Some people get the image of Jesus, I get Ed Asner...

I have a classic love/hate relationship with city snowplow drivers. I truly love how they make my life a whole lot better but frankly, I have been known to moan about their timing.

Anyone who lives in a high snow area knows exactly what I'm talking about. A lot of snow falls, you go out and shovel it because you want to do it before it gets any heavier and then the snow plow comes and plows all the snow from the street back into your driveway. When timed correctly, a person can go out and clear the driveway before it freezes.

Over the past couple of days, we had what was forecasted to be one of the storms of the century but it went from a snowstorm to a slush fest and back to snow again creating what is known here as "heart attack snow" which is best shoveled in increments during the entire storm so you don't kill yourself at the end by trying to clear it all at once.

Sage advice that to my recent memory a person would be well served by taking and that's what I did.

This morning, after doing what I hoped was my final shoveling for a few days, I came in and had just pulled off my boots when I heard the snowplow come up the alley. Now the alley had been plowed yesterday so I was a little surprised but after a deep sigh and a cup of cocoa, I pulled my boots back on, gathered my shovel and chopper and went back out to finish one more time.

Imagine my surprise to find that the snowplow driver had deposited Ed Asner in my driveway!!

Just for comparison purposes:

Thanks snowplow guy! You made my day!!

Tim Tam Slam

I remember watching this one night a few years ago and wondering where I could get some Tim Tams.

Tonight I can tell you two things.

1) Tim Tams have arrived in Minneapolis (at Rainbow)

2) Oh. My. God. Graham Norton's reaction is spot on!!!

Food Euphoria!!

Looking For Christmas

For the first time ever, I woke up this morning, the Saturday before Christmas, without a single present purchased.

This is usually is one of my favorite times of year to the point where I actually choose to listen to the 24 hour Christmas music radio station for hours at a time while I plan to bake cookies, go look at lighting displays, and call up old friends just to say "Merry Christmas". I normally get a kick out of even the small things like having to look for my single roll of scotch tape that I might have used once since the same time the year before.

But this year it's different. I suffered a hard loss earlier this year and I've discovered that as Christmas nears I've somehow managed to keep busy enough and strong enough for the other people who need me to get through the last months without truly grieving. As each day passes in December, I find that I don't want to leave my dark, dank dungeon until Christmas Eve and then I only want to pop my head out to watch the yule log burning on the television and really cry it all out. (Of course in my delusional state, on December 26, I believe I'll wake up and feel more like my normal self.)

So today, when I realized that none of the shopping had been done, I looked at my husband (who has been positively a saint as my moping as been getting worse) and asked if he would please come out and do some Christmas shopping with me, even though he hates it because if I didn't have some support, I'd probably get nothing accomplished given my frame of mind.

I made a list of everyone we needed a gift for (about 20 adults and 2 children)

Turns out it was the shortest Christmas shopping trip ever and I mean ever!

The first store we went to, the parking lot was pretty full so I decided to park about a block away and we walked back. When we went in the first thing we saw was a giant Toys For Tots donation box that had one lonely toy in it. I asked one of the people working how often they had to empty the box and she told me "not often, it's a tough year for everyone".

Thinking about all the children whose families by circumstance have to rely on strangers to receive even a single present, I turned my husband and told him what I was thinking, he nodded as he smiled warmly at me and said, "and I think it's a great idea, every kid needs something to hold on too and as a bonus, it will get me out of this madhouse really, really fast!"

We spent all our time in the store looking for deals on stuffed animals (because we figured there was less of a chance they would be damaged or broken that boxed toys). We spent our present money on a large pile of good sized Mickey, Minnie, Pooh, Tigger and teddy bears that we then donated to Toys For Tots.

Sometimes you have to grab the Christmas spirit and hold on tight when it finds you.

Merry Christmas everyone.

The Lemming Preservation Society

I have reached an age where, with the exception of new technology, many, many, many things pull up images from my past. Some of these gentle nudges, make me waste time on things I never meant to ever think about again, but other's come from so far out of left field, that I explode in laughter in celebration of their stupidity.

Lucky for you, dear readers, this post is about one of the latter.

First of all, for any younger readers, can you imagine a time when the phone rang, the person answering it had no idea who was calling? You had to answer the phone because it was the primary means people communicated with each other besides letters and postcards when they were not face to face.

The telephone while useful, could also be a thing of terror. Ask your grandmother about "heavy breathers" if you don't believe me because that's not what I'm here to talk about.

Today I saw the following tweet on Twitter:

I prefer to call them lemmings.

I burst out laughing because it called up (get it? Called up?) a long forgotten memory about how the telephone was also a great toy for kids and teenagers to use to annoy anyone with reckless abandon.

Kids used to call stores and ask the clerk who answered "Do you have Prince Albert in a can? Yes? Well you better let him out!". How many harried housewives got the call asking if there refrigerator was running only to then be told ,"Well, you'd better catch it!". There was some serious kid joy in hearing the line go dead as the receiver was slammed back down into the cradle.

What's this got to do with lemmings, kimbers, hmmmm?

Well, one night, there was a slumber party for 15 girls at a friend's house. About 7:30, her mother, who had a serious drinking problem (very normal behavior in those days) got fed up with the noise and in her drunken rant called us a bunch of lemmings.

Problem was, none of us knew what a lemming was and we weren't sure she hadn't just made the word up, so Mrs P (sorry, I'll never identify her) got her wish for quiet as the gaggle of girls went into the library to look up lemmings in dictionary. Then we had to get out the Encyclopedia Britannica, to see just how adorable these little things were.

We herded ourselves (like a pack of lemmings) back into the kitchen to tell Mrs. P we thought lemmings were very cute and she slurred back at us "they might be cute but they are stupid... one does something stupid, they all do it! Do you know that if one jumps off a cliff they all do? Stupid I tell ya! Stupid! now you girls keep quiet, I'm going to bed!" and with that she was off.

Now maybe it's adult in me, but no matter how confident I might be in my children to do the right thing, leaving 15 6th graders alone and unsupervised at 8:15 with a whole night looming before them does not seem like the best plan.

Especially when there is a phone in the kitchen, far, far away from the slumbering Mom. After sending a scout to make sure Mrs. P really was asleep we started calling people randomly out of the phonebook and saying:

Hello?

Long distance calling.

Norway.

We're calling from the Lemming Preservation Society and we were wondering if you would like to donate a dollar to buy a brick to build a wall to protect the lemmings from themselves?

and then we cracked up into peals of girlish laughter unable to go any farther. After about an hour of this one guy thanked us for being the best "unwanted call" he had ever received....

What a killjoy! Nothing like adult approval to kill the fun!