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decaf snowfall
Saturday, February 15 2014
A light snow fell for most of the day, accumulating to an additional inch on top of the 20 or so already on the ground. It was enough of a snow day for Gretchen to propose a celebratory french press of coffee, though not enough that the coffee would contain caffeine. (Gretchen is into coffee mainly for its flavor, so an absence of caffeine is no problem for her. As for me, I actually enjoy good decaf too and usually forget, on some level at least, that it is decaf.)
The snow was enough to make travel difficult, at least for two-wheel-drive vehicles. But Gretchen needed some books from the Hurley library, so Ramona and I drove down there in the Subaru to retrieve them. I stopped at the Stewarts on the way back home to get some Mountain Brew Ice, and of course, as always, there was somebody in line in front of me buying a lottery ticket, in this case something called King's Ransom (which I later learned cost at minimum of $10). There are dozens of games with different sets of rules, but all that diversity conceals a single underlying certainty: they all, on average, extract money from the mathematically illiterate, and they probably all do so at very nearly the same rate (if not, then the one that pays the best, on average, should be the only one played).
My friend Mark was in town (staying, as always, with Ray and Nancy down in Old Hurley). But I had a messy bit of website debugging I needed to do, so I hoped he would stay away this afternoon. Since he has a two-wheel-drive car, I assumed the snow would hold him back. Just in case he did show up, though, I had those Mountain Brew Ices. As it happened, Mark eventually did materialize (as always, without calling beforehand), but I was deep in the midst of my web debugging at the time, and Gretchen turned him away with some made up story. Thoughtfully, though, Mark had brought me a six pack of Brew Free or Die IPA (the best IPA available at Stewarts), and he didn't even know that tomorrow is my birthday.
The weather slowed the delivery of mail. We hadn't gotten any at all, and when it finally came today it was after dark. Meanwhile, Georges (the guy who owns the farm at the end of the half-mile-long Farm Road) had shown up and parked his car an Dug Hill Road and then somehow trudged in through that snow. I'd seen Gretchen trying to walk just the length of the Farm Road from where a trail behind our house reaches it out to our mailbox on Dug Hill Road (that's maybe 200 feet), and it had taken her about three minutes.
Partly in an effort to soothe muscles made sore by shoveling snow, this evening I took a bath.
I'm sure I'm not the only person who occasionally drinks a beer in the bathtub. And I'm certain I'm not the only person who uses shampoo as shaving cream. But I might be the first person who, upon drinking a beer contaminated with shampoo, decided that it tasted like a sloe gin fizz. For those who don't know, a sloe gin fizz is an archaic alcoholic beverage that I've only heard mentioned by my mother.
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