Blizzard Travel, and Inspiration

Tonight, New England is having its first blizzard of the season. I was very disappointed that Mommy got wind of its severity and timeframe before the boys and I got a chance to go back to the Space Center for the second trip of the week, to watch a movie about asteroids or black holes or the night sky. I didn't think that it would arrive on schedule, or that it would be bad, so I was highly annoyed that Amy put the kabosh on our semi-ambitious outing and said we had to stay closer to home.

It just happens that Amy, and the meterologists were right, as was the governor of Massachusetts, who got on TV this afternoon and told everyone not to drive in Massachusetts (a no-brainer for me - I don't like to go to Massachusetts anyway...). Yeah, they were right that it would come in the late afternoon and be nasty. Ian, Daniel and I were blissfully unaware of this, because we were blissfully buried in an arcade-plus-climbing-structure play area, kind of like Chuck E. Cheese without the blatant sleaze factor. I was watching wonderfully Daniel bomb out at Skittle-ball while Ian racked up a small mountain of tickets, and also the two of them climbing all around the maze and yelping encouragements to each other at whistling vocal pitches. But eventually Amy caught up with me and informed me, somewhat to my surprise, that there were already a few inches on the ground; all the rest was words of direction rather than description.

So we got on the road and slid around for about 40 minutes on a trip that should have taken about 25, but not without comic relief. Ian knew that I was nervous about getting up a particular hill, and staying on it through the traffic light, so he volunteered:

"Here's a trick that Toby did once."

This was followed by an account, in some technical detail, from a particular episode of Thomas the Tank Engine, where Mavis got stuck in the snow and Toby came to the rescue, somehow getting her out by pushing her very slowly along the tracks... Or something like that. For some r reason, I didn't catch all of the subtleties of the strategy...

At another point, I noticed a pick-up truck with a plow ahead of me, and expressed first pleasure that a plow was ahead of us on the road, and then disappointment that it wasn't actually plowing the road in front of us. The boys were interested in this, and some time several miles after the unhelpful pick-up truck parted company with us, when we were already about a mile from our house, Ian noticed a similar pick-up truck with a snow plow in someone's driveway (or the same one, depending on whom you ask), and he observed something like "There's that snow plow again."

I told him I thought it was a different plow, but he wasn't sure of that. Then he asked me, "Do you think that Mommy might have called it?"

I laughed, and said I didn't think so, but Ian knew Mommy a little better than that:

" I think she did."

(December 26, 2010)