Snap Snot

That title has nothing to do with this post, other than it's the first thing I read this morning on my work email, and it set me to chuckling before the first bell. Somebody was planning to step into some classrooms and take a 'snapshot', but some freakish Freudian slip resulted in a 'snap snot' moment instead.

Ahem. The promised sleet storm did not roll in until 3:00. That is just wasteful. I was yearnin' for an early out. Oh, but get this! Everything for the students after school was canceled. The sports practices, the mandatory tutoring, the academic team match, the spelling bee. But we had a faculty meeting until 3:40. Here's what that says to me: Students are precious. Teachers are expendable. Perhaps I should stop listening to those voices in my head.

Once I rounded up my kids, turned off my computers and made a pit stop, it was 4:00. The sleet she was a-fallin'. In fact, the slopey parking lot was covered with her round slicky goodness. The boys had gone on to the LSUV while I locked up. The #1 son had started the car. "It's all over the car!" he proclaimed like a true Einstein, though in my mind I thought of him as more of a Sherlock. Like his father, he had turned up the heater full blast before the engine was warm. I asked him why he was blowing the cold air around. "You're freezing The Pony! You know he has no body fat." The boy looked at me, then at his brother in the back seat. "Oh, I'm not freezing him." He pointed at the rear controls. He had not even turned on the back seat blowers. Believe me, he was NOT doing it to be kind.

I stopped before I got all the way out of the parking lot to make #1 flap the windshield wipers and knock off that skin of ice that had grown on them. I scratched at my side mirror. The boy had the bright idea to reach out and clean HIS side mirror while I was driving about 30 mph. Bad idea for Sherlock Einstein. He lost the feeling in his fingers for a good 20 minutes. Not that it was any of my concern. That boy tries to win a Darwin Award on a daily basis.

The roads were by no means clear. There was a layer of sleet on even the main roads, with car tracks to follow. We came across a tractor trailer truck off the road at the Chinese restaurant where we lost Mabel one year. I don't know if he hit his brakes to avoid traffic, or if he was trying to pull out of the Dominos Pizza mini-lot. Whatever the cause, he had run the passenger-side tires of his cab off the road, and his whole rig was canted at quite an angle. I would say 45 degrees, but it wasn't that much, so it was more like 30 degrees from the vertical axis, or 60 degrees from the horizontal axis, whichever floats your boat. This is why Mabel is the math teacher and not me.

The creeks were up, and we skated across the big low-water bridge with the water lapping a mere 4 inches from the top. Another 5 minutes, and we would have had to drive 8 miles out of the way for our Emergency Route Number Three. I did not even plan on the Number Two, which turned out to be a good thing, because that bridge would have given us the ol' heave-ho and flipped us upside down in the creek quicker than Teddy Kennedy on a date with Mary Jo Kopechne.

Nothing goes down better on a cold, sleety day than a big bucket o' Hot & Sour Soup. We called HH and convinced him to pick it up for us. To repay him, we salted the steps to the Mansion porch so he would not fall down and break his crown. And maybe spill the precious soup.

I have already gotten my NO SCHOOL call for tomorrow, have a belly full of Hot & Sour Soup, and am living high on the hog. With my fingers crossed that the power doesn't go out.