Let it snow–let it snow–let it snow

Nothing gives one the sense of accomplishment like a freshly shoveled driveway. I think it is the instant gratification of seeing your job completed one clump at a time – step by step, seeing the progress in real time. It made me think how can we structure classroom lessons to give that same feeling of accomplishment as we go along. I was also grateful for the wool sweater I bought in New Zealand this past July – a long term bit of planning that has paid off in spades (snow shovels?)  this winter.

Here’s a couple pics.

Gargoyles are not known for their fondness of snow.

Suzi and Lili inspect my work.

Now ya see me - Now ya don't

A couple more days

and we’ll be in the month of May. May has always seemed to be an invisible month for me – the adjunct to a song about April showers. Maybe it’s because April being poetry month is usually a busy time around here or maybe it goes back to school days – May being that last full month before summer break – a time for turning in text books – washing the blackboard – final tests – film strips and thumb twiddling in bare walled classrooms.

Even May’s holiday, Memorial Day, comes at the end of the month skipping over ninety percent of the month’s days like absentmindedly stepping over a springtime puddle.

Maybe it’s the transformational qualities of the month – nobody spends a whole lot of time staring at a cocoon. We predict weather with caterpillars and plant gardens to attract butterflies but don’t notice the chrysalis affixed to a milkweed stem. The bitter cold of February or the melting swelter of an August afternoon can turn our heads – but the not really cold and not really hot sweatshirty kind of weather of this month just doesn’t snatch one’s attention.

The month of May is the low man on the calendar pole, a place holder, the opening band that nobody remembers once the headliners hit the stage.

May – a month to get through.

Raining cats and...

This is our foo dog Suzi – she is a Papillion. Supposedly Mari Antoinette carried one of these bat eared fuzz balls to the guillotine with her.

What makes our Suzi so special is that she is a weather dog, a canine meteorologist if you will. Her capabilities are rather astounding. Every morning when we wake up we shout “all dogs outside!” and Suzi and her undocumented step brother Hector, the Rat Terrier mix, shoot out of the door like thoroughbreds from a starting gate. When they return one can discern the current weather conditions via a quick inspection of Suzi.

IF SUZI IS:

Soaking wet – chances are good it is raining and appropriate actions need be taken before venturing out into the world.

Covered in icicles – It is snowing or very very cold – dress warmly – remember 90% of body heat is lost through the head.

Panting with ears drooped – it is too hot for yard work – make lemonade and find shade.

Blowing down the sidewalk like a hairy tumbleweed grabbing onto then losing grip on mailbox posts and street signs – you just may have a hurricane on your hands – head to the basement.

Corkscrewing a couple hundred feet into the air barking like the horn of a car alarm – you got yourself a tornado going on – to the basement!

Refusing to come in, instead electing to lay in the grass sporting tiny little white framed sunglasses next to the blow up pool – well, you just may have to use one of your “sick days” – grab whatever book you’ve been meaning to read and hit the hammock.

"This has been coordinated test of the Suzi emergency broadcast system in your area. A small self important dog that can quickly warn you during emergencies is being tested. If this had been an actual emergency such as a 'tornado warning or severe thunderstorm warning’, official messages would have followed the alert dog. This concludes this test of the Emergency Suzi Alert System."

Snowbody knows the trouble I've seen...

My neighbor let me borrow his snowblower yesterday...

The TV news just reported that an airplane was frozen to the tarmac here for nine hours yesterday!

pics by sara

Freezin' Cabreezin'

Well,

It’s definitely winter here on the North Coast of the United States. Lots of blowing lots of cold. Here are some chilly pics – talk to ya after the holiday.

Merry Christmas.

jack frost on the window

out the front door

The driveway

Center Street in Mentor, Oh

Rt 2 Traffic jam due to accident

Better to stay home and knit.

Brake me off a piece of that...

At least the car didn’t fall on me.

I’ve been a part of enough workshops, panels and brainstorming conglomerations in my day to have participated in a myriad of ice breaking activities. From the simple” let’s go around the room and take turns telling everyone your name and why you’re here” to “who was the first major band you ever saw live, or tell something about yourself that nobody would guess” these little games are meant to put the folks in the room at ease and to build a bit of camaraderie.

With the latter I usually answer that I was once a barrel racer. Barrel racing is a rather cowboy kinda event. One races around three barrels placed in a ring some good distance apart (makes sense so far right) in a cloverleaf pattern – sometimes the event is called cloverleaf barrel racing – cowboys like to get to the point. Well, at least most cowboys I have met are taciturn that is except for the exceptions – cowboy poets – they can be quite long winded and rhymy to boot (no pun intended) – but that would be another post in which my friend and cowboy poet expert Jim Blasingame would have to make a ten gallon and spurred appearance.

Nope, this post is about brake jobs – that’s my second double secret talent – I am capable of performing maintenance to the part of an automobile that keeps you from plowing into a crowded Walgreens pinning some assistant manager against the photo developing kiosk.

This may seem an unlikely aptitude for a poet to possess, mechanical ability – and I do know my share of verse slingers who have an aversion to physical labor but there are also those bards who swing stanzas like a blacksmith’s hammer. Now I’m not talking the drum circle Robert Bly Mythopoetic ™ embrace your maleness new aged hoo-haw that staled a decade or two ago. I am thinking more along the lines of Carl Sandburg, Gary Gildner or Wendell Berry – those “guys who take showers after work” as Senator Chris Dodd has been expounding on as of late.

Anyway – once you’ve done a brake job or two you’ll have a basic working knowledge of what is going on and should be able to figure your way through changing pads and rotors on most vehicles. An easy way to visualize the set up is to imagine a CD spinning and you stopping it by pinching the spinning disc with your forefinger and thumb (another way to look at it would be a giant red lobster pincing a roulette wheel, not certain why one would want to – but ya could.) The CD is the rotor attached to your axle and your fingers would be the brake pads - pretty basic concept.

Of course, different manufacturers like to throw in little obstacles like the need of a special wrench or impossible to remove Phillips headed screws so no brake job is without its unforeseen impediment, usually accompanied by rust. The nuts, bolts and screws associated with brake assemblies are by design impossible to get at, requiring creative combinations of various hand tools accompanied by muscle taxing contortions of the human body. And, since brake jobs are generally only needed every couple years these fasteners have ample time to corrode into single units. Did I mention skinned knuckles? Expect them – and if you are lucky enough as I was to be doing these repairs in an unheated garage when the temperature is below freezing you understand the exquisiteness of the time delayed pain of flesh scraped off on a rusted bolt head when a wrench has slipped.

Even so, there are few satisfactions comparable to stepping on a brake pedal and having your automobile stop with the knowledge that you’ve just saved yourself a couple hundred bucks in the process. Of course, this talent is best kept hidden because much as the person who owns a pickup truck is so very popular amongst friends looking to move large objects so too can the mechanically competent be pressed into service. Therefore, when participating in these ice breaking activities I will continue to list barrel racing as my hidden talent – one doesn’t get many requests to help a friend because the barrel racing light is on in their car.

No business like snow business

Snow Day!

The equivalent of winning the lottery for a 6th grader. Today I was supposed to start a three day residency in a middle school outside of Oberlin Ohio but at 6am I got a call from a teacher at that school informing me that there was no school today because of snow.

Now we do winter pretty well up here on the north coast of the United States of America. Cleveland has plenty of snow plows and rust bucket cowboys to careen them about at breakneck speeds throwing blinding salt laced slushies across windshields of automobiles they pass and knocking down the mailbox in front of parent's house on a regular basis. An approaching snow plow will send whole cadres of grade school bus stop denizens running shriek squealing away from the roadside to avoid being covered with an icy batter of dirty frozen street sludge. And plow drivers never stopped their trucks to get out and give chase when pelted with snowballs – they are the one safe moving target that can be besieged with impunity - nonchalantly shaking off the icy missiles like a buffalo quivering its shoulder to send a fly on its way.

Usually the snow doesn't slow the populous here in town. Well, it might slow down things a bit but there is none of the crippling insanity that happens in places like Washington D.C. and further south where an inch of snow shuts the world down and is the impetus for stampeding in the Chinese made and most likely flammable electric blanket aisle at Wal-Mart. (Okay, I misspelled Wal-Mart as wallmart and MS word spell check caught it and corrected it with the trademarked spelling – that's a little creepy.) Anyway, snow generally doesn't stop us here. Chicago, Detroit, Green bay, Cleveland, Buffalo etc. etc. we can handle this.

Now the snow has stopped out there and it is a winter wonderland – the fluffy white stuff hasn't been tossed around wheel wells and drug around until it is all dirty and the colors of toe jam. Perfect for sledding or any other wintery fun time activities – none of which I care to partake in. Really, they could have had school today – it was worse yesterday when they did have school. But see, up here there are snow days built into the calendar – so just as often as not, snow days are called kind of as an afterthought – a reward for the inconveniences suffered the day before. But hey, I'm not one to complain. I got to stay in my warm bed a bit later today.

Hard to believe that just a little over a week ago I was walking around in 90 degree heat and humidity in a rice paddy on Bali. Well, another week and Sara and I are off to teach and speak at a conference in Istanbul – I don't think they get any snow days there.