Weather Update

The phone rings tonight shortly after dinner:  my office is opening two hours or so later than usual.  During that call, another call beeps in so I quickly hang up with Nikki to allow the other call to come through: it's Miss Jennifer, Thea's English teacher, school is closed tomorrow (and Miss Jennifer and family are without power over in Pennsylvania, making any whining about no TV on Facebook seem obnoxious).  Then not more than ten seconds after I put the phone back on the cradle from that call, it's Miss Margie from Micah's school, which is also throwing in the towel for Thursday.

Not exactly earth-shattering news, though if we're getting plowed out as off the beaten path as we are, the roads that lead to our area must also be getting clearer.

The big news is that the snowplow came through the neighborhood, leaving us with a three to four foot high icy hump at the end of the driveway.  This was always the dreaded consequence of getting our street plowed when we lived outside of Chicago.  The driveway and sidewalk would finally be shoveled and the damn plow would come through dumping a foot or more of icy, lumpy sludge at the bottom of the driveway, effectively blocking the cars in.

At around 9 pm, I went into the bedroom at the front of the house and heard the sound of something like a snowblower; it was a Bobcat clearing out the neighbor's driveway.  Steve was quickly re-purposed from reading Micah a bedtime story to person ready to recruit that Bobcat by whatever means necessary to clear the bottom of our driveway.  But emptying the contents of his wallet didn't even come into play, the Bobcat was part of the community's snow clearing efforts.

Not that I take back any of my numerous gripes about our townhouse community and those in charge of it, but I do have a slightly warmer and fuzzier feeling toward them for a few brief seconds - or perhaps it's just the management company for the community.  The Bobcat;s help clearing the driveways of the walls of snow created by the plow was a first, at least in the nine years I've lived here.