Weather? Or Not. Oh, Definitely Weather.

While the UK and Ireland, as well as Washington DC, have been having levels of snow this year that surprise, baffle and maybe even sometimes terrify them, we in New England have been having what we call "a mild winter." This doesn't mean we're not getting any snow. We are. It just means we can handle it. You can tell it's a mild winter when all the teachers you know complain about not having enough snow days (and when, two days after their February vacation, they're still saying, "I hope we get a snow day this week"). The two weeks before that, it seemed like the meteorologists and school administrators were teaming up to rectify this snow-day-less situation, because twice they cancelled or delayed school in advance for what were supposed to be "major" snowstorms, but which ended up being something that could only be considered major in Alabama.

So this time, when people started saying, "It's going to snow all week," you know, you took notice, but you were a little skeptical. By which I mean I was. Plus it was supposed to start snowing yesterday morning. And it didn't. It's true that last night, by the time I was about to drive over to the Other Jenn's to watch LOST together, I decided what was coming out of the sky might not be that fun to drive in by 10 o'clock at night. (We ended up watching the show from our respective living rooms, with our facebook chats open so we could "chat" things to each other like, "I knew it!" or "Ewwwww!" or "Psycho Claire!" or "Jack just wrecked everything!" or "Maybe he was supposed to do that . . . " Come on, LOST fans. You know what I'm talking about.)

This morning, however, the warnings of a major snowstorm had proved to be true. It's not that I've never seen this much snow before, although there was a lot. It's that every single beauteous flake seems to weigh 16 fluid ounces or something, so when you try to shovel the stuff? Well, let's just say I'm going to wish that professional massage the Other Jenn bought for me for Christmas which I accidentally missed the other night, was scheduled for Friday. The snow is beautiful, though, don't you think?

I suspect I may head out to church/work later in the day, but I'm going to take my time getting out. Mark-the-Plow-Guy says that it took him half an hour to get up Dead Horse Hill (yes, it's called that) with his plow because of all the cars that had slid off the road. Can I just tell you how happy I am that I no longer have a job that requires me to leave my house before 4.30 a.m. to serve coffee to people who don't know how to make it at home . . . or to people who probably won't even come into the store that early that day because of how much it's snowing? Very. Very. Happy. (I did say a quick prayer for whomever it is that had to open today.) Meanwhile, I'm going to sit here in my nice warm house with my nice warm dog and listen to the church history lectures I'm behind on.

Photos: February 2010, taken by jennwith2ns.

The Flip Side

I think I have more than my fair share of amazing, supportive people in my life. Super-Roger and Wonder-Dawna are two of them. It would be tough to delineate all the ways these two have supported me, even before the cancer diagnosis. Mostly this fall, actually, they've loaned me one of their cars at key moments while my car has taken the time to have a series of irritating problems.

On Saturday, I pulled out of my driveway with some difficulty and realised that I was also driving down the road with more than the usual difficulty, so I turned around and went back home and discovered that my back left tyre was flat.

It did not escape me, as I wrestled with the jack, that I had been so proud of myself last year at learning to change a tyre. But, I thought a little bitterly, it's one thing to be able to change a tyre and something else to have to--apparently once a year, and always in the dead of winter. Brrr! Fortunately an out-for-a-walk neighbour stopped and helped me finish the job. (This is a bit remarkable in itself, as I don't live in a particularly friendly neighbourhood--nor, I regret to say, do I do anything to change this.)

I noted, as I drove to work on the doughnut, that I was having a lot more trouble driving with it than usual, and that things were still feeling very bumpy. My suspicions grew and grew until I got to Starbucks, got out of my car, walked around to the other side and discovered that yes! That back tyre was flat, too!

I was not in a very good mood as I began my shift. Nor through most of the rest of it.

On a break, I quickly called Super-Roger to see if I could borrow his car again for the weekend if I could get a ride back to my town. Then I called the Milk Guy to see if he would give me the ride.

In the end, what happened, though, was that both these men decided to try to come bail me out themselves. They arrived within minutes of each other (and about half an hour before I left work), such that the Milk Guy was already removing the back wheels from my car when Super-Roger got there. Together they took the wheels to a local tyre shop, convinced the employees to stay open long enough for them to get me two new tyres, returned to my car and reassembled it, reinflated my front tyres, and I was able to return home safely--and a lot quicker than I had made it to the city that morning . . .

I daresay all three of us could have done without my tyre problems. But . . . I like my friends to meet my friends, and sometimes you can't very well orchestrate these things. I don't know that Super-Roger and the Milk Guy would have met under other, more ordinary circumstances. But I'm glad that they did.

Don't Stress the Cancer-Girl

When I first met the Nurse Practitioner at the Comprehensive Breast Center, she sat me down and said, "You seem like the type of person who's always thinking of others first, so you need to shift gears a little bit. While you're working through this cancer diagnosis and treatment, you need to just work on taking care of yourself and getting better. This time is about you. You need to have as little stress as possible."

Too bad nobody told the New England climate and global warming that.

Right now I feel like somebody put an alarm clock inside my stomach--that old-fashioned kind that jumps around in cartoons when it rings--and that in a second it's going to go off, and I'm going to go flying around the room like an untied balloon and scream my head off like . . . me when I'm stressed and nobody but God is around to hear me. Right now, I'm so on-the-edge that I might do it even though other people besides God are around to hear me. It will not be pretty.

Yesterday some girl came into Starbucks and said glumly that her power was still out, and I said mine was too, and she said she heard that her neighbourhood wouldn't be up and running until after Christmas.

Christmas is next week, folks. The power went out last Thursday.

And my father and my brother and my sister-in-law and my baby niece and my grandmothers and my uncle will converge on my mother and me and our house, and if we don't have lights? Um, excuse me? This is not okay.

I'm staying in the city for the mid-part of this week, at Pastor Ron and Mrs. Donna's apartment with them, and it's a huge help, but I never seem to have everything I need with me in the same place at any given time, and for example I realised two hours ago that I did not bring enough changes of clothing for the number of days I'm going to be here, and I don't have internet at church, and I don't have church phone numbers at the apartment, and I have two magazine articles to write, and a confirmation class to organize and two youth group events to cancel and the Milk Guy's power came back and then surged and fried some of his appliances and even though that doesn't directly affect me, it kind of stresses me out, too.

I think National Grid should have consulted me. I'm glad they got Old Church street up and running so that Old Church could provide food for those of us less fortunate and so that the nursing home on the same power line would be able to keep running. Hear hear. But didn't anybody tell them that there's a cancer survivor on my street, who's starting radiation today? And if they didn't, why not?

Winter Wonderland

The snow began softly falling on schedule today at 1 p.m. I say softly, but there was sure a lot of it softly falling at once. My shift ended right around then, and so did Kiran's; he didn't have his car, so I offered to give him a ride home.

Here's the thing. This part of the world gets snow. Sometimes a lot of it. We scoff at Southerners who shut down entire cities when one flake of the stuff falls from the sky. But if the truth were known, we don't really handle it too well either. Here we have been hearing warnings about this snowstorm (and the one coming up later this weekend) for the last two or three days. So you would think that all these seasoned snow warriors would just hunker down wherever they were for a couple of hours and wait until a few plows had been through, and then head home after that. Leaving the roads clear so those of us who had already worked a full eight hours and had stuff to do in the afternoon could head home among the first couple of flakes. Er, snowdrifts.

But no. Instead, everyone completely freaked out (or took advantage of the situation) and left work/school/the gym early, so that probably the entire county (minus the four people who were still working at Starbucks) decided to converge on Park Ave and Main Street all at the same time.

It was nice having someone to talk to in the car for the first two hours. Unfortunately, I was on my own for the last three. I'm not going to go into the part about how when I finally got home, I had no place to park and got stuck in a drift twice and had to dig myself out both times--and then dig myself in, as it were. And how that was kind of upsetting. (Or at least, I was kind of upset.)

But I do have a theory about why "my people" up here are so silly about snow. This batch of snow really is quite beautiful. It's soft. It actually shovels pretty well, yet it's also not too bad for making snowballs. (The best part of the commute today was when a car-full of college students scraped some snow off their own car and pelted it at mine.) But here we all are--poor us--having spent our childhoods making snowmen and going sledding and having snowball fights in our ill-fitting snowpants. And then we grow up and suddenly all we have time for is shoveling and trying not to skid into somebody else's car on the way to work. It's a let-down. Snow wasn't meant to be so mundane, I don't think. It certainly wasn't meant to take five hours to go ten miles in it. I think we were all just supposed to stay home and enjoy it.

Winter

Announcement from the Little Room Weather Station: it is snowing. Snowing.

I have mixed feelings about this. For now, I feel that I should get ready for work in about two seconds and hie myself out of here while I can still make it up the driveway . . .

Crystal Ball

I don't actually wish I knew the future. But sometimes I think I wish I believed horoscopes were an okay decision-making tool. I'm probably inherently superstitious enough to believe one if I read it. Note: if you remember when my birthday is, this is not an invitation for you to read my horoscope for me and tell me what it says. I will be truly put out if you do. Truly.

But . . . this is why sometimes I wish I were okay with horoscopes:

How do you know when to take what's there, and when to wait for something better to come along? Particularly if there is a distinct "something better" in your sights, but you don't know if it's going to be offered to you?

You think I'm talking about dating, don't you?

Nope! I'm talking about jobs. On Thursday I interviewed with the SAT tutoring company. The guy who interviewed me looked like Matt Damon, which was a little unsettling, but apparently Matt Damon thinks I should work out just fine as a tutor. (I'm still not talking about dating. This Matt Damon, like the real one, is married.) The one thing he did keep going on about, though, was the fact that they "have very few students in [my] area." This did not surprise me at all, but given the fact that he told me this about six times, I am translating it as, "We currently have no students in your area." I said that was okay, but keeping in mind the price of petrol and the fact that apparently I am the type of person who might drive three hours on a flat tyre, I should possibly be having second thoughts about this.

In the meantime, just this week a friend of mine alerted me to an ESL tutoring position open at a local college. I applied there, too, and didn't hear anything back so, in the interest of decision-making, I sent the contact a little e-nudge this afternoon. Astonishingly, she wrote back at once--to tell me that they would hire when the semester is over, and that the job would start in January.

I don't know what the pay rate is for the ESL job. I do know the pay rate for the SAT job is pretty good, but I dare say my car will get half of it. Also, the SAT job requires signing a non-compete clause, believe it or not. On the other hand, that job has actually been offered to me. I have no idea if Ms. ESL is going to want to talk to me when the semester is over.

Thus the wish for some horoscopic guidance. Something like, "You will receive a tempting offer, but resist--something better is around the corner." Or, "The grass always looks greener on the other side of the fence, but don't take risks this month--hang on to what you have." (Wow. Maybe I should just write horoscopes for extra money.)

Since I'm not consulting horoscopes, however, I'm left with the prayer option, which usually at least feels less clear and more frustrating. (Horoscopes are, of course, deliberately vague, but they sound like they're telling you something, so you feel like you can make some sort of choice.) God is sovereign, but I'm not, and I have no idea what He wants me to be doing these days. He knows my financial needs, and it seems like it would make sense for Him to provide for me by providing another source of income. (Then again, I have discovered God often doesn't do what I think would make sense.) I've been casting about for such another source of income since the beginning of the summer, and this SAT tutoring programme is the first thing in all that time to have materialised. So do I accept it as His answer and provision? Or do I trust that He has something even better for me which requires a leap of faith to relinquish the certainty for the not-so-certain?

I'm left back at James 1.5-8, I suppose, asking for wisdom and trusting that, since he said it will be granted, it will be. In the meantime, maybe I'd better stop thinking about horoscopes. It might be considered "wavering." So yeah. Don't check my horoscope for me. But if you think of praying for me instead, I'd really appreciate it.

And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street

I don't know that there are any Mulberry Streets between here and my place of employment. But I keep seeing things that strike me as odd or funny in transit these days, and the name seems to be a good one for the Tales of the Daily Commute matrix.

Today, on said commute, I ended up spending part of it behind a Carvel ice cream truck. (Not the kind from which a vendor sells ice cream cones, but one which presumably transports their ice cream and ice cream cakes.) It was an appropriately cheery-looking truck, entirely plastered over with photos of ice cream cakes, decorated with various congratulatory sayings.

The most eye-catching one from my vantage point said, "Happy 1st Lost Tooth!"

I was first struck by the originality of this. If you can convince someone to buy a whole cake instead of putting a quarter under their kid's pillow, you're golden. But so might the teeth be after a while. I couldn't help but find something ironically sinister about the whole enterprise. This greeting was being displayed on an ice cream cake. Ice cream. Cake. It felt like the subtext should be, "You might as well celebrate now, because you'll be losing a lot more teeth if you keep eating cakes like this one!"

Just as long as no one tries to put the cake under a pillow . . .

Just Seen

Today I was driving home from work, down the street where Ex-Roommate-Sarah now resides, and I saw a young man sauntering down the road. The first thing I noticed about him was that he was not wearing a shirt. Note to guys everywhere:

I don't care how fit you are, how great you look or how hot it is outside. Being shirtless in public, unless you are at the beach or a public swimming pool, is Not Classy. I am not impressed. Nor, I might add, are several other women I know.

(I might not be very classy either. But please. Spare us.)

Here, however is the other thing I noted about him. He was wearing a license plate. Yes. As in, the thing that one affixes to the back of cars, the number of which one wishes one remembered when one's car is towed. The bottom of this license plate was somehow tucked into the back of the young man's Bermuda shorts, but the number was legible, presumably in case he violated traffic. Or perhaps if someone wanted to call "How's My Walking?" (there must be such a thing, right?) and let them know he was staying on the sidewalk.

I am having a hard time imagining this adornment could be comfortable. On the other hand, I also have a little trouble with the idea that someone coerced him to put a good-sized rectangular metal plate in the back of his pants.

I don't know. Anyone have any creative explanations as to the reasons for this particular fashion statement?

Also, for a totally unrelated but also humorous observation, please check out this article from the Onion.