Luca Lunedi

Dude is still out injured, but we miss him, don't we?  Here's an old one from last summer.  

Starting from 12:00 and going clockwise, that's Daniele Bonera, Sleepy, JoeBeppe, Monty, and Dogfish.  Loooca's in the center, looking confused and asking a question of Monty.  Monty actually has an education, so it's possible Loooca got a response that made sense. 

Now that's over, it's time for Random Monday!  Queue up der list-macher.

1. 
   
   It's raining, but there is still well over a foot of snow in the yard.   I think all my shrubs are crushed/dead, but I can see them under the snow, so I'm pretending everything is fine.
2. 
   
   I know many of you believe that workin' for Uncle Sam is all roses and sunshine and coffee breaks, but sometimes, like now, I get to do something legally correct but personally distasteful.  I have been working on it FOREVER, and I've been working hard, too, on a roll like I haven't seen in a very long time.  My ass has been in this chair for ten hours today.  Did I finish?  No.  Hooray.  I get to work on it again tomorrow.
3. 
   
   Bossboy is retiring.  His last day is Thursday.  Weirdly, the thought of him being gone has led to a new feeling of competence.  I actually know how to do my job!  I don't need Bossboy to protect me.  I'm going to be just fine.  If you had asked me last month, I would have predicted that I would spend this week and the month of March in the fetal position.  Go figure.
4. 
   
   I loathe how broadcasters lurve to tell you the results in other matches, matches you were saving to watch later, but now the suspense is ruined.  ESPN360dotcom did that to me today, ruining a Juve game for me.  Have they never heard of the DVR?  Do they not understand that maybe we want to watch?
5. 
   
   I am trying very hard to enjoy the Olympics.  Really I am.  I am enjoying the curling, which is on for several hours a day on CNBC.  I would like to enjoy some Nordic skiing and some speed skating, but that is apparently not allowed.  "They" seem to think that all we want to see is XTreme events, two star US alpine skiers, Shani Davis, and promos for NBC shows and for movies belonging to one of the NBC companies.  I think, but am not entirely sure, that athletes from other countries are competing, and I surmise that some of them are kinda good.
6. 
   
   We watch very little commercial TV, except the soccer channels, and what we do watch, we see on DVR so we skip all the commercials.  We are seeing commercials for the first time in a long time during the Olympics.  They're horrible!  An alien landing here would think from our commercials that Bud is a tasty beer, Walmart is a worker-friendly company bringing goodness and light to everyone, and life without a smart phone is not worth living.  How do you people cope?
7. 
   
   Here are the commercials we see:
• 
  
  Bosley hair treatment.  (They all look better in the before pictures when they were bald)
• 
  
  Some credit counseling/debt-reduction service that looks like a news report
• 
  
  That guy standing in front of a urinal.  My Spanish is terrible, but I surmise that he is selling some sort of prostate thing.
• 
  
  Magical extermination devices ("Ratas!  Ratones!  Y Cucarachas!")
• 
  
  Proactiv skin care treatments featuring celebrity chicas I have never heard of (they all look better in the after pictures when the acne is gone).  The dermatologist chill-in-chief doesn;t do this for the money, you know.  She does it because she was once an acne victim (o!  the humanity!) and she wants to help the world so it doesn't have to suffer.
• 
  
  Some home improvement buying club ("The savings are significant!")
• 
  
  Edward James Olmos doing Farmers Insurance ads in espanol.
• 
  
  Occasional promos for two other shows.  My favorite is the spanish-language football discussion group, which apparently consists of five pudgy middle-aged guys in suits, and one young buxom brunette lady in a low-cut blue sequined mini-dress.
8. 
   
   These low-budget babies are terrible, but they are, some of them anyway, refreshingly honest.  Five guys in suits and one beauty with big boobs?  You pretty much know what you are going to get.  Magic extermination?  If you fall for it, that's on you.  But if you drink a Bud expecting a transcendent experience, you will be sorely disappointed.
9. 
   
   I have renewed my contempt for judged sports.  Why do we need style points for ski jumping?  How about longest jump wins?  What's wrong with that?  I have also renewed my contempt for sports that are all about the equipment (bobsled) or are pretty much about going for a ride (bobsled, luge, skeleton). 
10. 
    
    More contempt:  That Russian figure skater who won the silver medal saying "It's a sport, not a show" while wearing his sparkly costume.
11. 
    
    And more contempt:  The Washington Post reporting that American skiers have lived up to the hype.  As if they had nothing to do with creating the hype in the first place.
12. 
    
    Oh dear.  I'm getting myself all worked up.  Let's see.  Happy thought.  Happy thought.  Hmmm.  This is hard.
13. 
    
    OK, how about this.  The Man, who has only recently mastered the social custom of saying "your hair looks nice" to someone who has just had her hair done, remembers exactly what the roses I carried at my wedding looked like, and he always tried to get roses just like them when he buys me roses.  Awwwwwwww.
14. 
    
    And, to wrap things up, you know I can't end a list with 13. 

~Fin~

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She's Such a Sap

Ima sitting here working (am too!  Do the words Wilkey-Marzin mean anything to you?  What about F.3d?)  and I've got my IPod doing a random sweep through my songs and so forth, and I musta loaded a Peter Paul and Mary album or something.


OK.  I did load a Peter Paul and Mary album.  I like them.  I like their earnest 60s hippie liberal thing and their Woody Guthrie covers and their pinko peacenik anti-war anthems and their singalongs with kids (especially the zoo one).  And even when I looked it up and confirmed that they were singing about the Bell of FREE-DOM and not FREE-LOVE (duh), it did not diminish my admiration.  I don't care if they are not very popular.  I did it.  I did it on purpose.

So anyhoo, what should come up on the rotation but "Puff The Magic Dragon."  And I started bawling.  Poor Puff!  Abandoned by Jackie Paper!  No longer going to play along the Cherry Lane!  Slowly slipped inside his cave!  *sob*  I'm going to have to take a break to compose myself.

this post compelled by Clarabelle and fueled by hypoglycemia 

Aftermath

So yesterday we had snow again.  Only a little, and it didn't stick.  I still have a ton of scary ice, but the plan for the day is to go outside in the daylight and see if there is a safe way for me to get to the street, so I can get to the yarn store   work.

Here is the final set of snowscapes after the last of the big ones on Wednesday:

The yard.  The schip laurels along the neighbor's fence and the retaining wall are completely covered.

The deck.  Maybe you can get a sense of how windy it was during the last one by the waviness of the surface.   The snow is all the way to the top of the retaining wall behind the chairs.   Most of The Man's compulsive snow shoveling was for naught.  However, he has now finished and was able to liberate the garbage cans from the garage, which means we got our trash picked up for the first time in a month.  You have no idea how much poop two dogs can make in a month.  Thank goodness it was all frozen and much less fragrant than it could have been.

More evidence of wind.  I've never seen icicles that bend like that, but I'm sure Anonymous, The Science Guy, will clue me in on the physics when he gets around to it.

Those are some pretty scary icicles, but so far they haven't resulted in a leak.

These ones did.  The painters/gutter guys neglected a bit of caulking this fall, and water came in and started dribbling out of an electrical outlet.  It's temporarily fixed now, and we can get it caulked for real if it ever dries out and warms up.



The predominant mood of the manonthestreet seems to be that snow sucks and traffic is horrible and why can't anyone do anything about it and when are the schools going to open again and sure glad spring is coming.  I don't care.  I still like it, even though it appears that those expensive schip laurels are going to have to be replaced.  It's pretty, idyllic, and romantic.  I hope it snows like this every winter, but history says we won't get another real snowfall for another seven years.

Snow, snow! Hee hee!

The snow continues.  It started on Friday, and when we woke up on Saturday morning, it looked like this: 

Those schip laurels are taking quite a beating.  And the deck:

It didn't stop snowing until after dark on Saturday, so it looked like this on Sunday morning. 

All told, we ended up with somewhere north of eighteen inches.  The first snow plow came through on Monday.  I'm not complaining, mind you.  I live in a good-government county responsive to its citizens and with a good snow-removal track record.  (All you anti-tax folks griping about how the snow plows haven't visited your street yet, take notice.)  If they couldn't get to our street, which is the best and safest way to the elementary school, and therefore a priority road, then they couldn't.  Yesterday, we managed to go out for a few provisions, and then we got the car good and stuck in front of the house trying to park it when we got back.  The Man decided to shovel a path across the deck to an emergency back-up dog potty area, which left us with a deck looking like this:

And then, around four in the afternoon, it started snowing again.  This morning, the yard looks like this:

And the deck:

No, they aren't blurry.  The snow is coming down hard and it's windy, therefore:  blizzard.  Maybe not by Manitoban standards, but for Our Nation's Capital, it's a blizzard.  I don't expect we'll be dug out until maybe Friday, and the anti-tax non-good-government people in the neighboring jurisdiction may well be stuck until Saturday or Sunday.

How have we been coping?  I can't speak for The Man as I've hardly seen him since Thursday last week.   He has been shoveling snow full-time and otherwise worrying about whether the weight of the snow will collapse the roof, rip branches off trees, kill all our shrubbery, etc.

Yarn Bandit has been finding the snuggliest spot in whatever room I happen to occupy.

 

His joints are a little creaky, so we've gotten out the doggy staircase for him.  Kirby has been watching the snow fall and licking his paws like crazy whenever we liberate him from the donut.

I've been making fires and meatballs and socks and tomato soup (I'll never go back to the canned stuff) and shawls and lasanga and baby blankets and grilled fontina sandwiches and World Cup Scarves and carmelized onion and gorgonzola dolce pizzas and lace and so forth.  There has been wine and naps and footie (we lost the footie channel AND ONLY THE FOOTIE CHANNEL for about 12 hours on Saturday, but it came back as mysteriously as it disappeared, so we've been catching all the games we missed on the replays) and I caught up with the laundry and exercised a lot and paid the bills on time, and last night TBS reran the classic "Booze Cruise" episode of "The Office," which The Man had never seen.  We had mail and the paper yesterday, but otherwise not since Friday, but the mailman brought me new yarn yesterday. 

Seriously, this has been the vacation I desperately needed but couldn't afford to take.  It's beautiful and glorious and it makes us all abandon the ratrace for a little while.  Cain't do nuthin about it so's why not sit back and enjoy it?

this post fueled by blissful contentment

Snow. Hee!

We are at the beginning of what is likely to be a record-breaking snowfall.  They are predicting anywhere between 18-36 inches, with blizzard-like winds tonight and tomorrow.

Here's the grounds at Chez Nous at about 11:00 this morning, about 30 minutes or so after the snow started.  We had snow last weekend and more snow Tuesday night, so there are a few inches already on the ground.

And the deck......

And the dog potty.....

And here's the deck at about 1:00 this afternoon:

And the yard (see how it's just starting to stick to the plants)......

And here's the yard at about 4:00:

It's coming down in earnest now, but we don't care.   The cupboard is stocked, the firewood is stacked, there are fresh sheets on the bed and fresh towels on the rack, our new furnace works, our three-year-old roof is unlikely to collapse,  and the Merseyside Derby is being broadcast in lovely HD tomorrow morning.


And La Viola play the Romanistas.


And so many Bianconeri are broken, new coach DeadToMe has no choice but to start ADP, who has two league goals and two Coppa goals after not playing until January.  And Gio will be there too, and he's the only defender on the squadra who cannot be blamed for any of the recent fail.

And since I have to eat more protein and less starch, I have decided to make meatballs, which I can only be arsed to do about twice a year.  Usually I prefer

 Spaghetti and meatballs,

but now I'll be having

 spaghetti and Meatballs.

And I'm going to sack up and give Taleggio a try and snuggle up with beagles and yarn.  The Man will be too busy shoveling paths to the dog potty and becoming one with the Merseyside Darby to engage in any snuggling.