Kept In
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
So the whole thing seemed to have been somewhat of a joke, really.
If that had been considered a blizzard… well, they had shook out more snow than that two weeks earlier. And the wind hadn’t even been up. Maybe seven inches of ice and snow. Maybe a little more. And that was all. Though the predicted low of the day was eight below. And Thursday was to be ‘bitterly cold’.
And yet, by eight o’clock that morning, the neighborhood was still unplowed, and the highway was vaguely quiet. So OLeif would be home another day. Except that the big fellow seemed to have woken up with another one of his headaches, or as Puck put it for him, ‘head-eck’, and so it was a late start on morning plans.
So to breakfast with the organ drones of El Cid, or something very like it, from Classic 99.
The roads were plowed before nine.
Puck was requesting ‘cheese crickets’ (Cheez-Its).
The ice forests were sparkling in the returned sun.
And Puck also begged a game of Minecraft off his dad, which OLeif thought was pretty funny, and said that they would play it later in the evening together.
First on the checklist was Puck’s second reading lesson.
Second: building a ‘Puck’ snowman and a ‘Mama’ snowman. OLeif would help later in building the ‘Daddy’ snowman. That… did not go so well. The snow was still not of a good packing variety. And it was so cold, that Collette’s gloved fingers were numb after only fifteen minutes and two sleds down the driveway.
So instead, inside to read Sun Power (1976) and peruse a map of Jerusalem where Puck asked all sorts of questions about where Collette had walked while there.
And Joe shared the band: Onra. A sort of fuzzy mod-Asian collection.
In the afternoon, Puck could be heard in his room piecing together Marbleworks while singing tunes from Children’s Choir…
“God made… me! Every, part, you see.”
Later on…
Puck listened carefully to Adventures in Odyssey, some of which were embarrassingly bordering on Biblical error, if not sitting in it, while Collette fiddled with a Hebrew date conversion calendar, trying to figure out if the Great Flood had actually occurred on May 21st, by the Gregorian calendar, ending on the 29th of June. It seemed to be correct…
After wasting a certain amount of time in this manner, Puck helped OLeif replace the air filter in the basement. They came back up with the old mini trampoline.
“He bringed it up!” Puck declared. “We could keep this up here forever. Mama, could we keep this up here forever? It’s pretty fun!”
And even later, OLeif broke off work at five o’clock and shoved out to shovel the driveway in the still pale whorl of late snowflakes, dusting the ground in the less-sun of the late afternoon.
In unfortunate news of the day, Gloria had succumbed to the flu for the first time in years.
Into the night…
Puck requested several nighttime songs that he had discovered with OLeif while Collette was away…
“The meatball one and den duh French fry one! And den duh ‘Shay Bah-lee’ (Paris) one!” he asked excitedly.
Rose uploaded some nice photos of snowflakes with her ‘poor man’s macro’.
Filmography for Collette’s evening: Anthony Perkins, Sophia Loren, and Burl Ives on the scandalously dark silver screen. She couldn’t bring herself to finish watching it.
OLeif, who still had a headache, hiccups, and heartburn, was out for milk, eggs, bread yeast, canola oil, and coffee, and the 16-cassette tape audio recording of Mysterious Island from the library, and then bravely finished scraping and salting the driveway, hoarse-voiced.
“Some important human ailments still resist modern medical science and one of them is self-pity.” — Waite Phillips