THE STATE OF THINGS

It snowed all day on Sunday. All. Day. Monday morning, we awoke to blue skies and blinding sunlight. The snow is taller than Josephine and when she finally jumped off the top step to go outside, she had to tunnel her way to her favorite potty spot. Now, if she goes out it’s because she’s desperate. She comes back in covered in snow with balls of it clumping to her legs. She stands stock still and expresses the tiniest saddest whimper while I grab a towel. At ten o’clock this morning, I finally bundled up and cleared a path at the backdoor to make Josephine’s life a little easier. While I was up and bundled, I started tackling the front steps and path. I shoveled a path from our steps to about half way down the drive when I paused and thought there had to be a better way to do this.

We do have a snowblower.

And that’s where Michael found me, in the garage untangling a power cord and wrestling the snowblower out of the garage. Now I’ve never used the snowblower before, but I figured it had to be better than a shovel. So today I learned that the snowblower is only slightly better than a shovel when there’s almost fifteen inches of snow on the ground. Michael and I spent the next two hours clearing the end of our driveway and unburying my car so I can go to work tomorrow. We are still uncertain if Michael will be going to work tomorrow. If school is not cancelled again tomorrow, we’ll need to go back out and unearth his truck and then swap cars in the drive. My toes finally have feeling again, so I’m hoping they cancel school because I do not want to go back out there.

Okay January. I see you. You are coming in cold and furious. This is the most snow Kansas City has seen since 1993 or something like that. That means we are starting the year overachieving. I mean, I feel like I accomplished a lot this weekend. I made a decent loaf of bread, wiped down everything in the house with Clorox wipes, wrote up a class for a couples yoga class I’m offering up in February and while I only did six sun salutations on Saturday, that’s still six more than what I did last Saturday. I have several out of state family and friends who have messaged me about the weather and asking if we were okay and I can honestly say that we are. We have electricity and food. We’re safe and warm. We might be a little bit broken from clearing the driveway, but we’re surviving.