Didn't think I'd live to see the day, or My Future Career as an Old-School Ski Pants Model

I don't think I'd been this excited about the announcement of a snow day since I was in high school. Scratch that - since college, wherein my friend Sam and I would become several degrees beyond ecstatic, prompting incoherent speech and seizures. Kid you not.

At the witching hour this morning - 5:37 - the phone that lay in bed beside me (I'd be lying if I said I wasn't anticipating such a call) rang. On the other end, the voice of an angel, in the guise of Dana Mitchell, greeted me: Good morhning, Heathah. We're gonna call this one off today.
Sweet deal! click. At Beatrice Rafferty School this year we haven't had what you'd call a barrage of cancellations due to foul weather, despite some pretty foul weather, and not even by my Maryland standards (by no barrage, I mean zero).
Normally I would've chucked the phone and resumed my sweet slumber, but the storyline of the aborted dream was going down a bad road: some truckstop shenanigans involving a good ol' boy trying to pick up my old friend, Elaine, at a lunch counter. Wasn't interested in seeing where that led, so the call was fortuitous in a multitude of ways. To top it off, I stayed up and got a jumpstart on my snowday, resolving to milk this for all it's worth.The view of US Route 1 outside my living room window. Lookin' good. The drifts out front are now taller than me.

Since I've been up for 4 1/2 hours already, I'm having a second breakfast, or mid-morning snack, of leftover Brussels sprouts. Not as good two days afterwards, but still nourishing to the point where I can physically sense the good they're doing. I'd worked up an appetite pushing open my storm door (which budged just enough to let me squeeze myself through to the other side), kicking about eighteen inches of snow off my sixteen steps, trudging through the - at times - knee-deep drifts around the perimeter of my building in search of a shovel that never presented itself, and carving out a narrow path to the dumpster so I could dispose of garbage. I'm thinking of walking the two miles down to the Mobil station to purchase another shovel so I can get myself out of here.My lot in life - no snow shovel.

On the up-side of this, it's given me an excuse to break out my mother's old bib overalls from circa 1978. She handed them down to me when I was in college, and I didn't think they'd still fit but, low and behold, they do. I'm just sorry I'd let them sit in my closet all this time. They're made by Saska Skiwear, a navy poly-cotton blend, made in Hong Kong. These are the things to which people are usually referring when they say stuff like, "Cute as a button," and I have a real affinity for just those things. And buttons. Really, though, if anyone has a pair of these kicking around gathering dust, I just ask that you send 'em my way (just put my name and address it to Easternmost Maine and it'll find me).
But oh! Behold! Are these not spectacular?
This little number is, without a doubt, the most flattering article I've sported in a long time. Look out.

Anyway, it ended up that I struck out to the Mobil station on my x-country skis. The conditions couldn't've been a whole lot worse; the snow was far too deep to support me, so I stuck to the shoulder where there was about an inch of slush. I would've fared much better had I walked. A friend of mine had kindly offered to come and drive me to get a shovel, dismissing my skiing excursion as a terrible idea: "No. No, no, no. You're going to ski back home with a shovel? How's that gonna work?" Fair enough. I let her come get me at the Mobil station which, incidentally, was out of shovels (similar availabilities at the Irving station and Curtis', the hardware store and garage). We ran into a fellow music teacher who apparently, when not puttering around in his VW Rabbit, drives a truck with a plow, and we were able to convince him to swing by my place and plow out my car (which got me thinking about a local coalition: Music Teachers for Snow-Free Driveways - no clever acronym, though).

I got out the car with no incident. Now I'm just trying to remember where I left my camera...