What Happens When You Forget The Milk

Well, we weren’t going anywhere. Twenty inches of snow will do that to you. When we went to bed Friday night, the estimate from the local forecasters was eight to twelve. My math tells me they missed that by, oh, 100%. The funny thing is, you have to put your foot into it to really understand what this amount of snow is like, and I did. Early Saturday morning, Zeke the mutt got stuck in our back yard. Maybe this isn’t much of a concern for a healthy 3 year old Husky, but for a fourteen year old, twenty-six pound dog with arthritis, failing kidneys, and bad eyes and ears, this has the potential for catastrophe. Not realizing the scope of the snow fall, I stepped off the deck, in slippers, and went up to my knees, which meant the snow was up to Zeke’s spine. He went back to sleep, I made coffee.


Later that morning, there were two completely divergent views of this blizzard. The boys had the same look on their eyes as I do when I am walking into the poker room at the Mirage; that is “Man, there are hours of fun to be had here.” Or more accurately, “Man, which one of these dupes is going to take my money tonight!” I, on the other hand, stared out our dining room window and thought, “I hope to hell there are a lot of Advil upstairs because my back is going to be killing me.” I had the unique opportunity to shovel in layers, ten inches at a time. Of course there was no hurry. By the afternoon, the driveway was clear, but our cul-de-sac was not on the priority list for plowing, so unless I wanted to practice pulling in and out of our garage, we were still stranded.

Not having access to our vehicles and our stores and our daily dose of commerce, seemed crippling. It wasn’t being stuck at home; it was being denied access to our “lives.” I try my hardest to not go anywhere on the weekends, but take away my ability to decide to not go anywhere and I felt like I was on C-Block. We consume like we breathe, freely. Since we didn’t get to the grocery store, we actually “wondered” what we were going to do for dinner. Somehow, my wife “cobbled” together pesto chicken, cheesy rice and broccoli. We ate more from what was laying around and in the freezer than I am sure a billion people did yesterday. Process that for a minute. We were trying to save the milk in case we needed it for breakfast; some people woke up and wondered where they were going to get some water to drink.

Being snowed in sucked…actually, no it didn’t.