Fire and Ice

The ice is outside. The fire is inside, or at least it soon will be, as I plan to hunker down by the fireplace with a single malt whisky and wait out yet another storm.

Permit me a small indulgence and let me whinge about the weather for a bit. I'm Canadian. It's what we do, and honestly, it's one of our coping mechanisms to get through winter. I could talk about childbirth, politics, music, dogs, parenting, cats, writing, reading, quilting, wool spinning, stained glass, travel, dentistry, advertising, ancient Rome, intercourse..... (ahem) I mean social discourse i.e. communication or dealings between individuals and groups. Whatever did you think I meant? (And no doubt, putting that word in my blog will contribute to a surfeit of emails not unlike the ones that arrived when I talked about the mushroom shaped like a certain manly bit. But I digress.)

Yesterday afternoon I decided I'd head into our little village to do some errands. We'd had some rain the day before, but it didn't seem that cold so I wasn't expecting the layer of thick ice under a foot of snow which completely enveloped my car. Not only that, but the car had been parked under the shade of a large spruce tree, the branches of which were also coated with ice and snow.

The branches were so heavy, they bent under all that weight and welded themselves to the top of the car.

Which I can't reach.

It's a tall vehicle and I am an undertall woman. (You see how that works? I'm not overweight, I'm undertall!)



Even though I had less than a quarter of a tank of gas and I never normally let my car idle, I threw environmental responsibility to the wind Just This Once (because there was no way to get INTO my car without softening the ice before I started scraping) and let it run with the heaters on high, as I had left it. Then I realized I'd left my scraper in the car.

No worries. I had a spare! Alas, as it turned out, the spare was also in the car.

I managed to find an old one in the garage (another post entirely) and began to scrap away at the car. Forget scraping, soon I was hammering away with brute force just trying to make a dent anywhere and whacking off the branches of the tree where I could reach. I was afraid I'd break one of the windows but the ice held everything together nicely. After a half hour, I managed to clear the windscreen and the first two windows. Oh, did I mention I was wearing a jaunty little beret and silk scarf? I looked terribly chic as those ice chips flew up and assaulted my (now red and sweaty) face. All this to do a little banking and pick up some things at the drugstore.

I finally made enough headway to be able to drive, and as I took off down the road, I heard the last branch I couldn't reach snap off the tree. At least this time of year people are used to seeing cars with Christmas trees on their cars. Of course, when I got to the gas station, I couldn't get the little door thingie to open, so I had to pound it with my boot, then use a loonie to pry it open. Smarter than the lady in the pet food store, who used her car key and bent it enough so that it no longer fit in her ignition.

That was yesterday. This is today:

Ain't nobody happy.
And that old black van on the left? That has to be scraped and cleared of snow, and the paint supplies cleaned out of it, because it's being towed away for scrap on Monday morning at 7 a.m. Seriously. Could my timing be any worse?

Off to find the whisky....