Snow Day

It is snowing. It usually snows once or twice a winter around here. Just enough to etch the branches of the trees and lay lightly on the grass.

Not this snow. This snow is the fine pieced, heavy fall of a northern blizzard (although I have to admit since you can still see through it, not as much as a northern blizzard). I woke at 11 pm last night and couldn't sleep, but it wasn't snowing then. It wasn't snowing when I went for my morning walk, and it wasn't snowing when I went to work. By 10:30 it had snowed enough that my workplace closed and sent us home (those of us who hadn't left yet, anyway).

That's an amazing amount of snow to fall in a short time for us. And the wind is whistling and blowing snow quite nastily. I'm glad I am home and indoors. The drive home was, shall we say, interesting? I was cautious, and there were few people out (but more than I expected, honestly). There was only one place where I felt the car start to slide. I was trying to come to a halt at a four way stop with no other people on the other three ways. So I just took my foot off the brake and let the car coast through the four way stop, feeling guilty and defiant at the same time.

I don't have a garage, so I had to tramp through snow to get to my house. Just a short walk, but snow caked up on my shoes anyway. When I came in, much to Max's delighted surprise (yes, there's a cat in this story), I brought the snow in with me. Max likes to imagine he is a big fierce outdoor kitty and tries to dart out the door anytime you come in, so I didn't bother to even try to knock the snow off my shoes before coming in. It's just water. It'll melt on the carpet and evaporate. No big deal.

Oddly Max doesn't usually try to dart out the door when you're leaving, just when you're coming in. I find that very strange.

Anyway, I've brought snow into the house, mainly from trying to not have to run all over the yard to catch a crazy cat. Max was instantly diverted from the novelty of me being home so early and had to examine the snow carefully.

A treat to be eaten?

A toy to play with?

He wasn't sure if the snow was something to be played with, something to be chewed, or something to be licked, so he tried all three multiple times. He managed to lose interest and wander away before he would have inevitably have noticed it vanishing to be replaced by ordinary water. Which I was grateful for. He often blames me when things don't go his way, and I get very tired of being bitten.

I'd started Pegasus (by Robin McKinley) last night when I couldn't sleep and had managed to get most of the way through it, so while Max watched the snowy world from across the room, I curled my feet up on the evil villain chair and delved back into the world of my book.

(You know what an evil villain chair is. Most people call it a wing-back chair. You sink back into it and only your long crooked nose sticks out past the wings and the firelight ripples menacingly off the edged shadows of your face. Of course I don't look like that, and I don't have a fire, and the chair isn't quite that big (I would love one that big) but it's in lots of movies that way.)

After a while Max came over and decided that I was sufficiently occupied to be sat upon, and forthwith did so.

He leaves no space for my arm,
so it has to go around him,
but he doesn't seem to mind.

It's actually fairly difficult for me to sit very long with him on my bent legs like this. My legs don't mind being in that position if there isn't fourteen pounds of immovable weight pressing them down. But after I finished the book and put it away and got out the phone to see when the sequel was being released (it ends on a cliff-hanger, which I was unaware of before I got there, and ARGH) (oh, and sometime this year); anyway, Max apparently thinks phones are a different category of "settled human" than a book, and he got up and left. I was enjoying his company, but my legs were rather relieved to have him leave!

Max, in a green "cup" cat tree,
with my car and gardenia bushes covered in snow.

He is currently at the other window watching the snow as I type this. The snowflakes keep changing their minds; sometimes they are tiny and fast, and sometimes big and flaky and slow, and sometimes the wind makes them go horizontal across the windows instead of vertical.