Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later. A guy can’t expect to go rolling around Colorado in shorts and short sleeves all the doo-dah day. Not in November, anyway.
Looks like it’s either poop or a chance of poop for the foreseeable future, with plenty of wind to keep things interesting. The ol’ crystal ball shows a trainer ride in my future, along with the spirited use of various synonyms for “poop.”
There was a thin coat of snow on the Tomb of Chairman Meow when I arose this morning. I blame Obama.
It’s a bit early for this sort of thing, frankly. For starters, the leaves are still on the trees. And a casual check of the Innertoobz indicates that the first snow in these parts generally holds off until a week before Halloween.
Naturally, Herself is out of town on business, so I had to make my own coffee, police up the litter box, and dab the dew from Mister Boo’s delicate little feetsies after his morning constitutional. Oh, the humanity.
The weatherperson says we’re supposed to be back up into the 50s and 60s over the next few days. But what has s/he done for me lately?
It can’t be 70-something and sunny all the time. Still, going from a record high of 78 to snow on the ground is something of a shock to the system.
Happily, the streets and sidewalks retained much of that heat, so I didn’t have to do any shoveling this morning — good news for the ol’ back, since I spent yesterday raking leaves from the huge maple tree that shades Chez Dog. Looks like a bumper crop, too. I’ve already filled six bags and we’re a long ways away from seeing the last leaf on the tree.
Sounds like the cops in Oakland were engaged in a little clean-up operation of their own last night. They went after the Occupy Oakland folks with everything from tear gas to flash-bang grenades and rubber bullets. According to The San Francisco Chronicle, “City officials said they had been forced to clear the encampments because of sanitary and public safety concerns.” Uh huh. Right out of Steinbeck that is, as in “The Grapes of Wrath” and the less-well-known “In Dubious Battle.”
All the stories I’ve read make references to a schism in the Occupy crowd, with some insisting on a non-violent approach and others intent on challenging the cops to a fight. I’d love to know how much of the latter is legit and how much is the work of agents provocateurs. It’s an old trick, and one that keeps working, especially on the media. The Oakland Tribune‘s account of the evening’s festivities could have been written by the PD’s PR flack.
If you’re interested in following the Occupy movement online, bookmark Greg Mitchell’s OccupyUSA blog at The Nation. It’s one of my first stops every morning.
Well, we knew it was coming, but that didn’t mean we were ready for it — our first snow of the 2010 multiple-car-pileup season.
Naturally, I seized on last night’s weather event as the perfect excuse for a beaker of Gaelic brain eraser to forestall croup, pneumonia and whooping cough. Herself even had a wee drop.
That was the fun part. The sucky bits commenced this morning, when we had to take Herself’s 2002 Subie to one mechanic and my 1983 Toyota truck to another on roads that were glazed like a copper’s donut. For my trip I dumped six tubes of traction sand in the bed, locked the hubs, slammed it into 4WD and stayed in second gear the whole way.
The good thing about having a 27-year-old rust-bucket like this, of course, is that people in nice cars get the hell out of your way. It fairly screams, “What makes you think I won’t hit you?” And “Hell, no, I ain’t got no god-damn insurance.” Possibly “I’m still half-hammered from the whiskey I was guzzling last night.”
Anyway, it works. Everybody waited to tailgate me until I was behind the wheel of my Forester, inching home from the Toyota mechanic. Some mighty small hat sizes here in Bibleburg, and the body shops love ’em.
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