I just got a channel dug to the storm drain, shoveled a path across the yard (!) so that I could reach the hemlocks in the pleasance (one and all prostrate with their top branch-tips mired in snow), de-iced the porch and sidewalk and knocked down some pigsticker-sized icicles, and the whole thing is supposed to happen over again?
I know I have a warped mind, but it makes me think of one of the best pieces of location shooting that ever took place in Washington — In The Line Of Fire, in which Clint Eastwood plays a Secret Service man who was in the Dallas motorcade behind JFK and is now receiving threatening calls from an aspiring assassin played by John Malkovich.
No, it’s not the threat to repeat a historic event that I think of.
I remember my personal favorite scene from the movie as I look at the boots, gloves, fleece, and snow-sunglasses arrayed along the back of the couch and in front of the heating vents. The scene is the one where Eastwood is about to succumb to a flaring passion for the young agent played by Rene Russo, and just as they are nearly stripped down her walkie-talkie goes off and she has to get to the situation room stat, and Eastwood looks down at the radio and gun and handcuffs and other clanking paraphernalia that he has shed in a metallic crescendo as the two locked lips, and says in a voice of weary resignation:
“Now I have to put all that shit back on.”
Sixteen Tons 
I’m feelin’ for ya!!
I wish you the very best. We are bracing ourselves for the same crap. It might only be five inches but it’s five inches over what we already have. Southern California never looked so appealing.
So sorry to hear it. It snowed here again today, but it was a dusting of fluffy flakes about a half an inch thick. Good luck and godspeed.
I liked that movie.
I liked that movie too.
So is all this shovelling on top of or instead of your gym workouts?
I enjoyed that film no end, not least because part of the location filming happened on the rooftop of a client’s apartment and I got to hear all about the excitement as they blocked off the street and Clint and his stuntmen cavorted above.
I haven’t hit the gym since Friday. I know what the lot is like there — treacherous. And I’m logging two to four hours a day shoveling and hucking the accumulation off the shrubbery, some of which is more like treebery. Feature me thigh deep in snowdrift wrestling with hemlock branches that are normally up to the second storey of my house, prying them off the ground.
I am going to kiss the dumbbells when I see them, but it looks like another three days before there’s any hope of it. The whole thing is happening just like they said it would.
Saw some amazing pictures on the SF Chronicle website. I guess you are out digging right now. Stay warm and don’t forget to hydrate. . . but you know that.
It’s damned hard to remember to drink something shoveling in this, but it’s a thing I’m notoriously compulsive about (I carry around water bottles everywhere like little security blankets). However, no one is shoveling nothin’ until the wind or the snow drop off, at least one or the other. It’s 25-35 mph and dense snowfall out there — the one good thing about it is that nothing is really staying on roofs or shrubs like it did last time, it blows off too fast.
Here’s a pretty representative gallery from around DC:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/gallery/2009/01/27/GA2009012701325.html?hpid=artslot
There’s been a 50-car pileup downstate on I-64. There’s fifty reasons to stay inside.
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