemed to me at least like the most egregious misuse of a power tool imaginable. It was a preposterously simple matter to clear the driveway in just five minutes using the snow shovel. I wasn’t even winded when I finished. I probably could have used a push broom.
One of my neighbors, who owns one of the largest snow blowers I have ever seen, does not have the same reservations about how and when to use it that I had about mine. He’s one of those “I paid a lot of money for this power tool and I’m going to use it” kind of guys. His snow blower is taller than he is, and has a mouth wide enough to clear half his driveway in a single pass. After a heavy snowfall, witnessing it make short work of waist-high drifts of snow is an impressive sight to behold. Seeing him use it to clear a half-inch of snow is another thing entirely. I was at the end of my drive, clearing away the inch-high ridge of snow left behind by the city snow plow crew after they cleared our street, when I heard the roar of his snow blower coming to life. I stopped what I was doing and used my shovel as a prop to rest my arm on while I watched him follow his behemoth to the end of his driveway, maneuver it through a 180-degree turn, then follow it back up to his house, all the while wreathed by the faintest haze of snow thrown into the air as a thin, insubstantial whisp that blew apart in the breeze the moment it exited the chute off the top of his snow blower. He tried to make a bigger production of it by spending some extra time at the end of the driveway making sure he got all the snow left behind by the city plow, but it hardly took him five minutes to do the whole thing. I bet the engine on his snow blower didn’t even get warm.
Ordinarily I wouldn’t have even bothered to shovel so little snow off the driveway because I’m pretty lazy when it comes to yard work, to be frank. I should probably hire some of the more enterprising neighborhood teenagers to cut the grass and shovel the driveway, but as well as being lazy I’m also a skinflint, so to this day I still do my own mowing and shoveling and other yard work, but only when I feel I absolutely have to. Yesterday afternoon was one of those times. Our good friends, Becky and John, were coming over later in the afternoon to go out to dinner with us, then come back to our little red house to spend new year’s eve playing games, and I didn’t want them to have to trudge through even as little as a half-inch of snow, because who would do that to their good friends?
We had a very casual dinner at a popular local pizza parlor not far from our house. We figured we’d have a quick dinner there, then return to play games while we noshed on some snacky foods and finally toast the new year, not necessarily at midnight because none of us are spring chickens any more. We ended up spending a bit more time at the pizza parlor than we had planned, about three and a half hours! I can’t account for this. It’s normally a popular place but there didn’t seem to be any more customers than we usually saw; in fact, I spotted empty tables and stools at the bar from time to time, but the wait staff were obviously running their legs off. We didn’t even see our waitress until about fifteen minutes after we were seated when she paused briefly — and I mean very briefly — to apologize for then wait, then add she’d be back in just two more minutes before she dashed away again. She didn’t give us enough time to ask for water. And she wasn’t back in two minutes.
When she did come back, ten minutes later, she stayed only long enough to get our drinks order before rushing off again. We managed to slip in a request for some fried cheese curds, too, but just barely. She swooped in to dive-bomb the table with John’s beer minutes later, explaining his order was easiest to fill because it came in a bottle. Becky got her cocktail about five minutes later, while Barb’s sat at the end of the bar at least ten minutes, for some reason. I got my beer last, many more minutes after B’s cocktail was delivered. If I recall correctly, the cheese curds arrived after we all raised our glasses to toast the new year, but the waitress didn’t take our dinner order until we were burping contentedly after finishing off all of the cheese curds and had nearly made our way to the bottoms of all of our drinks.
So you get the idea: service was slow and the main courses didn’t arrive until well past the time we thought we’d be on our way home. We weren’t in a terribly big hurry, though, so it’s not like we felt like complaining about it, but damned if we wouldn’t make fun of it a little bit.
Back at our little red house, I popped open a bottle of bubbly, poured a glass for everyone and we shared a toast to the new year, again. Then we played a very silly card game that required us to shout out words and phrases that were improbable under any other circumstances that didn’t involve prosecco, and had a pretty good time doing it.
The thermometer says it isn’t any colder out now than it was when I left the house at eight-thirty. My butt, on the other hand, says it is. I want to believe the thermometer, but I have to live in the same set of clothes with my butt, so I believe it’s colder.
Actually, I believe it’s the same temperature but I know it feels colder now that the wind has picked up from being nearly dead calm when I left the house, to blowing briskly and mercilessly now. Also, I had to walk home through a headwind, and that’s always good for making the weather feel a lot cooler.
Speaking of a lot cooler, I had to peel out of my coat during yesterday’s walk; it was warm enough to walk the streets in my shirtsleeves, and a lot of other people were doing it, too. The day before that, it was colder than it is today. Winter in Wisconsin; if you don’t like the weather, wait a couple hours.
The building I work in is about two years old. Everybody tells me it must be so nice to work in a new building. Honestly, it’s not bad. There’s a kitchen on our floor now with modern refrigerators, two sinks, and a place to set up the coffee makers, and I have a window over my desk. So that’s nice. But the new building is just like the old building in one significant way: the heating sucks. You’d think modern technology would have come up with a way to heat a big building in the last fifty years or so, but no. It hasn’t. When the leaves turn and the winter winds begin to blow, everyone on our office starts dressing up in layers, and I’m not the only one who has a pair of gloves with the fingertips cut off so we can work our keyboards.
Then yesterday while I was drying my hands with a paper towel, I recalled how we used to hang damp paper towels over the thermostats at school to trick them into feeling colder than the already-chilly temps they were set at, and I wondered if that still worked. Guess what? It still does.
I learned from the radio news yesterday morning on the way to work that southern Wisconsin was under a winter storm warning until the next day and that our part of the state was forecast to get hit with six to ten inches of snow. It’s all anyone could talk about at work. Snow started falling in a fine mist at about nine o’clock and by twelve, people were bailing out early to beat the traffic jams that would inevitably snarl the city’s roads.
My boss gave us the option to get out early. B’s boss did, too, so we bailed out at about twelve-thirty and worked from home. Funny thing is, the snow pretty much stopped by the time we got home and there wasn’t any more snowfall until after dark. More snow apparently fell during the night because I had to fire up the snow blower to clear the driveway of about five, maybe six inches of snow, which is nothing to sniff at, but it wasn’t the snowmageddon everybody was apoplectic about.
We have somehow survived Part One of The Great Blizzard of 2016! But wait! There’s more! (That’s why they called it Part One, see.) More snow is on the way! No one will blame you if you cannibalize your spouse!
Seriously, we got two, maybe three inches last night, about the same as last weekend when another storm was coming in and everybody was talking like we were all staring into the heat death of the universe. Come on, people! We live in Wisconsin! Put on your hat & gloves and grab your shovel! We’ve done this only a couple thousand times before! I think we can get through the next one just fine.
Just for the record, yesterday we had the first SUPER MASSIVE SNOW STORM OF THE YEAR that everybody talked about as if it was the end of the world, and when we went out to our car at the end of the work day, it turned out there was maybe an inch or two of accumulation and some ice to scrape off the car. How is it that, every year, everybody forgets what winter was like? We live in Wisconsin! Snow is the default setting here!
I shoveled the driveway this morning, also for the first time this year, also just for the record. I didn’t really have to; our car could have easily driven right over it, but I was insomniac and figured, what the hell, I need some cardio anyway.
In other news …
“Let’s move to Wisconsin,” I said.
“You’ll love the seasons,” I said.
What a maroon. What a gully bull.
Among the things I will not be doing this morning is shoveling the driveway, even though I set my alarm clock to go bleepity-bleep-bleep a half-hour earlier than usual because the all-knowing National Weather Service said there was supposed to be somewhere between five and twelve inches of snow on the ground this morning. The driveway’s on the ground. So is our car. And when our car is separated from the driveway by twelve inches of snow, it doesn’t take us to work in the morning.
That’s why I gave myself an extra half-hour to shovel it all off this morning. It was a brilliant plan, except that, when I peered blearily out the window at the driveway this morning, there was no more snow on it or the rest of the ground than there was when I went to bed last night. Relieved, I went back to bed, reset my clock and burrowed into the bedcovers, where I laid for five blissful minutes until the cats began to dance on my head.
This Is Drivel 