Useful vermin
The absolute coolest thing I saw all week was video footage of a mouse cleaning some old guy’s tool shed. I don’t even remember where I saw the clip, but for five minutes I sat there spellbound, watching this shiny-eyed rodent tidying up the work bench and placing everything neatly into a bin. It would be really swell if one of you fine folks saw this video, too, because when I write it all out like I did, it sounds like something I might have experienced after swigging too much Nyquil. I mean, that really happened, right?

I’m melting; my wickedness!
What the $#!!@# kind of storm was that Tuesday night thing? Just before midnight, I went out and cleared two yards of the 6 inches or so of snow that had fallen over the course of just a couple hours. Feeling good about myself, I then went inside to have a nice cup of cocoa with a Nyquil chaser. When I looked out again, the snow had turned to rain and it was falling so hard, it had melted all the snow I had taken such pains to remove. All that time and effort wasted! So now the next time it snows, I’ll tell myself that I don’t have to do anything about it because my Fairy Rain Mother is going to come along to clean up the yards and come morning, I’ll be utterly screwed. Winter is hard, man. I wonder if I can get a trained mouse to sort it all out for me.

I think my driveway might be a parallelogram
It doesn’t help that I’m absolutely lousy with a snow blower. Lacking any kind of mind for geometry, I can never go about snow removal with the kind of orderly precision that I see in some of my show-off neighbors. Wherever I see snow, I just kind of attack it with the snow machine so that I end up hurling snow onto areas that I’ve already cleaned. Then I just stand there scratching my hat pompom and wondering why it’s taking me six hours to clear one small driveway. In my defense, I’ve never claimed to be very smart.

Gut punched
Another thing I hate is when I’m pushing a shovel across the driveway and it runs into a ridge in the pavement and stops suddenly, causing the shovel handle to spear into my midsection. If you see me out in my driveway writhing on the ground like a grub worm some winter night, this is probably what happened. Probably.

This column dedicated to Marty Engstrom
Who could smile even when surrounded by blistering winds and nine feet of snow. I’m betting those guys who spend weeks at the top of Mount Washington probably go through a lot of Nyquil.

Copy the Story Link

« Previous

Mark LaFlamme: Snakes in the toilet and mean old ladies on bikes

Next »

Mark LaFlamme: Things I found at Marden’s but didn’t get and now I’m sad