living with snow

A few inches of snow haphazard the parking lots because no one can see the lines. People use whatever markers they can (like the cart corrals up at Econo or the wheelchair-van signs) to figure out where the lines are supposed to start and how far in to pull a car, but by the time 4 or 5 more cars have used those initial cars as markers, the cars snake around and sometimes people can't back out because the lanes become too narrow and one time up at the movie theater at the mall cars were three deep instead of two and the people with cars in the middle were stuck.

Maybe because we are still in the beginnings of winter, people were driving more slowly today and were patient with each other up at Econo while they waited for others who were trying to push their carts to their cars through the snow or who were trying to back their cars out into the narrowed lanes. I learned that 3pm Thursday is a good time for food shopping: there were few people and no one I knew in the store, unlike last Saturday when we ran into friends in the juice aisle, the beer aisle, by the chocolate, next to the bananas, and while digging into the soy milk case.

I was buying food for tonight's class, which met at our house and was warm. On Tuesday, Roxane had driven down to Rhinelander through the fog, snow, and deer to pick up Heather who couldn't fly in any closer, and she told about getting stopped in Eagle River by a policeman who asked her why she was there and then complimented her on being articulate. Steven and Jill are refinishing the floors in their new house with the help of Nate. Casey has new penguin slippers. Alexa makes dangerous rum balls. Karen has finished the written part of comps. Sunny continued as Sunny. At the end, everyone pile up at the door to put on their boots, coats, gloves and hats and we laughed at how bundled up we all were, with hats that are warm and occasionally stylish and boots that are warm and not.