Pickles & Dimes

Friday:
Listen to the forecast of SNOW!SNOW!SNOW! Sigh. Cancel appointment to get car’s oil changed and (sob) broken snowblower fixed. Look forward to enjoying cinnamon rolls on Saturday morning after shoveling.

Friday night:
Take husband up on offer to do Saturday errands on Friday night. Enjoy a lovely dinner out along with a casual stroll through Target. Arrive at grocery store to discover they are out of hamburger. Curse hotdish-loving countrymen.

Later Friday night:
No snow yet. Congratulate ourselves on our proactiveness; now we don’t have to leave the house at all! Mourn (once again) the loss of a functioning snowblower.

Saturday morning:
Snow! But only about 6 inches. Six inches is nothing. Decide to attack the snow now (even though it’s still falling) rather than wait until it’s finished. Reschedule long-awaited breakfast of cinnamon rolls until Sunday. Spend a relatively easy hour shoveling. Go inside and cram all of our snow-covered gear into the dryer for Round 2. Wrap Christmas presents while listening to Christmas music and snuggling with the puppy. Look outside an hour later and see absolutely no sign that we were ever outside – it’s like we never existed. Resist urge to sob. Decide this would be a good way to get information from terrorists (“Confess or shovel this driveway until all the snow is gone!”).

Saturday afternoon:
Still snowing. Remind self that winter doesn’t officially start for another few weeks. It’s like winter personally hates us. The roof drifts are ridiculous, like 10-feet-tall white sand dunes. Trudge back outside. Plow has tossed an ice fortress across our driveway. Decided to tackle it anyway, since we’ll be out again Sunday and the plow will be by once more. Spend 45 minutes shoveling, only to look back at my “progress” and realize it looks like I haven’t done anything. Quickly reach Shoveling Fatigue™. Realize husband has also reached Shoveling Fatigue as we get into a shouting match after he criticizes my speed, as though I have been standing outside smoking French cigarettes while he does all the work. Point out that I am conveniently shoveling the four-foot drifts, carrying them all the way across the driveway and tossing the snow over our 6-foot fence, while he is at the narrower part of the driveway where he can toss the snow onto the 2-foot drifts on either side. Do not mention that he is using a much-heavier shovel that can handle a much larger quantity of snow. Despair over lack of upper arm strength. Get annoyed at my hat falling down over my eyes every time I bend down. Remove it, despite husband telling me I shouldn’t. Realize hair has frozen to scarf. Fret over whether the removal of said scarf will also result in the removal of hair. Neighbor leaves in car. Five minutes later, neighbor’s wife goes trudging by, her face stoic, yielding a shovel. We follow her to find her husband’s car stuck and the tires spinning uselessly. He gets free right as we arrive. There is a lot of wind. I probably should not have taken off my hat, but do not admit this to husband, pretending instead that I do not feel the wind freezing my eyeballs. Put hat back on; it is frozen stiff, as are the kleenex I stuffed into my jacket pocket. After two hours of shoveling, the motion light comes on. It is dark out. I can’t feel my thighs or two fingers on my right hand. Husband has ice on his eyelashes. Shoveling sucks. This is possibly the worst thing ever.

Saturday night:
Spend a ridiculous amount of time anxiously looking out the window. The snow tapers off, but it is windy as crap out there. Watch weather report and laugh as one station goes to their on-the-spot reporter outside and all you hear is the wind roaring through his microphone.Take some ibuprofen to ward off the aches and pains. Hear a news item on the New York Giants, and how they prepared for their game against the Vikings by leaving a half hour early. They’re now stuck in Kansas City. Wish fervently for a forfeit to reward their stupidity.

Sunday morning:
Get up and see the plow has already been by and the snow isn’t too bad. Realize my arms refuse to rise higher than my head. Decide to tackle everything first thing. Hold off on the cinnamon rolls – we’ll have them when we’re done. We are wearing layers big time: long underwear, two pairs of socks, two pairs of gloves, ski masks, my insanely long scarf. The driveway ice fortress is hard as a rock and requires plenty of Snow Cleaving, an action that irritates my Shovel Blister. Cannot believe I have been shoveling so much that I gave myself a blister. Jason takes the roof rake to the drifts, as I grumble about the fact that we actually have to use a rake on our roof. What’s next? Siding spades? Hallway hoes? The roof rake drops a metric ton of snow on our driveway, so our “quick” shovel turns into a 90-minute affair. Halfway in, I realize there will be No Cinnamon Rolls. There is Whining. My ski mask makes me claustrophobic; it’s hard to breathe through the material, and the eyehole keeps blocking my vision. I would be a clumsy bank robber. There is very little shoveling; it’s more like snow tossing, shuffling a few steps forward, tossing the snow ahead, and repeating I’m until close enough to toss it over the fence. I am barely able to lift my arms. This is an insane workout. I estimate we have spent nearly 4.5 hours total shoveling snow. We finally finish, coming inside and seeing that the Dome roof collapsed.

Spend the rest of the day in an exhausted stupor on the couch. Vehemently vow two things: 1) we are getting our snowblower repaired next weekend and 2) I am having cinnamon rolls next weekend NO MATTER WHAT.

Sunday afternoon:
Discover a dead, buried snowman in our yard. He deserved it.

Last week I ran three miles without stopping. (Somehow I feel the need to clarify that these miles were consecutive.) To say I was impressed with myself would be a grievous understatement, and in fact, once I decided to run the whole distance without stopping, my main motivation was pretty much just to do it so that I could say I did.

My previous longest run without stopping was two miles, which somehow became embedded in my brain as That Distance I Reach So I Can Walk. (True story: as a sprinter in high school, I secretly bummed car rides from friends whenever I was supposed to be out on a long-distance run.) For months, I’d run two miles and automatically walk without even really checking to see if I needed to. After recently completing a mile one night at a decent pace and realizing I wasn’t even breathing hard, I decided it might be time to up the ante.

Whenever I run, I have to engage in this crazy conversation with myself that is full of negotiations (if I run X at Y, I can do Z; X being an arbitrary distance at Y speed, and Z being a completely counterproductive reward such as drinking a liter of Mountain Dew or never exercising again). So once I decided to run the whole distance, I laid out my bargain: If I run the whole three miles, I can do it at a (much) slower speed than I usually run (which admittedly, is not Olympic-caliber to begin with).

As usual, the first four minutes of my run involved an impersonation of a dehydrated camel loping on three legs. At the beginning of my runs, I cannot run in a straight line to save my life. (This is troublesome because if I take one wrong step, the treadmill will propel me directly into a wall.) But, on the plus side, I was so preoccupied with hating everything that the time went faster: I fiddled with my iPod cord, I got irritated at my shoelace whapping against my ankle, I peeled my bangs out of my eyes for the eight thousandth time, and I worried about Shorty looking like he was about to leap onto the treadmill (this happened once, and was about as hilarious and awkward as you might imagine).

After the first mile, everything settled down. I wasn’t tired and time seemed to be floating by, so like an overconfident idiot, I increased my speed. That lasted about 37 seconds. At mile two, my face felt like it could legitimately start nearby paper products on fire and I was sweating from places I didn’t even know could produce sweat (my elbows?). And, this is undocumented, but I swear that the treadmill timer started counting slower.

At mile 2.5, determined to gut it out, I focused on my iPod. Instead of running to my usual exercise playlist, I had hit shuffle, and of course every song blaring in my ears was instrumental or classical or the slowest song ever to be composed, OH MY GOD. So I wasted a lot of time jabbing the fast-forward button while issuing loud sounds of annoyance. But I did it: three whole miles. Without stopping.

Now I never have to exercise again.

Level 1 – Fruitcake

The stuff of nightmares. Chunks of fruit embedded into cake? No. The texture issues alone require a detailed PowerPoint presentation outlining the many ways that this is not a real food item.

Level 2 – Eggnog

Every year, I encounter this somewhere and think, “Oh. Let’s try it again. It’s probably not as bad as I remember.” And every year I have the satisfaction of realizing, “Oh. It is as bad as I remember. Possibly even worse. Will the hostess notice if I use this spoon to scrape my tongue and then induce vomiting?”

Level 3 – Christmas sugar cookies

I’m not a huge fan of sugar cookies. My cookie preferences are pretty slim, to be honest. I’ll have chocolate chip cookies, those Hershey Kiss cookies, and that’s about it. Other Christmas cookies I’ll tolerate include chocolate-covered pretzels with M&Ms pressed into them or chocolate-covered Ritz peanut butter crackers (and yes, I realize that neither of those are technically cookies). Cookies that make me dry heave: cookies covered with thick, sugary frosting, cookies with nuts and cookies covered in coconut. Especially coconut.

Level 4 – Candy canes

I’m not really a peppermint type of gal, unless you’re counting York Peppermint Patties, which are a completely different story. Every time I see one of those commercials, I crave a York Peppermint Patty so bad, and yet I think I have purchased maybe three of them in the last 15 years.

Level 5 – Gingerbread cookies

Now we’re finally getting somewhere. Love gingerbread cookies – love them. Love the smell, love the taste, love biting the head off the gingerbread dude.

Level 6 – Oreo truffles

Jason’s mom made these for the first time last year, and I almost needed an intervention, so great was my addiction. At Thanksgiving, she gave us a baggie with eight of them, which I carefully counted out as though they were gold coins and told Jason, “We get four each – no cheating.” The unspoken implication being, “Or I will hunt you down.”

Jason told me it didn’t think it was a good idea to make a batch myself, even though I half-heartedly insisted it would be “for the people at work.” [Ed. note: And if they can’t find them hidden in my filing cabinet, then TOO BAD for them.]

It’s probably a good thing I didn’t make any though, because I can’t stop eating them. They’re like little almond bark-covered Oreo cakes (and nothing like those awful Oreo Cakesters, which was a cruel joke played on the world by Nabisco). So by not making Oreo Truffles, I’m saving my husband from having to witness me acting like this:

What’s your holiday treat hierarchy?

I cannot skate very well at all. We went skating last year with one of my good friends, and as she pirouetted her way around like a lithe figure skater, Jason took a solitary bone-cracking fall on the ice and then skated the rest of the evening without incident, while I shuffled and fell my way around the ice feeling as though both my ankles were about to snap in half, and tiny tots speed-skated around me. We still had a blast though and plan on doing it again this year.

How about you? Can you skate?