Enough

It’s gotten so the day is not complete without an extended stay with that gateway to the netherworld known as my driveway. Apparently I’ve become too adept at clearing the damned thing because overnight the winter came up with a heretofore unused weapon from its arsenal. This diabolical weapon neutralized my greatest ally – the snow blower. We received our standard four inches of snow overnight but winter then threw in a couple hours of freezing rain followed by a few more hours of actual rain.

My Driveway

This resulted in a sloppy mess which the snow blower made a gallant but unsuccessful effort at moving but it was just too heavy for my redoubtable ally. I resorted to using the snow blower as a snow plow. I would get a running start and ram the snow which since it was sitting on a coating of ice and water would slide to the side. This worked for a little bit until the piles were too heavy for the machine to move. The rest of the job was old fashion elbow grease which I learned is a commodity not as quickly or generally available to a body rapidly closing in on its sixth decade. The town helped by plowing a huge pile of slush at the bottom of the hellish portal. A school bus then got stuck on the hill and no less than six different plows came by to re-create the pile each time I had moved it. Panama is looking incredibly good at this point.

Happy Cali-Daughter With Her New T-Shirt

WingMan is back in residence in Los Angeles and I know a certain daughter of mine is extremely pleased with that development. He was a celebrity guest DJ at an LA club last night where he was charged with playing Emo music. I’ve got to be completely honest with you – I had to look up what that meant. Here’s what I found:

Emo /ˈiːmo/ is a style of rock music characterized by expressive, often confessional, lyrics. It originated in the mid-1980s hardcore punk movement of Washington, D.C., where it was known as "emotional hardcore" or "emocore" and pioneered by bands such as Rites of Spring and Embrace.

I’m still confused but so glad WingMan is back on station.

WingMan Last Night

I was cleaning up the desktop on my work computer yesterday as I have a bad habit of throwing the project of the moment and assorted documents up there for ease of availability. This means the view gets kind of crowded after a couple months as the important icons are snowed under (that theme again!) by the myriad OBE documents. While doing this I discovered a picture from my son’s wedding to the ABFA and on a whim used it as the new background for my desktop.

The New Desktop Background
(from L)WingMan, Cali-Daughter, ABFA, Favorite Son, Tropical Wife

In a lonely winter where I really need serial morale boosts this turned out to be just the ticket. It brought back fond memories of that delightful day and I’m now constantly confronted with the faces of the people I cherish most in the world. As I look into each of them (ignoring the brute on the far right) I can’t help but smile and realize how blessed I am to be associated with such remarkable people. It’s also nice to remember there is green grass somewhere under all this white stuff.