Pet Peeves

The weather man has been threatening us with snow for quite awhile and he’s mostly been wrong. We’ve seen some fall but not fall for long. We’ve seen some fake snow that’s like sleet or hail or something that’s harder and whiter than rain but has some stupid made up name that I don’t remember. We’ve mostly had what I consider FRIGHTFULLY COLD WEATHER mixed with HURRICANE FORCE WINDS.

I hate the weather here. I miss hurricanes.

I went out to get the mail tonight, a few minutes after 5. I’d put it off all day because… it was COLD and WINDY and I did not want to go outside. I’m already cold just sitting here in my house wearing two jackets. But I went to the mailbox anyway because somebody has to do it.

It was cold and windy and getting dark. Nothing new or unusual going on out there.

Twenty five minutes later, TW went out the back door to put the dog out and she screamed. I ignored her. She screamed again, threw open the door leading to the office and told me that I needed to “see this”. Bah.

I got up. I went to the door. It was dark. She wanted me to open the door. I refused. I wasn’t getting anywhere near a door that made her scream. So… she opened it.

Snow. On the ground. WTF? Why do we live here? And how long before the dog refuses to go out in it? Right now he’ll still at least step out onto the ground and look around at it and then he’ll get up on the step and eat snow off of the top step. But how long will it be before we have to drag him out in it?

How many more months until spring? I am not sure I will survive this. Seriously.

The house behind ours got a nice shiny new roof last week. Well, no it isn’t shiny, it’s that orangey yellowy goldeny color roof. But it is nice and new and the roofers were interesting, errr, entertaining, errr, something else.

They don’t seem to have much appreciation for Senator Obama. There were “fried chicken and watermelon” jokes. And then there was some discussion about Obama “not being American”.

Yea, I know. I wanted to yell “Dudes, you can’t run if you aren’t American, duh.” I also wondered at how one minute they could be talking about Obama’s “obvious love of fried chicken and watermelon” and in the next calling him un-American. If fried chicken and watermelon don’t scream “American”, I don’t know what does.

These roofers know a lot about Nascar. And professional wrestling. And some sort of kung fu things. Also, they seem to have a fondness for Calgon because out of the blue, two or three yelled “Calgon take me away!” — that sort of scared me, even more than the Obama thing.

Also, there was much questioning of manhood up there on the roof. The preferred method was related to calling each other homosexuals, in a variety of ways, and talking about which had most recently “been on his knees”.

Those roofers… they were something else.

I spent a lot of time over the holidays going through old blog posts from Fast Times and here on Flamingo House and it was fun. Also, odd. Really odd.

Moving Fast Times from its home on ClubMom to its new archived home on hosted WordPress meant going through each post that had images and re-uploading images. That was interesting. Watching Michelle change. Skimming over the stuff I wrote about or wanted to write about but link dumped because I didn’t have time to write was troubling. I needed more time. It was also interesting to see holes in time where I know there were things I should have blogged about Michelle and education and growing up, but I didn’t blog them because people were reading who wouldn’t have appreciated those stories. I should have blogged them, saved them as draft or pushed them out with a password. Not for you, friends and family, to read or for strangers to read – but for Michelle to read, later. I loved that blog but looking back, I have lots of regrets.

Going back through this one, Flamingo House formerly known as Daily Dose, to clean up links and funky text caused by the move from Blogger to Typepad to WordPress. What a mess. Besides the mess, there are also regrets. Dozens of posts started but not finished, because I didn’t have time. So many family stories not shared, huge holes where our lives should have been documented.

I almost broke my own rule about resolutions and came here to say I was resolving to blog more often and blog more openly or if not openly then to blog privately. But no, a resolution isn’t the answer to these problems. I don’t have the answer. I don’t have a solution. I do have ideas. Now let’s see if I can put those ideas to practice.

I don’t want to look back again in a couple of years and see so many untold stories and unwritten posts.

Remember a few months ago when I raked and raked and raked and raked and I ranted about leaves? Well today I found something I hate even more than I hate leaves – acorns.

I’ve actually always hated acorns. TW likes to tease me about the sky falling ’cause I used to rant about acorns when I lived in South Carolina but this acorn problem in our yard right now, it’s much worse than a little bit of sky falling.

Raking up acorns. It’s the pits. And pretty much an impossible job. Unless there’s some special sort of acorn rake that I don’t know about. Is there such a thing?