Wicked Winter Weather Whips White With Wrath

Whoa. Massive alliteration Batman. Apparently blizzards are good for my vocabulary and word usage.

So, there's a blizzard. Yeah. Just in case you didn't know. :)

At 11pm at night, after only a few hours of heavy snow and wind, there is a drift outside our door that is roughly waist-high on me. I doubt any of us will make it to work tomorrow, although my manager called tonight to ask me to make a full-faith effort to get in tomorrow, but not to risk my life. The snow and wind are supposed to continue well into the day tomorrow, so we'll see how things look in the morning. In the meantime, we have three of the four cars in the driveway, bumper to bumper, and we are all snug and warm in the house.

Winter has arrived. With a grand entrance, if I do say so myself.

In other news, things have been busy for me of late with the job. I have now taken on nearly all aspects of my position and have really settled in. While I am still looking for a permanent position in my field, I am making some money in the meantime and trying not to loose faith in the human race.

For clarification, I have always been a weird person attractor. I don't know what it is, but people seem to feel they can be their strangest and often worst selves to me and around me. I don't think I am overstating the level to which I attract the crazies. Actually, I know I'm not, because when I recount my stories to people who have a similar perspective as I do the stories are typically followed by, "Something like that has never happened to me! Weird!"

Some of my favorites from Chicago were the police officer giving me the bird and the panhandler calling me a bitch for telling him to let go of me and stop hitting me up for money with an obviously fake story about having just come from his mother's funeral and his new mission in life of raising enough money to find the cure to breast cancer.

And now I can add Christopher and Banks stories to my crazy list. This past Sunday I got, in one day:

• Middle-aged sisters screaming at each other about our shitty clothes

• A husband who called his wife fat and lazy after telling me his wife's size

• A woman who's beautiful scarf (which she had bought from C&B 4 years earlier) was ruined when the gas overflowed at the gas station and got on her coat, scarf, pants, shoes, hands, etc. Of course, she knew we wouldn't have the same scarf, but what scarves did we have and what were the fabric compositions because really, just look at her hands, she can't wear just any type of fabric (because the corrosive gasoline, cold weather, and advanced age couldn't have had anything to do with her dry, chapped hands). On a side note, after tying up nearly an hour of my day, she bought a scarf, only to return it, TRIPLE BAGGED, the next day because she got home and her nose was running and she couldn't figure out why until she saw the scarf on the back of the couch and figured out it was the fabric or the dyes. So she triple bagged the scarf, left it in the garage all night, and drove it back to us the next day to return our poison to us because she wasn't going to be responsible for it any longer.

True stories. All of them. Exaggeration not required because the real thing is crazy enough.

I finished my Christmas letter today and I have my cards, so be watching your mail in the next few weeks.

That's the latest from my world. It's an exciting life.

Much love!

~g