Snow Days

Winter has hit Chez Szondy with a vengeance–actually, it's more like a foot and a half of vengeance with about 15 degrees of frost and roads that aren't passable by anything that doesn't have four-wheel drive and chains. It's the sort of thing that we've anticipated and having laid in enough wood and supplies (booze) to last until the next thaw the whole thing is less of a hardship than an adventure.

At least, that's what it should have been, except my wife's company has decided to complete a massive wadge of work before Christmas and she felt duty bound to try to make it there on Saturday. That's simple enough to say, but in practice that meant spending Friday shoveling a hundred-foot stretch of road, pushing the Hunmobile backwards inch by icy inch along it to the main road, bundling wife & child into the machine, pushing it to a start, and then leaping into the passenger's seat while the car was rolling along at five miles per hour. Then it was literally tobogganning down the mountain, a nail-biting ride into Monroe to buy tyre chains, running around in said chains (I'm leaving out the dirty, miserable, painfully cold job of puttin them on) in search of petrol in a town that hasn't seen a fuel tanker get through in a week, and then back home where we threw the chains (twice) on the steepest, slushiest and most appalling stretch of road on the mountain and ended up stuck at the bottom of the hill in the gathering twilight. I then started to walk alone up the mile and a half home to collect a sled so I could walk back down and then haul the family back up in the dark.

Man-hauling; where did I see that before? Ah, yes. Scott of the Antarctic. They all died in that one, didn't they?

Fortunately, one of our neighbours came by in his Jeep and saved us all from the Adventure at the cost of little more than an unsolicited loaf of pumpkin cake.

The outcome: The Hunmobile is now stuck down the bottom of the road, the wife has given up on the idea of bullying into work in favour of remote Internet access and teleconferences, which is a good thing since with another storm breaking today she'd have been stuck forty miles away until Christmas at least, and I've made her promise to believe me whenever I tell her that the roads are impassable.

Now the question is whether I'll be able to post this. The weather has all but knocked out our satellite feeds, so this is a bit like posting an electronic note in a cyberbottle.

Or something.