The Book of Roof

This is the roof over the front porch of our house.We’re not shoveling it.David doesn’t believe in the practice for places other than the walkways. For years he practiced only solar shoveling on the driveway; that’s what he called it: ‘solar shoveling.’ I’m not sure just when that changed and we began hiring a guy with a plow on the front of his truck. It may have been around the time the sweet softness of the mothering hormones ebbed in my body, causing me to turn a mite more male in my manner, which is to say more BLUNT in a merry sort of swashbuckling way.All he has to do now when it snows is take his mighty upper body strength out and do the steps and sidewalks, which I’ll be the first to admit he does very faithfully. But this new thing with shoveling your roof? This shoveling–the-roof thing he’s never gonna do.I have two rooms where I spend most of my non-cooking hours. One is the guest bedroom which I use for answering letters from the people who write me and the other is my so-called office if you can say that about a room that’s full of candles and pictures of the dead and props for all the funny videos I’m going to make any day now. Both look out in this porch roof, the same roof my oldest child used for sneaking out as a high school freshman. The same roof our cats loved to pad around on, surveying the neighborhood.I look out at it all day long lately thinking, “Today? Will this be the day it collapses and kills the mailman?”  I guess I could drag my own little Irish fanny out there and shovel it off but it’s so much more fun to stay inside and play the aggrieved princess.I looked out at the above picture for a really long time just now before I finally noticed the photo  of my two men, propped in the corner of the window frame. Don’t they look nice? Maybe it’s OK that I'm so idle and whiny as long as I love everybody to death who gets within 50 yards of me. Kinda countin’ on that to tell you the truth.

Cabin Fever Day Number 98? 99?

Still stuck in the house under mounds and mounds of frozen yogurt  or whatever that white stuff is outside, I can’t even remember the last time I was out. Lolled in the bed for three hours reading old New Yorkers but when I got up I got way up: wrote a week’s worth of diary entries, paid bills, got done refinishing this little  high chair,  repaired some nice dangly earrings with Superglue. (God I love superglue! And this time I only got my fingers stuck together for a very short time before I found the solvent...)Also trained my new speech recognition software so that it will stop writing 'dock' when I say dark,' and 'pock' as when I say 'park'. I mean why would anyone even be writing about pockmarks even though I have a few doozies myself from contracting  chicken-pox at the ripe old age of 25 from my sister Nan who got them at 27 by sharing a ski chalet with a field trip of middle schoolers. (My how we itched, childhood diseases being much more serious when you’re big! )I also went on the treadmill and didn’t almost break my neck this time the way I did the other day . And I watched half an episode of Glee and the last ten minutes of Cast Away, made a creamy tomato sauce with real tomatoes, drank two ounces of red wine (Weight Watchers R Me) and built a big fat fire in the fireplace, only burning the front of my sneaker a little.Also today it finally stopped snowing and instead rained, laying a coat of clear nail polish on top of all that frozen yogurt. So if we’re lucky we will have maybe all gone back out and rejoined the world today.Less moronic content from me let’s hope. But why not end with some nice moronic fun just this once and enjoy this delightful video showing what happens when things really go amiss with a treadmill routine:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCj2oTsY3_M](I chose this slowed-down version made by a German-speaking person (a) because you can’t hear all the swearing as clearly as in the American one and (b) because the soundtrack is Mozart’s Lacrimosa (meaning tearful) from the Requiem in D…… Witty German-speaking person ha ha !)