By Walt McDonald
All winter peacocks screamed, strutting the same
slow pose. At dawn, we smashed the ice with hammers,
dumped pots of boiling water steaming into troughs
for beaks of preening peacocks. They shoved each other off
like cousins bunched at the only mirror at church.
My logger father whittled a forest with buzz saws,
the roar and buzz of steel and mosquitoes
more than my ears were tuned for.
My sister and I played keep-away with feathers,
dazzling the surly turkeys and peacocks with footwork,
lobbing frozen dirt clods like grenades,
until our father called us. When roads were frozen,
I jockeyed the throttle of a John Deere
rusted before the war, hauling logs and hay bales
to farmers miles away. The war was almost lost
when my father enlisted, Pearl Harbor bombed,
the fall of Bataan all we heard for hours
on every station at night, except for our parents
talking softly after bedtime
and peacocks screaming in the dark.
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The snowpocalypse arrived right on schedule, starting innocently enough at 10 a.m. with some powdery flurries. The kids were dismissed from school two and a half hours early and walked home in slightly heavier snow; Adam promptly went over to a friend's for most of the afternoon, while Daniel chatted online with the members of the robotics team responsible for hardware, who are having a weekend-long sleepover at the home of one of their families so that they can get the robot built. Paul was home several hours early too to work from home. We bailed on going to my parents' for dinner when we realized there was going to be more than a couple of inches of snow on the ground and the county asked people to please stay off the roads. I worked on a bunch of projects, including a review of "Schisms".
Rosie spends a very difficult afternoon sleeping and cleaning herself. She is always under the impression that younger son should feed her the moment he arrives home, so she was quite disgruntled to have to wait two and a half hours.
In the afternoon, the skies were already quite dark but there wasn't much accumulation in the trees...
...though with the flash on, you can see how hard it was falling.
By nighttime, the neighbor's tree was hanging over our front steps.
Paul and our neighbor shoveling. (He's from Russia, so he's not terribly fazed by winter weather.)
Daisy's day was just as rough as Rosie's. She was not allowed to sleep on top of the heating vent. Cinnamon wisely stayed upstairs in the middle of my bed for most of the evening.
Here is what the White House looked like on the 10 o'clock news (the only reason I ever watch Fox is to get local weather and closings).
Fannish5: Name 5 characters who should be fired from their jobs.
1. Captain James Sawyer (Hornblower)
2. Annorax (Star Trek: Voyager)
3. Amy Gardner (The West Wing)
4. Tommy Caffee (Brotherhood)
5. Peter Petrelli (Heroes)
After dinner -- jacket potatoes with spicy cheese and veggie bacon, which actually crumbles better than other bacon -- we watched Smallville's "Absolute Justice" (which I keep expecting to see on a vodka bottle). I am not nearly familiar enough with superhero lore to have an opinion about the Justice Society and how it was portrayed; my major point of interest is that Hawkman and Dr. Fate were played respectively by Michael Shanks and Brent Stait of Stargate and Andromeda respectively. My favorite moment was when Clark was told that Lex Luthor is his ultimate nemesis and Clark got all stuttery: "Lex? Lex is dead!" (So I IMed Dementordelta and said, "Suddenly Clark's heart beat faster. No wait that's me..." and she IMed back, "Mine beat faster when Green Arrow was bending over that railing in those tight pants!" which was also a very nice moment! Tess didn't get a huge amount to do, but we got some great scenes with her too, and I always like it when Lois is investigating things without Clark instead of waiting around for him. So I enjoyed it, albeit for mostly shallow reasons.
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