It's Not Tundra

While most Targets are SORT OF laid out the same, Targets in California don’t sell a LOT of snow shovels, so I had to go looking. When I saw what I thought were them down an aisle, I walked down there and went past a woman with a baby in a shopping basket. As I walked by I thought: “Hm. That looks like Stephanie and Fiona. But they live in Amherst so it can’t be…” And then I stopped. Oh. Yeah. Reality check. This was going to take awhile. Right. We had moved. Check. Luckily, Stephanie, who we had seen just a few weeks before when we were looking for a rental, was just as surprised to see us. We chatted for a bit and then chose our snow weapons. They had a snow shovel with a cooked handle that they called “ergonomic”. Now I’ve looked it up since and I guess it means that it’s easier to shovel because it has a crooked handle. It’s also designed as a “pusher” [1] , but I’d been taken in by that before. Still, it looked like the best bargain and we got two of those and one sm...

IN HONOR OF THE FIRST BIG SNOW IN THE 367 DAYS WE'VE LIVED HERE... THE DRIVEWAY!!!!!! [1] “Oh, how can you handle shoveling all that snow!” people would say. The cold was the first thing people commented on, the snow was the second. And it’s true. You did have to move it out of the driveway and the sidewalk. God knows that I was yelled at often enough to get off my ass and go shovel the driveway. My father would get pissed off occasionally at my lack of concern for snow removal and would bestir himself to do it. My mother would then go into something resembling a religious fervor [2] and scream: “Your father’s going to have a heart attack! Your father’s going to have a heart attack!” And the implication certainly was “Because of you”. And I would drag myself outside. Begrudgingly. [3] We had a large collection of snow-removing implements in my childhood. My father, far from a handy man and who I don’t think I ever saw swing a hammer, seemed incapable of parting with ...