Yay for 2 shitsucking feet of snow! Yay for whiling away the hours drinking cheap bourbon and playing Quick Pick in New Lebanon, NY, with the only person from high school I’m still on speaking terms with.
No, really. Yay! Xmas is over; we’ve done the gift exchange, and now we can all return to not pretending like we care about each other.
Yet. Yet. As much as my relationship with my mom is strained, I really like coming upstate, because I feel a quiet contentment simply eating, drinking, reading, and shoveling snow.
You bet your sweet ass that K and I shoveled some serious snow today. My mother had only one snowshovel (which offered the handicap of the actual shovel part coming detached from the handle every 3 minutes or so, leaving K to go running after it, grumbling) and one dirt shovel, which I used with limited success. But man, we really made some headway. The neighbor boy, who is just as cute as a button and either the nicest kid in the world or the next Jeffrey Dahmer, came down on his ATV and plowed the driveway, but K and I did the path and around the cars. No small feat. I could tell he was getting worn out though, because when I suggested we shovel a path to the woodpile (yes, the woodpile) his eyes went dull and his mouth went slack and his soul escaped from his body with a shrieking sound not unlike a deflating party balloon. He was already demoralized from 2 days of eating, drinking, and silently reading the O Magazines on my mother’s coffee table. He’s one of those people who likes to *do* things.
He went home tonight though. We put him on a train in Hudson, the train whose delay forced us to read every pennysaver and real estate circular in the entire train station. The only houses that were remotely within our price range (eg, under 6 figures) were either mobile homes or built on Indian burial grounds. Or “handyman’s specials.” We once spent an entire afternoon mounting 3 Lack shelves from IKEA. We’re not handymen. Anyhow, most handymen have better credit than we do. And like I said, K likes to *do* things. Living up here is not conducive to doing things. You can read about other people doing things and writing about them in Yankee magazine, but that’s about it. Well, and you can smoke shwaggy weed, which is what I did for many years, but it gets old. Yes it does.
My mother drove us all to the station and narrowly missed causing 3 separate accidents. I made her drive ’cause of my fear of black ice. Which the nice weatherman warned me about today. I spent the entire time scanning the macadam for black ice and periodically saying, in what I hoped seemed an offhand way, “um, you might want to break now.” There but for the grace of every other driver on the road goes my mother.
I know there was more crap I wanted to mention. I actually took the time to write stuff down today, so I’d remember it. Is that common among bloggers? I generally go by the seat of my pants, throwing caution to the wind; though in reality I’m the least spontaneous person in the world. This blog is my oasis of Fauvist sensibility. And now I’ve ruined that too.
Oh, I’m reading Atonement by Ian McEwan. (Please don’t make me dig up a link for it, people. My mother’s computer is so slow and her Internet settings are so freaking weird, not to mention her strange, rounded, ergonomic keyboard that makes me type all wrong. Well, at least on the PC Blogger gives me little icons for ital and bold. I never knew that. Suffice it to say the book won some pretty big awards this year.) And I highly recommend it.
Hope all your xmases were bright and that you’re walking in a winter wonderbutt. I’ll be back in the city about 5 seconds before my impending rural-upbringing-induced meltdown.
Stroke me.
