Well, it's been an interesting three days. Not quite "interesting" in the "may you live in interesting times" sense, but it had its moments.

Over the weekend they started talking again about wintry weather coming our way. As the days progressed it went from "alert" to "watch" to "warning." By Monday night it was at "possible catastrophic event" phase. Atlanta's one of the places where three inches of snow is "catastrophic" only because it always has a nice layer of ice underneath it. As I've said before, Rhode Islanders are crazy, but not that crazy. I don't go out in ice because my car has not yet learned to ice skate, especially 26 miles. In any case, the state took that decision out of our hands; on Monday night they declared a State of Emergency and ordered anyone who didn't have to be out not to be out. By Monday afternoon, the supermarket shelves were stripped by human locusts. Friends kept sending photo posts to Facebook of empty bread shelves and empty milk cases at the supermarket. Eggs vanished, and meat was spirited away. If it were closer to Christmas all that would have been left would have been the fruitcake.

James' company, no fool they after being on short commons two weeks ago during "SnowJam," sent everyone home with a laptop. This James set up Monday night; he had a couple of setup bobbles, but those were normal. As things would have it, Tuesday was mostly harmless, with heavy skies. The fact that we were both teleworking, however (CDC was closed for the day, but teleworking was in full force), provided several problems, mostly to my connection. He has some sort of AT&T network program, essential for connecting to his work, that does not work and play well with others, which threw Citgo for a loop. A lot of times I was connected both on 4G to CDC webmail on James' tablet and through my desktop to keep up with everything. (Wednesday I actually couldn't connect at all, DSL or 4G.) Tuesday evening the freezing rain started; you could hear the hiss of it even through the door to the deck. Then it snowed for a while, long enough to put a white coat on everything.

Then it turned back into freezing rain.

Wednesday was a long, cold day. I'd try to get online every half hour, but I kept getting either a 403 or a 500 error from the web page. In between I should have washed the kitchen floor, but I felt just enough up to sweep it. I cut coupons. James worked steadily, and Snowy shrieked every time he spoke on the phone. I finally started to laugh and told him that no, he couldn't help Daddy work. It was either sleet or freezing rain all day.

Wednesday night it started to snow.

This morning I woke up to a brilliant white world. You remember that scene on Christmas morning in A Christmas Story, where Ralphie wakes and finds there's been snow in the night and every branch of every tree is white? That's what it looked like, and I should have taken a picture of it then, because even though it didn't get up above freezing until nearly noon, the snow started melting the minute the clouds parted. By late afternoon, even the driveway, which had been a sheet of ice covered with snow covered with ice yesterday, was completely clear, as was the street. I could actually go outside and refill all the bird feeders, which I couldn't do on Wednesday during a break in the precipitation because the post holding the three feeders was frozen solid in its socket and I couldn't turn it enough to get all three feeders near me to refill. I was able to do only one. I was rewarded by seeing more birds than I had in a long time, including an eastern towhee (that vanished when I tried to photograph it) and a yellow-rumped warbler who kept moving when I trained a lens on it.

Through all of this we were anxiously watching Willow. On Tuesday we figured This Is It. She was miserable. She wouldn't eat, she was wandering, and she looked all in. On Monday night we had started watching Westminster happily; on Tuesday I finally gave her a pain pill to make her fall asleep and I was crying as I was petting her and watching the sporting dogs prance into the arena. By Friday, when everything had cleared, I knew, we were going to have to make a decision, and James morosely agreed.

But as she's done before, she rallied. Since there is now a long list of things she won't eat, we threw desperation to the wind. James mixed some of the mild chili he was eating into some rice, which she now hates like poison, and some cheese with it, and she ate that. Not all at once, but she finished pretty much everything he gave her. At the rate she's eating, she's going to starve to death. If we give her something bad for her, she's still going to die because we won't put her through the pancreatitis treatment again, but at least she will have eaten something and enjoyed it. Even the condemned get a last meal!

Been watching Olympics tonight, really for the first time since opening ceremonies. Saw several people take terrible tumbles during the new sport, slopestyle, which is snowboarding on an obstacle course that looks more frightening than Dracula. Aieeeee!

Labels: birds, dogs, events, Olympics, pets, snow, weather, work

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