Author: photog

Tuesday was a chaotic day.  We had snow, then rain, then sleet.  When I got out of work today my car was a popsicle.  But being a really lazy guy, my ice scraper was sitting at home where I left it, in front of the kitchen porch where it was definitely of limited value.  So, I used my bare hands to scrape this thick ice off my windshield and remove the ice from the roof and trunk.  Liquid water is an amazing heat transfer material.  The ice on the car was wet enough to make my caveman act extremely effective at freezing my fingertips.  So, there I am driving along trying to use the dashboard car heater to thaw my fingers enough to feel the steering wheel.

On the way home I filled up my five-gallon plastic gas can with some three-dollar gasoline and headed home to the horror that was my driveway.  Because there was still a freezing rain falling, I put on a raincoat.  And because my fingers were still kind of tingly-numb I decided that I needed to protect them from getting frozen again.  I made a glove sandwich.  I put a pair of thin Thinsulate gloves on and covered them with a pair of disposable kitchen gloves.  Not the tight-fitting rubber ones for doing the dishes but the loose clear thin plastic kind that restaurant workers wear when they handle cold cuts.  Then I put a pair of work gloves on top of this.  It worked like a charm.  Keeping the insulated glove dry kept my hands warm and the work gloves provided the strength to protect the thin plastic gloves from damage.  Edison the Man!

Snow blowers are pretty good with dry snow.  They’re so-so with wet snow and they’re pretty abysmal with slush.  And that’s what I had.  The slush would separate in the auger and form a cylindrical plug of solid ice that would slowly travel up the outlet and when it got to about a foot long it would break off and fall out of the chute and then a burst of watery slush would shoot out for about thirty seconds and then start to clog with ice again.  It took about three passes over the whole length to get most of the slush off the driveway and even then, it was still a mess.

Last week, I bought this fancy shovel which works better at pushing than shoveling the snow down the driveway.  It has a couple of handles at different points on its length and works really well for quickly clearing this heavy wet stuff.  I went over the whole upper driveway again with it.  This was slower and more tiring than the snowblower, but much more successful.  By the time the light failed at about 5 pm I had gotten the upper driveway and enough of the rest of the pavement cleaned up to the point where tomorrow I should be able to get in and out without trouble.  Camera Girl provided sufficient wifely verbal sympathy for my heroic efforts and also a hot meal that was greatly appreciated.

Afterwards I watched a few clips on the results of the Iowa caucuses and was happy to hear the Lefties on MSNBC caterwauling about white privilege and racism.  It’s interesting how even Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow only seem somewhat moronic when in the company of someone as profoundly stupid as Joy Reid.  She was jabbering away about how White Christians were plotting with Donald Trump to subvert the country and disenfranchise everyone who wasn’t white and Christian.

And I thought to myself, “If only Trump was this evil dictator.  I think I would submit to a purported dictatorship of these Midwestern, Elks or Shriners or whatever, if only they would promise to sit Joy Reid on the shelf of a dunk tank filled with ice water and gave me a dozen baseballs.  Now I’m not a monster.  I would allow her to be fished out between dunks and dried off and warmed up.  But I would consider it one of my finest moments if I managed to hit the target even once and consigned Joy Reid to the icy depths if only for a few moments.  And I thought, “That’s a pretty good idea.”  Dunk tank justice would provide satisfaction to the multitudes.  Imagine if every aggrieved conservative got a turn at freeze dunking Nancy Pelosi or Joe Biden or Nikki Haley for saying really stupid things.  This would be a happier world.  Of course, some of the frailer losers like Pelosi might catch pneumonia.  But I’m willing to take that risk.

I guess maybe the cruel and unusual punishment standard of justice might forbid dunk tank justice.  But I tell you, I don’t see why we couldn’t get a constitutional amendment to cover it.  And I’ll bet if Joy Reid thought that she could get dunked in ice water for saying things as stupid as what comes out of her mouth currently, maybe she’d take up some more noble profession, like rodeo clown.  But unfortunately, being a rodeo clown takes brains, of which she has not a scintilla.  Well, how about doorstop?