Snow Day: Part Two

The entire novel Rexroi is on-line. Click on 'FREE CHAPTERS of an Upcoming Novel' on the sidebar to the right. It really is the whole novel; I just haven't changed the link to say so, yet. Maybe I will today.

March in western Wisconsin is the snowiest month of the year. It also is the one that breaks your heart the most because you always get a few melty Spring-like days where it's warm and you can think about what you're going to plant and so on. I'm pretty much on the low-end of the gardening scale, but I got a few plants and I do pretty good at watering. Mostly I specialize in perennials, though I do have one place where I'll plant some non-perennials.

I call this 'rustic' gardening. I try to work in the wild beauty of the surrounding woods. If a wildflower pops up in my yard, I mow around it. My rule is that if I think it's pretty than it gets to stay.

However, please do not take gardening advice from me. There are certainly more experienced gardeners than I. My usual attitude is that plants must earn the right to be in my garden (or house). If they can survive the way I want to treat them, then they can belong to me. It's not like I'm going to spend my days being their butler or anything. They have to be able to stand on their own two feet and pull their own weight.

Monday was also a snow day in this area. I feel a great deal of guilt taking another day off like this, especially after there was so much talk in the office about what everybody else was going to do about today's snow. It sounded like most were going to try and make it in come hell or high water. Boy, I'm sure not living up to the required standards of a hearty Midwesterner, am I? Ah, screw it! At least I'll be a living Midwesterner, even if everyone calls me a pussy.

I've been called a pussy before. I've survived.

I suppose I could make it to work if I truly wanted to. It would probably take about three hours and I would be at severe risk of ending up at the side of the road in a snow bank in freezing weather and if that happened I'd be pretty screwed and the snow is still coming down ... hmmm.
I wonder if I have any cocoa left. Maybe I'll build a snowman.

There was a woman in the office yesterday who had two children with her (a boy and a girl), the boy was about six and the girl might have been three or four. So I asked the boy if he'd built a snowman on Monday. (He had). Then I asked him if he used a carrot for the nose (yes) and charcoal for the eyes (yes). Then he kind of clammed up, because why was this big man interrogating him about his snowman building habits, anyways?

So far I haven't written anything controversial that the spiders seem to like, you know like the Enron Scandals, the War in Iraq, Bush's sagging approval rating, problems with the Medicare Prescription plan or anything like that. Please accept my apologies. I'm really just killing time here until I can get out of the house and do something.