My car wouldn't start this morning. I put the key in the ignition and turned it, and although the lights and radio and all the bells and whistles would turn on, the engine refused to play nice. Considering that the last time this happened it turned out that my car's computer had decided it no longer recognized my key, I said several decidedly unkind things and muttered my way back inside the house to rouse poor Richard out of bed so he could drive me to work. It was while we were turning the corner off our street that we both woke up enough to realize what we were driving through. Snow. Incredible, beautiful white flakes, swirling to the ground. Snow, here for the first time in probably at least 15 years. I couldn't stop staring out the window as we drove down the freeway, watching the snow fall all around us. It was obvious as we drove further, which cars on the road had been in garages the night before and which ones hadn't. The ones that spent the night outside had tiny drifts of snow on the hoods, and clumps sliding off the roofs. When we got onto the freeway, traffic crawled, surprisingly well behaved for the weather, especially considering that it's common to see people speeding along at 80 miles per hour or more even in the worst of the rainstorms. By the time I reached Roseville, the sun was out and the clouds were clearing. As we grabbed bits of news reports throughout the day, it became clear that of the entire area, only the poor Roseville residents didn't get to have snow. In a few towns near my own they had several inches on the ground, even enough to build tiny snowmen. Alas, we didn't get nearly enough for anything picturesque. But that's all right. At least I got to watch it falling from the sky. ******** I was starting to really wonder about the sharp increase in hits to my site lately from Google and Yahoo searches on my name. The paranoid part of my mind wondered if a sudden plethora of coworkers had suddenly decided to try to find my web presence, but a teasing e-mail sent to one of the mailing lists I'm on finally cleared up the mystery. Seems that the governor of Maryland took a wife this past weekend - one Jennifer Crawford, a deputy chief of staff. True she's about my age (well, a few years older than me, actually), but not only have I never been to Maryland, I already have a husband, and besides, they probably don't allow people to bring seven cats into the governor's mansion anyway. ******** Oh yeah, the car. Turns out it simply needed a jump start to give it enough juice to get it to the nearest service station, where they pronounced the battery terminally ill (get it? Terminal...oh, never mind) and did an emergency battery transplant. All is back to normal. This is probably a good thing, considering that I had been warming up to give Nissan a piece of my mind if it had been the computer after all. They don't know how lucky they are.
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