A Foot o Frozen Stuff

After a couple of days of a couple or three inches, it cut loose today. I was tending fire to keep us warm, sleeping on the couch and rousing every once in a while to mate new wood with old glowth embers. On the 2 o'clock round, I saw snow falling. At four and a third hours, the back porch light revealed big sparkling flakes mounting quickly. Dawn seemed to come late, so dense was the snow, inching up past boot height. 


By then, the school district had admitted the inevitable. My job had pre-empted the snowfall, telling us to work from home, but I'd already decided to take the day off. Write technical reports or play? No choice at all.


And play I did, but not nearly so much as a certain first grade girl who: ate her weight in snow, buttressed a snow-fort, staked claims to untrodden quarters of the yard, explored the pick-up bed full of flakes, and made snow angels (though not in the same quantity as face-prints, mind you, and not quite to the same effect as the motion-deprived snow-crucifixes she also embedded in the deepening white stuff). Among other things. At one point, she menacingly wielded a plastic lettuce knife at her sister; I'd foolishly given it to them to sculpt snow with, feebly unable to predict her using a giant green plastic knife as a, uh, giant knife. 

Baboon, or Australopithecene? I care not, so long as he guards my abode with ferocity belying his lazy grin.

Me? I'm more of a hands-on worker of snow. It took me about an hour of surprisingly aerobic work to make this. Nestled in the winter-shadow of the south hedge, it's some sort of great ape. Cracker has this song, "Guarded by Monkeys," which rocks lyrical and guitarical mad genuisness, but monkeys are only good in troupes, being fairly insubstantial, even frail, one-on-one. So I opted with a single big-ass ape (ass not pictured). For scale, the pupils of it's eyes are bottle caps. Rumors have already made it back to me that a case of Winterhook is buried in this creature's medulla oblongata, but it ain't so. This will have to do for home defense as well as a stand-in until I can realize my life-ling dream of hanging out in snowy hot springs with Japanese monkeys.

Eventually, the snow petered out, leaving a foot or son on the ground. Miserly little ice pellets finished off the day, but too few to bring down the power grid (I hope). Just in case, the fire is still burning. 

Yes, I'm gonna say it: Grillin and Chillin.