I’ve missed you internet. First it was the trojan* that incapacitated my PC and laptop and then this! I was almost back online when this monster of a storm hit late Friday night. I wasn’t the least bit prepared for it and ran to the store, like everyone else in my neighborhood, at 8pm. The shelves were empty but I made do by grabbing some sauerkraut, corned beef, swiss and pumpernickel. I threw it all in a Crock Pot and called it good.

And it was.

The mood around my house was pretty jovial. It was a Friday night, the snow hadn’t begun in earnest and everyone was still having a pretty good time. My daughter and I were playing a marathon game of Plants VS Zombies and my son was out getting his eyebrow pierced. The heat was cranked up, the Christmas movies were playing on TV and all was good.

I woke up the next morning (Saturday) and looked outside, the snow had stopped for the time being and it didn’t look as if we had more than 6 inches on the ground. 6 inches is nothing so I grabbed a cup of coffee and settled in for a couple of hours until the rest of the house woke up. I stepped outside when I let the dog out and noticed my neighbor shoveling. We exchanged “good morning”s and talked a little about the weather and what was still headed our way. I remember thinking to myself that my neighbor is a little obsessed with shoveling. I was was far more practical and was going to wait until the snow had stopped falling officially.

I say officially because the snow had stopped only for a brief moment, the worst was yet to come, and come it did.

24 hours later we had nearly 20 inches of new snow on the ground. The 5th worst snowstorm in recorded history for the Twin Cities, proving that Global Warming is oh so real because I have been alive for all five of these storms.

I have a snow blower but I can’t figure out how to start it. Either it’s the choke that is messing me up or it doesn’t work. I’m not really sure. I asked my brother if I could borrow his (because his used to be mine until we traded two years ago when I moved to a smaller lot and didn’t need as much power and width). He sent me a text message saying it was out of gas.

Now, I know my brother and how he doesn’t like confrontation of any kind. I also know that he is willing to lie if it suits his purposes. I also know he has been out in the snow all day long and the last thing he wants to do is help his sister out.  Actually, it doesn’t matter if he has been in the snow all day or not, he never wants to help out his sister.

Instead of confronting him on any of these things I just played right along with him and texted back to him that I had a can of gas in my garage. He responded that I could come and get it since he was finished with it until they plowed.

If I could actually get to my garage and get my car out it I wouldn’t need to borrow the fucking snow blower.

Because I have a very passive – aggressive relationship with my brother (for reasons he won’t share with me), I simply said I couldn’t get either vehicle out due to the drifts and then I said “thanks anyway”.

I’m not sure why I thanked him.

It is 7:15pm as I type this and we just finished shoveling the car out. We haven’t yet shoveled out the truck, there is still four feet of snow between the truck and the alley that needs to be removed and there just isn’t any place left to put the damn snow.

My son and I actually considered sharing a car until spring.

* I am virus free now but not without all kinds of hell. I still haven’t managed to reinstall all my software and while I backed everything up I haven’t taken any of it off the hard drive. I have all kinds of posts that are just itching to get out (just ask me about the Minnesota bloggers who snubbed me) but until I get my computer back up to speed and catch up with work, you will have to wait. But consider this: why do we only hear Stevie Wonder songs at Christmas?