Let it snow.

Over the weekend the DC area had a record breaking snowfall. It cancelled the government on Monday. You know it's getting near the end when a friend calls you up more than once and worriedly asks if you're taking it easy while shoveling snow. Your ancient heart and all, you know.

I told my friend that if throwing a little snow around was going to do me in, I shouldn't be in the gene pool anymore. She assured me that my days of being in the gene pool anymore were long gone.

And where were my three strapping boys who I put through college (full tuition & fees--no student loans, yay!) while I was clearing twenty inches of snow off 90 feet of driveway, 90 feet of sidewalk and 24 feet of walkway? MIA as usual. I hope they were at least at their Mother's house helping shovel the driveway and walk. Her new husband is over 60, after all.

Although I doubt it, the young generation being what it is. I helped shovel out the driveway of a neighbor who is pretty incapacitated by physical ailments. A house guest of his, in her forties, had already done most of it. His twenty year-old son showed up, felt obliged to pitch in since I was there laboring away, threw about four half-shovelfuls of snow to the curb, and then brushed snow off his buried car for the last half hour I was there finishing the job. Motion without much momentum.

When I got home from that neighborliness a city snowplow had come down our street. Its driver barreled along my curb line at about 30 MPH and pushed the snow over the snowbank onto my bone dry sidewalk, covering a long stretch of it with two two feet of snow and ice chunks from the street. I had expected to shovel the end of my driveway again after it passed, but not my sidewalk all over again. Nobody else's sidewalk was similarly treated.

This annoyed me greatly. It is still unshoveled, forcing pedestrians to detour into the street to get past my house, and it's going to remain that way til it melts.