Scheduling bumps

Yesterday afternoon my mom and I picked up my brother's sons from their house after they got home from school and brought them back to our house. I had big plans for the rest of my last day off: mail some Christmas cards overseas, finish decorating here, go across town to my house and perform the weekly maintenance chores, decorate the Christmas tree there...

Well, at least I got the cards mailed.

After we got back to the house the boys had some supper that my mom had had cooking in our BRAND! NEW! OVEN! and then they settled in for some homework and television while I got down to the serious business of chatting online and writing yesterday's blog post. As I was starting to begin thinking about possibly considering getting my butt up out of the chair, my mom's police/fire scanner lit up. "Do not use Hanover Street;" came one voice. "Use Market." A few minutes later: "Market Street is now a sheet of ice. Accidents all along Kosciuszko Street. Rescue vehicles are stuck at the following locations..."

Sometime after we got to our house the soft and gentle snow that had been falling for a while turned into something a little meaner. Now, little more than an hour later, Nanticoke's roads had become useless. Impassable. So much for doing anything across town.

My brother came to our house from work in his four-wheel drive truck, so he didn't have too terrible of a time navigating the roads. But I was not going to chance them in my Tercel. Besides, there was barely time to replace the old strand of big-bulb lights on the back porch with 120 blue LEDs, resulting in a total blue LED domination of my mom's Christmas lights. (The house now looks something like a crashed spaceship or an interdimensional portal. I swear these lights leak into the ultraviolet.) Then I had to make my lunch for today (which I ate around 5:30) and, as a final act, spread calcium chloride on our sidewalks.

Which meant that the sidewalks at my house went untreated.

At least, untreated until I got home from work today. This is a big disadvantage to this schedule: if you wind up doing something before or after work, something like shoveling snow or spreading salt, it means you have less time for your normal before- or after-work routine. Shoveling and brushing away the loose snow and spreading the salt on my sidewalks after work today meant that I got home half an hour later than usual. (I also had to stop for gas on the way home, so that didn't help.)

And now it's nearly 9:00 again. Time to make the lunch, pull out the clothes, and get myself to bed. Take care! I'll talk to you later!