A peek at my day

This morning the waste removal company came to pick up the dumpster from our kitchen renovation. It's been parked in our driveway for more than a month now, collecting scraps from our job and several other jobs our contractors are working, as well as random stuff I think our neighbors have contributed (a Christmas tree stand? Why couldn't you wait and put that out with the regular trash?).

It had also collected a relatively large amount of rain, sleet, snow, ice, and pretty much every other form of precipitation you can come up with. If you had asked me this morning what state all this moisture would be in, I would have thought that the days of single-digit temperatures would have frozen everything up nicely. I would have been wrong.

When the truck driver tipped the dumpster at a sharp angle to pull it up onto the bed of the hauler, a huge flood of dumpster soup came rolling out the gaps at the back. I'd say we probably had 20 gallons of sludgy water spill out onto the driveway ... the driveway that was 18 degrees F.

When I went out to use the snowblower tonight, not only did I get to fight my way through the several inches of snow that had accumulated since this morning, I also got to slog through an inch-and-a-half-thick layer of tea-colored sludge where the dumpster used to be. The snowblower sucked up a decent amount of it, flinging it off into our yard, which now looks like we have a troupe of the world's most incontinent squirrels living in the trees overhead.

While I was snowblowing, Liza was playing with her toy broom, trying to sweep the snow off the front porch. She was hampered by the fact that it had started raining shortly before we went out, so everything was glued down with a sixteenth of an inch of ice. Did I let that stop me? No, sir! I blowed and scraped and swept until I was at least within sight of the actual concrete ... all the better to ice up as the rain kept falling.

After Liza went to bed, I went back outside to move the car back into our driveway so the overzealous local police wouldn't give me a ticket for being parked in the driveway of the vacant house next door. Needless to say, my nicely cleared sidewalk and driveway were a total skating rink - I'll have to post a photo tomorrow of the sun glinting off of our glasslike driveway.

I got the car moved without incident, and as I went back inside I noticed the contractors had left the light on in the garage. I unlocked the side door, flipped off the light and closed the door, not remembering that this door is the best lubricated on the planet, so it requires a tiny push to slam shut with an earshattering thud. Which is exactly what it did ... 10 feet from the head of my daughter's bed.

When I went inside, Liza was screaming her head off, so I shucked off my coat and went upstairs, wet boots and all. She was sitting bolt upright in bed, obviously still mostly asleep, yelling, "I want some more carrots! I have to have another carrot! More carrots!"