A Reminder of Where I Live

Parental Unit Papa drilled into my miniscule cranium, all the years that I was growing up,

Be prepared. Think ahead. Walk through the problem before it is a problem.

Remind me again that I live in the Frozen Northeast Ohio. The land of ice and snow. If George R.R. Martin lived in Cleveland he would never have even started writing Game of Thrones because he would know that Winter is Always coming around here. Always coming and never leaving and….

I digress.

We live in a small development where most of the residents are more Geriatrically challenged than HHBL and I. Not much more but more. I am not sure if that is the reason why the person who plows all the driveways does such an astronomically horrible job of it…..but he does. And when a driveway is not plowed well and then the person who lives in said house doesn’t go out and do a bit of work cleaning off the driveway and then the snow gets driven over time and again by various people and then there is a freeze and a thaw and a freeze and a thaw and driving and…..everything turns to ice that is as strong as The Wall.

Not that I would know anything about that.

My Nemesis

You can’t really tell but the ice at this particular point on my gently sloping driveway is around 2 inches thick. It is thick. It is gnarly and it is clinging to the driveway with as much force as the Kardashians cling to fame. Dislodging it with the sharp end of a shovel only serves to dislocate my shoulder. At one point, I resorted to taking a hammer to it. My hammer is not Mjolnir (look it up if you don’t know) and therefore not as effective at breaking things.

Where is Thor when you need him!

Put some melty stuff on it, you are saying to yourself. And I would have….if we had any more melty stuff. And there, now I have circled back to the whole “always be prepared and think through the problem” that I mentioned about 10K words ago. Way back in the Fall, which I can hardly remember because the cold has lasted so long, I bought what I thought was an appropriate amount of melty stuff to get through the winter. That appropriate amount ran out about three weeks ago. As I shook out the last of the melty stuff onto the most critical parts of the driveway I knew I had gambled and not well. I have been deluding myself into thinking that we could get through the rest of the never ending cold and ice on the driveway. But I finally threw in the frozen towel this morning. You see, it is not a pleasant thing to have to go out of the garage in the early morning with Max the Magnificent hot to trot and have to restrain a dog with a sloshing bladder so that you can safely traverse the icy col. I am wondering if George Mallory had this much trouble on the Khumbu Ice Fall. After the latest near fall this morning I determined to stop at Lowe’s on the way home to buy just a bit more melty stuff.

The woman in the aisle, who by the way was setting up the display of spring gardening merchandise, looked at me with pity and just a bit of scorn. I felt rather like Oliver, holding out my melty stuff bowl and asking pitiably, “Please Sir, could I have some more?”

We don’t have any more of THAT! (as she glanced at the displays of planting tools). And I know for a fact that Home Depot, Walmart and Target are all out too.

Rats.

Marcs was out, if they even had any. And I had to traverse all the darn aisles of useless plastic items just to figure that out.

I was melty stuff defeated and looking at the prospect of praying that I didn’t break a leg before Spring as well as wasting time tomorrow trying to find melty stuff. And then, into my miniscule cranium there popped an image. I am very good at remembering if I have seen something. And I remembered, just at that moment, that there had been a display of melty stuff just to the right of the door as you entered Heinens. Oh please, oh please, oh please let there be some. So I braved the Heinens parking lot at 5:15pm (you take your life in your hands at about that time) and went in and…..there it was. THREE shelves full of melty stuff. I restrained myself from falling on my knees in happiness and just stood there with a happy grin on my face before I grabbed a container, no better make it two containers, and went over to plunk down some money.

All I can say, after this rather rambling post, is that come October of 2015 I am going to buy a pallet full of melty stuff. As God is my witness I’ll never be without melty stuff again!

I might have been listening to Gone With the Wind for long stretches.