Vivaldi weather

  • We got half a foot of new snow yes­ter­day, and today the sky looked like it was ready to drop more, but it didn’t. It had that metal­lic off-white color and had no def­i­n­i­tion, just a smooth sheet laid down from one end to the other. Greg said that he heard that we would get more (he’s off in San Diego right now, which seems like cheat­ing), but when I went online to check, the chance for pre­cip­i­ta­tion was zero. They listed the chance that things would ice up, how­ever, as “likely.” And so I went out with my trusty snow shovel and aimed at a lit­tle strate­gic com­bat with the elements.

    It’s “strate­gic” when I do it because I’m not a spring chicken (actu­ally, I don’t even know any spring chick­ens) and there’s no way on God’s once-green earth that I’m going to try to clear all the snow. Yes­ter­day, it was pow­dery and soft — per­fect for snow­balls. Today, it’s denser and crusted over — per­fect for the kind of icy snow­balls that you bet­ter get right with your first throw, because they sting like mad and your tar­get will likely kill you if they’re not inca­pac­i­tated. So given that a shov­el­ful weighs as much as a big book, I’m a lot more about tar­geted than gen­er­al­ized action. I got the side­walk into the house in fair shape, as well as the porch steps. I attacked the great banks of snow left by the snow­plow and hacked out a path for the car. I would’ve done more, but I heard a sin­gle meow behind me, and turned around to see Ace, the neighbor’s black cat, regard­ing my progress crit­i­cally from the other side of the street.

    “Are you super­vis­ing?” I asked.

    He looked at me as if I’d said some­thing weird. So I fig­ured I should use him as my Magic 8 Ball.

    “Should I stop now?”

    “Meow,” he said. Which was a clear enough sig­nal to me, so I thanked him, came back inside and made myself some of the very fine caramel choco­late cof­fee I got for Christ­mas. (Denise, my bar­rista, wher­ever you are, thank you!)

    And I put on “The Four Sea­sons,” because it’s Vivaldi weather. All those icy vio­lins swirling and scratch­ing. It doesn’t mat­ter which of the Sea­sons you have on — they all sound like win­ter. And win­ter can have a lovely sound to it really. You just have to know what to lis­ten for.

    (BTW, couldn’t quite work the tech­nol­ogy right to link to a sound-byte of “Four Sea­sons”, but if you want a quick lis­ten, go here and scroll down the page to the list of sam­ples. Good stuff, and it’ll remind you of a BMW commercial.)


    Related posts:

    1. Extremely inter­est­ing weather
    2. Cold as a bat’s underpants
    3. Frederica’s weather report
    4. The weather report

    January 22nd, 2007 | Grace | No Comments |

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