Well, maybe ten. Despite the Channel 11 morning news team stealing my "Worst. Winter. Ever." line three or four times an hour, I've gotten over it. Yeah, I regret not not having asserted my intellectual property rights for that language right away. But I've become resigned to my life being full of regrets over stupid stuff I've done and smart stuff I never quite got around to doing. It's time to move on to greener pastures. Like the signs of an imminent spring.
Every one around here (me included) is giddy at the thought of 40+° temps today. But really? It's gonna take quite a few 40° days (in a row) to melt the glaciers that have formed over the last three months. I'm looking for surer signs.
1.) Baseball. Pitchers and catchers reported like three weeks ago and the rest of the rosters within a week after that. We're already getting the injury reports out of Fort Myers that are early guarantees that the Twins are destined for another 90 (or more) loss season. It might be shaping up to be a late spring but even a late spring holds the promise of being followed by a miserable summer.
If the injury reports aren't enough, there's more tied to the approach of baseball. I've gotten my hands on a copy of the 2014 edition of Who's Who in Baseball. This is an annual event for me and by the end of the baseball season it will be dog-eared and ragged from me trying to memorize player statistics that I used to know by heart from playing Strat-O-Matic baseball.. I picked it up at the Barnes and Noble down in Highland (hmmmm; that doesn't sound right, does it?) after Miz Susan sent me out to find a couple copies of a kid's novel for a reading group in her classroom. I paid for the two Lizzie Brights and my WWinBB with a Barnes and Noble gift card Miz Susan found on the floor of one of her school's halls. Ashes to ashes, etc.
2.) Gas prices. Gas prices have shot up over the last few weeks, up to $3.59 at my two-station barometer north of the Lowry Hill tunnel. I've heard reports that the refineries are retooling for summer blends, hence shortages and higher prices; pure ECON 101. Last fall, gas prices jumped on the same stupid-ass excuse. Translation: the Koch Bros. and the other oil barons are feeling the need to finance a few more vacation destination properties for their worthless children. It sucks that prices are up but it means that spring is soon to follow. Why is it, though, that this seasonal blend retooling is something which seems to have sprung up out of nowhere? It's not possible that those great patriot oil barons are lying to us, is it?
3) Parking restrictions. As reported earlier, the City of St. Paul has restricted parking on the even-numbered sides of its residential streets. This is particularly unfair to us on the even-numbered south side of Laurel because much of the far side of the street is taken up by entrances to driveways and there ain't a single one of those on our side (credits to Miz Susan for pointing that out). Those driveway cutouts easily chew up at least a third of the oherwise available parking over there. Yeah, sure, lots of the north side cars end up getting parked in owners' driveways but not enough. Not to mention (but I'm going to anyway) that both Michael across the street and I busted our butts to clear our street frontages to the curb following the city's so-called plowing. If the city had done a proper job of plowing from the get-go, the streets wouldn't have narrowed to the width of dirt roads in unincorporated towns out in the sticks.
The city clearly has no idea of how to handle snow removal to ensure safe and speedy passage for emergency vehicles. Further showing off its lack of savvy, the city enacted restrictions just as the worst of the winter was passing (read: spring's about to get sprung.). Hey municipal workers, don't take this too personally. The dummies in Smallsville across the river declared their parking ban even earlier than St. Paul's.
4) Cats on the loose. Olive and Gray, our two totally-without-merit-except-for-cute cats have developed bad cases of cabin fever. Who hasn't in our neighborhood? For eight months a year, Miz Susan and I keep ourselves in trim by responding to their demands to be let out and then back in about 39 times a day. Miz Susan and I have gotten fat and lazy without that workout routine in our days. The cats want to go out but have been turned back by the icy blasts when they've stuck their noses out the door. Poor kittens; they don't understand this cruel joke any better than the household help does.
This might be changing. When I got home on Friday night from my beloved EnHenn, Olive was out on the front porch. She was nervously pacing, hoping to be let back in. She had to wait until I was done schlepping groceries in from the trunk of the car (yes, parked illegally in front of the house) and she was in like a shot when I finally got the door open. But she had gone out when Susan got home (presumably willingly; I never asked) and she stayed out. Both cats went out this morning on my 9th try to see if our Sunday paper had been delivered yet (this was at 9; a story for another day) and if they didn't stay out for long and never got farther than the top porch step, I'm seeing this as a sign that their internal cat season sensors are telling them that warmer days are coming. Which is OK. Both Miz Susan and I can stand the exercise of doing door attendant duties for our cute but otherwise useless cats.
5) Dreams of our backyard decked out in its midsummer garden finery. It doesn't make any sense to me but, as early as February, Miz Susan's thoughts turn to gardening and turning our backyard into an English country garden riot of color and a near commercial-grade tomato farm. Yeah, you read that right: February. There have been past St. Patrick's Days when I've had to physically restrain her from from grabbing a rake and heading out to the yard to "just clear away a little" of the piles of leaves we'd (I'd) covered our annuals with the fall before. Despite the history of physical restraint and the repeated warnings of Belinda and Bobby Jensen Saturday mornings to stay the hell off the lawn and out of the garden until things have dried out a little, she's still always going to be determined to get outside and start mucking around. Maybe the insidious influence of Downton Abbey has driven her a little crazier over the last couple of years. She's already making me address her as M'Lady so I know there's been some effect on her.
I cringe when the time for her to start gardening can't be reasonably postponed any longer. That's the time when she and our friend Molly will spend long hours of planning what's going to get planted and where. My involvement in the process consists of being handed a shovel of one sort or another, being pointed in the direction of a stretch of real estate and told to start digging. For a rest break, I'm allowed to haul 40 lb. bags of cow manure in from the car (into which I'd loaded them shortly before) or to empty the compost bin and work the contents into the dug up real estate. Or to reconnect hundreds of feet of hose to the spigot on the side of the house. I know it's unreasonable to cringe at these prospect but...there you have it.
Maybe it's the longer stretch of daylit hours (which just picked up a bonus at 2 this morning) but Miz Susan has started to stir into that pre-planting twitchiness. Another sure sign that spring is on its way to getting sprung. Full disclosure: I feel the need to play wet blanket just a little bit. The state high school boys' and girls' basketball tournaments are coming up soon and established Minnesota folk wisdom says that those are always accompanied by blizzards. Don't put the shovels away just yet.
Hey, notwithstanding the current snow cover and the absolute certainty that it's gonna get added to, there's worse things to look forward to than spring. Like the income tax filing deadline. Good thing that's still months away, right?
Sunday, March 9, 2014
Saturday, March 1, 2014
ok, ok. it turns out that it could be worse.
One (maybe all) of the local TV stations' news teams have taken to calling this the worst winter ever. As in, "Worst. Winter. Ever." Maybe this means it's now official. Not that anyone who's living here is gonna be surprised by that. And you people who used to live here but wised up and headed off for warmer climes aren't gonna be surprised either since your friends and family have been bombarding you with horror stories and gruesome pictures of the Minnesota version of Global Climate Change. I figure we've got a legitimate right to bitch about the weather. It's gotten pretty miserable.
If anyone had said a week or so ago that it couldn't possibly get any worse, I might have been inclined to agree. The newscasters had already tagged this winter as the worst ever. But we'd've been wrong. It's gotten worse. Even much worse.
The street maintenance crowd of the City of Saint Paul has washed its hands of the pure-d horseshit job it had been doing when it came to plowing residential streets. Having never once come even close to clearing the streets curb to curb (despite the multiple opportunities of umpteen earlier snow emergencies), City Hall threw up its hands in surrender on Friday and declared that parking is forbidden on the even-numbered sides of residential streets for the duration of the winter. Which could end on April 1 (so says the declaration) or maybe Memorial Day or maybe in time for the ceremonial first pitch of the All Star Game across the river. That would be something. I remember watching Nolan Ryan stride angrily in from the right field bullpen at old Metropolitan Stadium to pitch for the Angels in a Twins home opener back in the 70's. Ryan sported a long olive-drab trench coat which could have come from a Kaplan Brothers surplus store. That was probably his statement of protest at being forced to pitch on a day when there were still 25'-tall piles of snow out in the parking lots. Ryan owned the Twins that day.
But that was on like April 10th. This year's All Star Game at Target Field will come about three months later on the calendar. While it's not too likely that there'll still be snow in the shadows down in the right field corner, I still like the mental picture.
What this newly-announced even-numbered parking ban amounts to for me and Miz Susan is that we risk getting tagged and towed if we park our cars in front of our house. Our very own house, the Laurel Avenue Estates. I'm willing to swear that we paid the city a couple of hefty curbside parking spot license fees back when we moved in. Or did the paper-pusher at the closing just tell us that we had and then pocketed the cash herself? Jeez, what a couple of saps we are.
I'm now forced to look for parking for the Camry and the Tahoe a half a block west down on Fry. It's as if I've been forced into Mr. Peabody's Way-Back Machine for a return to Laurel Avenue, circa 1977. Back then, I was parking a light blue Ford Galaxy station wagon along that same stretch while I was living in the corner duplex at 1630. Golldarn, am I a small town boy or what? It's not like the extra half block walk from the cars is gonna kill either one of us but it's still annoying. And now that I think about it, the dope on the corner of our block didn't bother to shovel his walk all last winter and his sidewalks turned into 6" thick sheets of ice. I'd know cuz I was the good neighbor who spent hours chopping that ice up in April and maybe even May. Am I still a good neighbor if I'm cursing under my breath the whole time that I'm doing good-neighborly deeds? I'm surprised that the ice didn't claim a couple of victims last spring; now I'm worried that it'll get one of us this year.
I'll grant that moving half of the parked cars off of the streets has opened things up nicely. They've taken on this wide Haussmannesque Parisian boulevard look. If it would only warm up about 70°, I can imagine a lively sidewalk cafe society springing up, complete with little umbrellaed tables and aspiring hipsters with berets and laptops. Too bad that some of the other worst-winter-ever features forced on us aren't quite so cheerful.
People are exhausted and they're stumbling around like extras on The Walking Dead. But instead of dried blood all over faces and hands and clothes, our zombies are showing off salt-stained boots and shoes and pants cuffs and overcoats. Chapped and cracked cheeks and lips and hands along with permanent cases of hat hair are the war wounds that we've suffered during this WWE.. The cars that are still allowed to park on the odd-numbered sides of streets are often left halfway up snowbanks with decided lists to port. The city streets are caked with ice and some of the intersections are worn so smooth from spinning and skidding tires that they could easily pass as competition-ready ice rinks fresh from Zamboni runs. The ice on the streets might not be all bad as much of it covers up a nightmare-in-waiting of potholes and broken pavement. And the freeways aren't much better. It's been so damn cold that there are still ice patches from the storm a week ago under bridges where the sun don't shine and MNDOT's chemicals are ineffective. I've seen more crashes and spinouts on my scenic commutes up and down I-94 over the last week than I remember from the previous four winters.
Like I was saying, anybody who was thinking a week ago that it couldn't get worse has been proven more wrong than Mitt Romney strategists on Monday night before the 2012 election. It has gotten worse and apparently we ain't done yet. The predictions are for 17° and 15° below zero for tonite and tomorrow night.
It's looking as if there should be plenty of room for corned beef and cabbage in the fridge for St.Patrick's Day. The Guinness and the Harp should do quite nicely in the snowbanks outside. I'm not sure how O'Gara's is going to handle its overflow parking though.
If anyone had said a week or so ago that it couldn't possibly get any worse, I might have been inclined to agree. The newscasters had already tagged this winter as the worst ever. But we'd've been wrong. It's gotten worse. Even much worse.
The street maintenance crowd of the City of Saint Paul has washed its hands of the pure-d horseshit job it had been doing when it came to plowing residential streets. Having never once come even close to clearing the streets curb to curb (despite the multiple opportunities of umpteen earlier snow emergencies), City Hall threw up its hands in surrender on Friday and declared that parking is forbidden on the even-numbered sides of residential streets for the duration of the winter. Which could end on April 1 (so says the declaration) or maybe Memorial Day or maybe in time for the ceremonial first pitch of the All Star Game across the river. That would be something. I remember watching Nolan Ryan stride angrily in from the right field bullpen at old Metropolitan Stadium to pitch for the Angels in a Twins home opener back in the 70's. Ryan sported a long olive-drab trench coat which could have come from a Kaplan Brothers surplus store. That was probably his statement of protest at being forced to pitch on a day when there were still 25'-tall piles of snow out in the parking lots. Ryan owned the Twins that day.
But that was on like April 10th. This year's All Star Game at Target Field will come about three months later on the calendar. While it's not too likely that there'll still be snow in the shadows down in the right field corner, I still like the mental picture.
What this newly-announced even-numbered parking ban amounts to for me and Miz Susan is that we risk getting tagged and towed if we park our cars in front of our house. Our very own house, the Laurel Avenue Estates. I'm willing to swear that we paid the city a couple of hefty curbside parking spot license fees back when we moved in. Or did the paper-pusher at the closing just tell us that we had and then pocketed the cash herself? Jeez, what a couple of saps we are.
I'm now forced to look for parking for the Camry and the Tahoe a half a block west down on Fry. It's as if I've been forced into Mr. Peabody's Way-Back Machine for a return to Laurel Avenue, circa 1977. Back then, I was parking a light blue Ford Galaxy station wagon along that same stretch while I was living in the corner duplex at 1630. Golldarn, am I a small town boy or what? It's not like the extra half block walk from the cars is gonna kill either one of us but it's still annoying. And now that I think about it, the dope on the corner of our block didn't bother to shovel his walk all last winter and his sidewalks turned into 6" thick sheets of ice. I'd know cuz I was the good neighbor who spent hours chopping that ice up in April and maybe even May. Am I still a good neighbor if I'm cursing under my breath the whole time that I'm doing good-neighborly deeds? I'm surprised that the ice didn't claim a couple of victims last spring; now I'm worried that it'll get one of us this year.
I'll grant that moving half of the parked cars off of the streets has opened things up nicely. They've taken on this wide Haussmannesque Parisian boulevard look. If it would only warm up about 70°, I can imagine a lively sidewalk cafe society springing up, complete with little umbrellaed tables and aspiring hipsters with berets and laptops. Too bad that some of the other worst-winter-ever features forced on us aren't quite so cheerful.
People are exhausted and they're stumbling around like extras on The Walking Dead. But instead of dried blood all over faces and hands and clothes, our zombies are showing off salt-stained boots and shoes and pants cuffs and overcoats. Chapped and cracked cheeks and lips and hands along with permanent cases of hat hair are the war wounds that we've suffered during this WWE.. The cars that are still allowed to park on the odd-numbered sides of streets are often left halfway up snowbanks with decided lists to port. The city streets are caked with ice and some of the intersections are worn so smooth from spinning and skidding tires that they could easily pass as competition-ready ice rinks fresh from Zamboni runs. The ice on the streets might not be all bad as much of it covers up a nightmare-in-waiting of potholes and broken pavement. And the freeways aren't much better. It's been so damn cold that there are still ice patches from the storm a week ago under bridges where the sun don't shine and MNDOT's chemicals are ineffective. I've seen more crashes and spinouts on my scenic commutes up and down I-94 over the last week than I remember from the previous four winters.
Like I was saying, anybody who was thinking a week ago that it couldn't get worse has been proven more wrong than Mitt Romney strategists on Monday night before the 2012 election. It has gotten worse and apparently we ain't done yet. The predictions are for 17° and 15° below zero for tonite and tomorrow night.
It's looking as if there should be plenty of room for corned beef and cabbage in the fridge for St.Patrick's Day. The Guinness and the Harp should do quite nicely in the snowbanks outside. I'm not sure how O'Gara's is going to handle its overflow parking though.
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