This is not been a good weekend.
First came the blizzard on Friday. In the morning there was not a flake in the air. It was even pleasant outside. I had half expected a pile of snow on the ground, preventing me from going to work. Then the blizzard came mid-morning. It had become clear that it was going to be impossible to drive through that in the evening, so I got leave to take a half-day vacation. I used the time to work on my taxes.
First thing Saturday morning I looked outside. Yow! The whole yard was deep in snow. I spend the better part of an hour digging myself and my car out of the snow. Then I mailed off my tax payments. They have hurt me more than the snow did.
I spent most of the remaining weekend working on my Web site. I got the projects, essays and Fairmount sections up-to-date, and even included new favicons (’favorites icons’, those little square images in a Web browser’s address bar) for the projects and Bioshock sections.
I did not learn until Saturday morning, when Madre informed me, that the folks’ next-door neighbor down Walnut Street had passed away. Jeannie was one of the most cheerful persons that I have ever met. She had always lived in that green clipboard house with the two big pines, for almost as long as I have lived in town. She married some guy named Peterson; filled the house with all kinds of books; raised a very intelligent daughter named Alice; tended the garden in back of the house until the backyard was all cleared out a few years ago when Mr. Peterson died; and was a clerk at the local grocery store until a year or so ago. Everyone, including Madre, was surprised by her passing, even though she had become an invalid forced to use a walker in past year or so. Madre, my sister the teacher and I paid our respects this afternoon. We will all miss her.
I do not know what will happen to the clapboard house. Whoever gets it may dismantle it, or layer it with vinyl siding and remodel it (like what happened to mine). I know it does not look the same as it did ten years ago when it had a comfortably cluttered garden and tall pines, which kept you from having to look at the rest of the town. Now it’s all barren, like a suburb of some cruddy city.
No, I am not happy about this at all.
I guess it was all capped with the loss of the Indianapolis Colts in the Super Bowl this evening. How is it, that everything seemed to be okay in the third quarter, when I last checked on the game before going to the upper room to finish my Web site work; then coming back down to discover that Saints had won 31-17? What??
I normally don’t care about spectator sports, but the Colts had a second Super Bowl in its grasp. What happened?