Where’s the snow? Here it is, the middle of January, and except for a few snowflakes the night after I came back from Kentucky, we have not had any snow in this part of Connecticut since the freak snowstorm last October. And it has certainly been cold enough for snow. This morning, for instance, it was only 9 degrees when I woke up, and the highest it got today was 19. Add to that an out-of-season March wind, and all day it really felt like the temperature was only in single-digit figures.
Some of my co-workers have told me that the last winter in New England was a killer one, with more snow than anyone would want to experience. If that’s true, then it is only fair that a brutal winter be followed by a mild one, to even up the score. In that case, I lucked out; I first applied for this job in January 2011, and I could have gotten caught in the bad winter, if I had been accepted that early.
Meanwhile, back home in Kentucky, the weather is acting more predictable. I remember past winters, like the one of 2006-2007, where conditions were relatively mild at first (hardly any snow, temperatures in the 30s and 40s), and then in the third week of January, the really bad weather began. That seems to be happening this year, right on schedule. Our home got almost no snow until last Thursday, and now according to Leive, there’s at least an inch of snow on the ground. On Friday she tried to go grocery shopping, but a block from home the car skidded on the ice and snow, and hit a recycling bin. At that point she went back home and called our in-laws in town, Gene and Rezia, to hitch a ride from them. I remember I was in a similar situation in 2007, when winter conditions forced me to learn how to drive all over again; forty years in Florida taught us nothing about dealing with this!
Aside from the wind, it has been a quiet weekend in the apartment. I wasn’t called in to work overtime on Saturday, as has happened so often in the past seven months. Thus, the main events of the past two days were meals, going to the laundromat on Saturday, and going to church on Sunday. On Saturday I also went to Wal-Mart and picked up a second pair of reading glasses, because I realized that the first pair was good for looking at a computer monitor, but not for reading a book. That was an awkward experience; the new glasses had a price tag attached with a plastic loop, and I had to wait until I got home to remove it, because I couldn’t see what I was doing. Thus I will now be carrying two pairs of glasses for seeing things up close; everything farther away than my arm is still clearly visible.
At 5:30 on Saturday morning, I caught another mouse. This was the fourth captured since I moved into the apartment, and the first in 2012. I thought I had caught the last mouse in December, and until last Friday I had not seen or heard evidence of any more. Then I found mouse droppings on a paper napkin, so I did the test I tried before; I left a peanut on the floor, and it disappeared before I went to bed. That prompted me to take the lid off the bucket that had captured the other mice, and that night, just like the other times, a mouse fell in and couldn’t jump out. Because it was before dawn, I took the bucket downstairs, threw the mouse outside, and went back to bed, only this time I threw the mouse over the neighbor’s fence, so it is more likely to go to another house than come back here. Now time will tell if I have seen the last of the mice.
