Thwarted Reaping

So a planned adventure north to my hometown to reap some of the benefits of the heavy reconnaissance conducted during my November birthday pub crawl was thwarted by Mother Nature yesterday.  My wife and I planned on driving up there for some tax free shopping (her) while I reaped benefits.  Unfortunately the first major winter storm decided to accelerate its arrival into the early afternoon. 

Just Prior to the Storm

 I had zero confidence in my ability to extract my wife from a shopping frenzy in a timely manner and then subject the both of us to her driving 70 miles on snow covered roads.  My ability to drive would have been severely restricted due to the reaping process. We also missed out on a planned lunch with the Keene Friend who we see entirely too little of recently.

Just Before Dark - Not Much On Ground After Whole Afternoon of Snow

After battening down the hatches at home I settled into Couch Potato Position #1 for the entire storm.  I kind of like watching a snow storm in my family room because it has windows on three sides so it’s a little like being inside a snow globe.  It snowed all afternoon with very little accumulation while I contented myself with watching the Navy hand the Army its ass in football for the 13^th straight year.

10" of Snow Overnight

Although I didn’t attend West Point and my Cantankerous Friend did not attend Annapolis I’m sure I will be targeted with some snide comments over the next few days.  He used to be stationed in Philadelphia while I was at the Pentagon and I would drive up there each year to watch the game with him.  The parties were always better when the Navy won.

The Snow Facing my New Toy This Morning

My wife had trouble settling down from the Christmas Party Friday night and was up at 4am cleaning the house and wrapping Christmas presents.  She crashed and burned around 9am.  This pretty much freed me up from taskings for the entire afternoon.  I can’t remember when I last had a whole Saturday afternoon with nothing to do; I didn’t like it (entirely too geared up for a reaping session).

Driveway Cleared This Morning

My wife eventually emerged and we took in a couple movies to kill the snow covered evening.  We watched the documentary Black Fish which my daughter had recently recommended.  It was fascinating and something anyone ever considering a visit to Sea World should see.  It starts out with the death of a Sea World trainer which is eventually blamed on a rogue whale who accidently killed his trainer.  The truth is startlingly different.

See This Before Patronizing Sea World

Like most of the uninformed public I was always under the well publicized impression that the sea world trainers of killer whales were highly trained biologists.  A series of former trainers reveal the dangers and the lies told to the public. Black Fish totally exposes the hypocrisy of these tourist meccas and criminal level torture of the magnificently intelligent orcas.  I now understand all the protests I’ve been seeing.

I’m late publishing today because I spent the morning out with my new favorite toy.  The snow blower worked like a charm and the 10 inches of snow we received overnight was removed without too much effort.  I was worried it would be too heavy because the storm ended with about a half inch of rain on top of the snow which made it really heavy.  I don’t miss the tractor mounted version, at all (no more crawling underneath to fix the auger belt every five minutes!).  I did end up with an almost constant cloud of snow circling around my head (nothing a cup of hot chocolate didn’t cure).

Snow Moved - Time for Hot Choclate