First of all, I want to apologize for the way this site looks. It’s gotten really ugly lately, and even though I keep coming here looking for something neat to do with it, I have neither the attention span to sit down and devote enough time to managing it, nor the money to pay someone with better graphics and web development skills to take care of it for me.
Secondly, I hate snow. The older I get, the more I hate it.
It snowed last night, and even though it was only 4 inches, it’s still a pain in the ass. The meteorologists were calling for somewhere between 5 and 11 inches overnight, but when Kel and I woke up this morning, we chuckled because, in our northerners’ opinions, it was only a dusting. Kel grew up in the Rochester-Buffalo area of New York, and I in the Washington, DC area, so we are no strangers to real snow. This was nothing compared to what we’ve experienced.
Yesterday was Kel’s once-a-month payday, so not only were we in need of groceries and had to go shopping, but it seems that because of the threat of snow, the whole rest of the Raleigh-Durham area were also desperate to stock up on staples. He left work early because he had a few extra hours accumulated, and by the time he got home and picked me up so we could go to Harris Teeter and Kroger, the snow panic was in full swing. It was complete mayhem. All the soccer moms and their carts full of three kids were out, banging into other shoppers and abandoning their cart full of kids in the middle of the aisles so nobody else could get by. The milk section was completely empty, which we didn’t care about because we don’t drink it, and since we have plenty of bread, we didn’t even go into that section, but I’d assume the shelves were bare there, too.
I’ll never understand why people make a mad dash for milk and bread.
Anyway, moving on . . . Earlier today, we put on our double layers of pants and shirts so we could go outside and play around in the snow. It turned out to be pretty shallow, and it had sleeted in the afternoon, so it was really more ice than anything. We walked down to the main road that our apartment complex is off of, just to check out how clear the roads were, and it turns out a plow hadn’t been down it since much, much later. There was tamped down snow and ice all over the place. We saw an idiotic driver almost spin out turning into our neighborhood. If we were closer to the corner at the time, we might have been hit by him.
It was bitterly cold out there, and it was still slightly sleeting, so our cheeks were frozen. Even though we’d bundled up pretty well, we were ice cold. I had wanted to walk over to the golf course that’s next to our apartment complex, but there was no way I could handle the freeze. I’ve become such a wimp from living down here in the south for so long. I say “so long” sarcastically, though, because we’ve only been down here about 2½ years. We’ve been lucky, though–it doesn’t do much of any snowing in Raleigh, especially when you compare it to the Buffalo area.
After I took off the outer layer of pants, I stood at the patio door, looking out (it’s much prettier from inside the warmth of an apartment) and I noticed this cute little bird flying around. Neither Kel nor I are bird enthusiasts, so we don’t know what kind it was, but it landed near one of our windows and looked in at us. We decided that if we had to guess, we would think it’s a female, pregnant bluebird. Of course, it’s winter, so it could’ve been a male bluebird with lots of extra feathers to keep it warm, but we liked to think she was so pudgy because she was about to lay some eggs.
I tried to get my camera and take a picture if it before it flew away, but it took off before I could even walk over to where the camera was. I decided I’d go out on the patio with my telephoto lens and see if I could see the bird flying around out there. I stood there for a while and it came back and landed on a tree that was about 50 feet from where I was standing, and I was able to get a shot of it.
The reason I titled this “For The Bird(s)” is because this bird, and a couple of other ones in our neighborhood, seemed to be the only creatures who were happy it had snowed. They were the only ones who looked like they were having fun. There were no kids out, no pet owners walking their dogs, nobody walking around inspecting the damage. Just these goofy birds flying around freezing their tailfeathers off. Yeah, snow is definitely for the birds!
