20 Below

The alarm clock is set to the news-weather-and-traffic station and this morning when it went off and penetrated my sleeping consciousness it did so at a particularly apt moment, as they were announcing the temperature in various locales around the area and happened to mention my new hometown, where the mercury was apparently standing at 12 degrees Fahrenheit. Needless to say this did not inspire me to throw off the covers and face the day, but one snooze-span later I dragged myself to the shower. Thankfully the pipes had not frozen solid.

One thing I’ve found living in Virginia is that the winter temperatures go through peaks and valleys, with bitter cold spells and springlike stretches, always coming in unpredictable combinations that vary wildly from year to year. So right now we happen to be in a long stretch of near-freezing days and well-below nights, but physical discomfort aside I can’t summon up too much shock and outrage about it. It’s just the weather, a prime example of something that’s nobody’s fault and nothing anybody can do much about. (I could get outraged about the oft-heard “Global warming my ass!” which seems to be the 21st century’s “Cold enough for ya?” but I’m trying really hard not to get too rankled over that one.)

It hasn’t snowed since the blizzard in which we relocated, except for an inch-deep dusting the other night that was comparatively nothing, but the piles around the cul-de-sac where the snowplows deposited the massive moving day accumulation are basically still there. It’s just been too cold for the piles to properly melt. This is only noteworthy because a huge pile of snow is blocking half of the top of my driveway. I can’t be too hard on the plow operators (honestly I think the city services in this regard were really excellent in terms of promptness and efficiency) because they did their level best to put the snow between people’s driveways, and by and large around the end of our court they succeeded. The problem was they couldn’t see my driveway, because I didn’t have a chance to shovel more than a narrow trench down the left side of it before using said trench to unload the moving truck. So a small mountain was dumped in front of the right side of the driveway, which was indistinguishable from the lawn. I have to steer around this giant lump of ice very carefully when I back out of the driveway in the morning. Supposedly things are due to warm up some this week, so maybe the pile will be gone by next Monday.


This past weekend proved cold enough for us to take the calculated risk of starting a fire in the wood-burning stove, and I’m happy to report that we did not burn the house down. We still have a chimney sweep coming out today, but we’ve already concluded that the den can be downright habitable when there’s a nice fire going, and that’s encouraging. We might have shivered and suffered through the weekend, but my Very Little Bro came to visit and my wife and I feel much more beholden to the needs of family and/or guests than we do to our own. Hence. We actually had two fires, one each Saturday and Sunday night, and by Sunday I was forced to buy a bag-o-firewood from the 7-Eleven. The previous owners of our house left us a fair amount of firewood under the deck, but the vast majority of it was in chunk that might have fit in the original fireplace but were too big for the stove. We used all the small pieces Saturday, and we’ll use the remaining trunk-sections once we can get them chopped down to size. Yes, this means that our list of requisite fix-up purchases has been extended to include “axe”. Woohoo!

While staying with us, Very Little Bro steered us towards some entertainment we had previously been missing out on: Jersey Shore on MTV. I know plenty has already been written about this show elsewhere, and most of it is on the mark (it would be hard to miss the mark of such a broad target, a show that’s all surface about people who are all surface) but the most striking thing to me was that my primary response was not disbelief or disdain but simple nostalgia. I went to high school with those kids, with fewer tattoos and fake boobs, but still. I keep waiting for New Jersey (and by strange extension/association, my childhood) to be less of a subject of fascination for the rest of the country/world, but I guess I still have some more waiting to do.