Civilization is Hereby Canceled.

So in case you hadn't heard, DC got some snow earlier this month.  Being from Colorado, I was raised in the snow.  For most natives of the east coast, Colorado may as well be Calgary, which makes me half-Inuit.  That means I'm accustomed to scraping out a living on the frozen tundra, right?  It also means there is no end to my amusement watching the panic that arrives in the days leading up to a snow storm.  Grocery stores take on a vaguely Soviet feel, with barren shelves and people fighting for the last loaf of bread.  Your only competition on the road is a forlorn Snickers wrapper skittering across the asphalt.  The humans have all raced home and locked themselves inside with their provisions (and probably firearms) to wait for spring.  Shop windows are darkened with improvised hours of operation taped to the door:  Closed Until The Thaw.

Despite the comedy of it all, the storms of the last two weeks have been every bit the crippling nightmares the weathermen warned they'd be (for once).  This is the closest to an actual apocalypse that I've been.  It was an educative (wet) dry run.  First, the Saturday storm dumped over two feet of snow.  My cupboards were all stocked up, so I could have stayed in the house for days.  But somehow the knowledge that I couldn't go anywhere even if I wanted to brought on a maddening cabin fever very early on.  Nothing was open.  All public transportation was shut down.  Nothing to do and nowhere to do it.  You might think that I would use this down time to do something productive like write or read or start converting my DVD collection to digital.  You'd be wrong.  Let me shed a little light on my own behavioral patterns for you.  IF those activities had been options for avoiding doing something more important when the weather was nice, I would have pursued those activities with gusto into the wee hours of the night.  But since they now became the most productive options on the table, immediately my mind went in search of something less pressing to distract me from What I Should Be Doing.

By two o'clock that first afternoon, when things looked about like this shot below, I got bundled up and headed out to dig my car out.

 

What's that you say?  Cute red jacket?  No, that's not me.  That's a neighbor.  How can you tell from that distance?  Well, the shovel is what gave it away.  See, I didn't/don't have a shovel.  Every store within 40 miles has been sold out of snow shovels for the last month.  So what did I dig my car out with?  Brawn and grit,  that's what.  Steeled by the raw determination that is stretched in the sinews of all true patriots.  Nah. Actually, it's more an illustration of just how badly I wanted to do anything but stay in the house.  For two and a half hours, I bailed the heavy, wet snow with my hands.  Whenever my energy began to wane, thinking about being cooped up in the apartment for the rest of the night was all I needed to keep the John Henry Express moving.  Here's the after picture:

I know it doesn't look like much, but I was proud of that job.  That trench goes all the way around.  You can imagine my pique upon waking in the morning to find that one pass of the snow plow had undone the whole thing.  This dig/bury cycle was to be the wash-rinse-repeat of the next week.  Every day through the following Thursday, I spent some amount of time shoveling my car.  By the time the plows stopped coming, there was just nowhere else to put the snow.

The week following the first storm was fairly astonishing as well.  With the struggle to clear all the weekend snow, and with the arrival of 15 fresh inches on Tuesday/Wednesday, nobody was risking anything.  As you can imagine, government employees make up a huge proportion of the workforce in DC.  And the government shut down for pretty much the whole week.  At times it seemed like the only people working were the foreigners running the 7-11, but I think they live in the back closet so it hardly counts.  One of the biggest annoyances of the lockdown, though, was the television programming that Washingtonians were subjected to.  Roadblock coverage on all the networks all day long of weather and reporters on the street nattering on about the dangers of walking on uncleared sidewalks and snowball fights.  Are we three years old? 

We did eventually get mobile again last Thursday, and my roommate and I ventured into the city to see what we could see.  We were excited about what snow-packed mayhem lay across the frozen Potomac.  But what we discovered was much more frightening/thrilling than we could have ever expected:  VIKING INVASION!!

I don't think we have to worry about them, though, considering they showed up on a friggin' boat.  Who storms Washington on a boat anymore?  How 19th century.  But no matter how weird our day may have been, I imagine this little fella was wondering who slipped the acid in his mashed nanners:

 

There are worse ways to ride out the storm than dancing on the sidewalk with Smurfette and Sully, I suppose.  Like shoveling snow with your hands maybe.  I guess that's all I have to say about that.  Except that I am officially done with winter this year.  All I want is warm weather, a beautiful beach with palm trees, and drinks with little umbrellas in them.  Is that too much to ask?