Your Personal Penguin

Although Naomi very much likes both the book and the song (shout-out to gift bestowers C & B!), and although I admit to being surprised by how much better the song is than I suspected it was going to be, and although I am glad to know that Davey Jones is still getting work, still I
can't help wondering if it was a mistake to download "Your Personal Penguin." All day long I have been singing it to myself in my office (with my door closed, yes). I am about at the end of my rope. "Lots of other penguins seem to do fine in a universe of nothing by ice. But if I could
be yours and you could be mine, our cozy little world could be twice as nice."

We are finally emerging from our universe of nothing but ice. For the past week, the weather in Bellevue rather resembled...the weather in Minnesota. At least the weather we remember- who knows what it's doing this year. Last Wednesday afternoon, the work hallway buzz was that it was starting to snow, and that people were having trouble getting up the ramp out of our subterranean parking garage. I decided to join the herd and get on the road. I left at 4:30 to a traffic jam in our own little parking lot (and a beautiful, fluffy snowfall). I had to wait ten
minutes to get out of my parking space. Traffic is a strangely big deal here, and is rabidly tracked and reported on. But normal traffic is meaningless as compared to what happens when any sort of precipitation other than our normal warm rain enters the picture. People here simply do not do winter driving. Collectively, we lose our nerve. In our defense, of course, we can cite the hilly terrain. When I finally got out of the parking lot and around the corner onto the main road, going up the long, steep, impressively iced-up hill to the freeway at a slow crawl was a little nerve wracking, especially as we had to snake around cars with tires making that futile RRRRRrrreeeeeeeee sound, and other cars that had been outright abandoned. (Abandoning one's car is a common response to winter driving conditions here.)

The freeway was easier to navigate, but when I got back off, things were similarly nuts. On a stretch of road that normally takes me four minutes to drive through, I sat behind a burgundy Ford Explorer, stopped sometimes as long as five minutes before we would creep forward another ten feet. The Explorer had a DVD playing, and at first I thought it was "Air Bud," because I don't know of any other movie that has a cute yellow lab as the main character. Then of course there was scene after scene of lots of cutie cute yellow lab puppies running around. I have never seen "Air Bud," but I know it has something to do with basketball, and there didn't seem to be any sports in this puppy-centered film. Was it the yellow lab version of 101 Dalmations? You can have that one for nothing, Disney. I could tell who the bad guys were, because, just like in the dalmation movie, they were always sitting in some kind of van. The puppies somehow found the last functioning drive-in movie theater in the country and for reasons unclear to me, invaded the snack bar. A woman ordered a large popcorn and a moment later a cutie cute yellow lab puppy burst out of it. What a mess! But, cute! All the while, George Bush addressed those of us with the radio on about his brilliant plan to fix a much messier and much less adorable popcorn spill far, far away. That's when I started to regret that I couldn't actually hear the 101 Yellow Labs movie.

Normally, if I leave work at 4:30, I can pick up Naomi at her daycare and still be home shortly after 5:00. On Wednesday I didn't get to her daycare until 6:15. There were only a few kids left, and two teachers, and Naomi's biggest concern was that she had just received some snack food, and surely I wasn't going to make her leave it there! I stopped for gas, milk, string cheese, and cheezits (the selection of nourishing food at this quikstop was about what you would expect). We sat in traffic, munching our snack food and drinking our milk, singing songs, and talking about snow. There is a strip mall near our house with a big empty K-Mart (classy, I know), and as we drove past the vast snowy parking lot, a Subaru wagon with the windows rolled down was doing harcore doughnuts. It looked like fun, but I felt like Naomi and I had about reached our winter excitement peak. Parenthood can really wreck some of your thrill seeking instinct. We got home at 7:30.

Nothing can make this already long story short, but to bring it to a close, I will report that both Thursday and Friday were "snow days," meaning that Naomi's daycare was closed. Jim and I both went to work for a half day on Friday, passing the all-wheel drive Audi baton. The snow
stayed all weekend, bolstered by a troop surge on Tuesday, resulting in another snow day. Now, finally, the temperatures are rising out of the low thirties, the snow is disappearing in the way that it normally does in the first four hours after it falls in these parts, and we are weirdly looking forward to an actual 5-day work week... barring unforeseen circumstances, of course. To the other parts of the country (and now Europe) who are having similar run-ins with this big bad winter, we stand with you. That's the real reason we abandoned our cars.