Tales from the Shark Tank

Usually the first snow of winter is a light dusting, amounting to an announcement. “It’s really winter now, little humans. Time to dig out the snow-boots and your warmest coats and gloves.” It melts off by mid-morning, and then you have a couple of weeks to a month before you have to worry about any serious accumulation.

Not this year. I’d heard there was snow in the forecast, but not how much, so I was expecting the usual half-inch or so. Imagine my reaction, then, when I got up to answer nature’s call at 3:30 this morning, glanced out the window, and saw that the ground had gone from crispy brown (the leaves I haven’t yet mulched) to solid white. There was no wind, so no drifts, but more white stuff was falling at quite an impressive rate. I looked at the roof of my car and realized we already had at least 6 inches, with more piling up merrily as I watched.

The phone rang at 5:30, announcing a 2-hour school delay. And about 8:00, when my son the budding meteorologist went out with my metal yard/meter stick to measure, it was a bit over 9 inches.

It’s pretty much limited to this county and the one to the east of us; lake effect snow (in our case Lake Michigan) is like that. But the weather service is predicting that this will be a particularly snowy winter overall. If the start is any indication, that may be an understatement.

This afternoon, since I was going past, I stopped at the local Old Time Pottery store to see if I could find a small size (5 to 7 inch) pottery or glass pie plate.  That is an emporium I normally avoid like the plague, mostly because my tolerance of kitsch is best measured in negative numbers, but the Anchor Hocking website said that was one of the retailers who handled their products, and there was a small pie plate listed among their wares.

This is essentially a warehouse-sized store.  The back half was full of dishes, bakeware, pots, pans, linens, cushions, storage supplies and the like.  Not my pie plates, but certainly a lot of stuff.  The problem was that in order to get to the back half, I had to go through the front half.

The entire front half, an area larger than many grocery stores I’ve been in, was full of Christmas stuff.  Trees.  Ornaments.  Fake greenery.  Santas.  Inflatable snowmen.  Seven foot tall straw figures that I assume, from the costumes, were intended as either shepherds or wise men.  You name it and it was there, and the vast majority of it was cheap in both senses of the word – inexpensive and tacky. And of course, there was the music.  I never knew you could do Greensleeves as a torchy blues, and you know, my life would have been complete if I had continued in my blissful ignorance.

I did it.  I got back to the back corner, looked at the stoneware and glass bakeware, found full size regular and deep dish pie plates, but none that were tart or individual sized.  And then I fled.  I don’t think I’ll be going back any time soon.

It’s gotten quite cold here recently, so our son has taken to wanting gloves when he goes out.  I’ve considered getting him some nice waterproof ones, but the simple fact is that he’s better at losing gloves and mittens than all three little kittens combined.  So rather than fight with him over it, I get him about a dozen pairs of inexpensive gloves at the start of the winter, and if he wants to play and a pair gets wet, we just change out.

This is our second cold snap, so he’d already had a pair out earlier this fall, which he could not find this morning.

“Mom, where are my gloves?!?”

We investigated the pockets of his bomber jacket.  No gloves.  We looked in his backpack.  No gloves.

“Mom, you’re supposed to know where my gloves are!”

“Since when?  Honey, I cannot follow you around all day to keep track of your gloves.  What am I supposed to do, hide in your desk while you’re at school?”

“Well, can’t you make a Glove Locator?” asks my son.

And then he wondered why I laughed.

For all the time we have had them, we have simply kept our cat’s food in the bag it came in, and they have never attempted to mess with it.  But it looks kind of tacky, so I got a container big enough to hold 20 pounds of kitty crunchies.  This turns out to be a Good Thing.

So about a month ago Mom gave me a bag of kibble her little girl had turned her nose up at in disdain.  (This cat prefers freshly cooked chicken breasts, still slightly warm.  She’s not picky, oh, no.  Not spoiled rotten either.)  It had a little hole in the bag where the other cat (who, sadly, escaped Mom in a parking lot 1/2 a mile from home but has not been seen since) had clawed it, but that was all.

My girls took advantage of that hole, declaring the contents of the bag the Most. Delicious. Treat. EVER!  I didn’t have my camera handy, but I came in once to find a “headless” black cat – which is to say her body was visible from the shoulders out, but her head buried firmly in the bag.  So they learned that bags were not impregnable, and I learned that they liked this stuff a lot.

It was a small bag, and ran out fairly quickly.  Time passed, and the bag of their usual kibble also began to run out, so we got a big bag of the new stuff.  I saw one of the girls using it as a cushion, but she looked up at me with big innocent eyes and neatly folded paws, saying “I don’t have any designs on this.  I know what it is, but I’m waiting patiently for you with the opposable thumbs to open it for me.”

Yeah, right.  No more than 45 minutes later, I wandered by that way again.  And lo, a smallish hole had appeared in the end of the bag, just big enough to paw out a few morsels at a time.  Tornado was out, but Sophia and Cloud were both much disgusted when they saw me pouring that big bag full of Wonderfulness into a large plastic container.  They watched very carefully, too, both up on their hind legs to get high enough to actually see into the bin.

Oh, the not quite finished bag of the old kibble?  Still in the kitchen, and still unmolested.  I checked.