Freezerdoodle

It’s snowing again.

Never…in the history of winters….has it been so crappily snowy, icy and downright treacherous.

And never…in the history of meteorologists….have they been so freakin’ wrong.

They’re like 0 for 5…or batting a .240 average….or, whatever translates to really bad. I’d fire ‘em all in a New York minute.

Last night, they’d predicted a dusting to fall overnight….two inches, tops. We awoke to a light and delicate snow this morning and I remember thinking, “Normal Rockwell painting” when I looked out the window.

Yes, I know. Hell must’ve frozen over…or pigs must be flying ("Hey, Jen!!") ‘cause you just heard me say something nice about the snow. Don’t get used to it. I only said it ‘cause it was supposed to be stopping…and the roads were virtually un-snowed-upon. I figured we were golden.

I was wrong.

The school buses arrived….da boys grumblingly boarded said buses and I sat down to write.

When it’s sans sun outside, I often do not bother to open the drapes in my master bedroom-slash-office, for it does a better job of keeping the warm air in and the cold air out.

Imagine my surprise when I clicked on our local Metro Traffic & Weather and saw the red crawling ticker across the bottom of the screen, depicting a Winter Storm Warning. I then realized that they’d changed the snow accumulation totals….from a dusting-2 inches…to a whopping 8-10 inches. Then it said, “Our bad. Love, Jeff and the gang”

I parted the curtain then….and what did I see? First, I saw this:

…and then I saw this:

…and then I said, “Shit, shit, SHIT!” and I grabbed my bag and ran to the car because I had no milk, no eggs…and no bread.

DON’T EVEN ask me why….’cause I can’t hear you…and I would probably ignore you even if I could.

I hit the closest market and performed a flawless product-grabbing fly-by…as I raced up and down 3 or 4 aisles…then I got the hell out of there. There was enough un-plowed snow in the parking lot that it left my biceps of steel burning from the strain of pushing that cart.

(Author’s note: I can’t even bring myself to type the word “snow” again, so for the remainder of this piece, we shall refer to it as “freezerdoodle”. Please do not adjust your monitors.)

I swerved and slid on the freezerdoodle the whole way home. Nothing was plowed or sanded…and as hard as I tried to will a freezerdoodle-truck to appear,

…I saw not a one.

I made it halfway up the drive. Then I got stuck....tires spinning helplessly. Here’s where it gets interesting. Are ya listening?

The garage door was already open…awaiting my usual careen into said garage. The plan was to jump out, grab the shovel, remove freezerdoodle from behind all 4 tires, throw down some sand/salt and proceed with the careen. Easy peasy…right? I put the car in park and took my foot off the brake.

The car began sliding backwards….so, I jammed my foot on the brake again. We stopped. WTF? It took….I wanna say, a good ten seconds for this to fully hit me.

I pulled up on the emergency brake and it seemed to be holding. To play it safe, I unlocked all four doors and left the driver’s door wide open…whilst I raced for the shovel. Freezerdoodle cleared, I ran back for a pail of rock salt. As I’m teetering back towards the car, I see the car starting to slowly slide backward again and I scream, “NOOOOOOOOO!” and I slip and skate and dive into the driver’s seat…jamming my foot on the brake and mentally patting myself on the back for having the foresight to leave the door wide open.

From this point…not knowing what else to do, I had to contort my body to lean out of the car to reach the now-overturned pail of rock salt to then haphazardly fling it under the car with my bare hands in hopes that some of it landed in the general vicinity of the tires.

I then threw the pail into the snow bank, threw the car in drive and after a little New York rocking and rolling, I DID ultimately careen into the garage.

My hair, however….did not fare as well.