I love the trees that are growing in front of our house. When I planted them five years ago they were about as tall as me, and they've grown very fast up to the roof line. One is a boy and one is a girl (tiny cones). But Juliet is dead. Now Romeo will have to die too (wouldn't it look weird with just one?) During the big snow storm we had last year I went out and shook them so they sprang upright again, but during the one last week I completely forgot about it, and when we looked out in the morning Juliet's top had broken off, and Romeo was very dejected (bent to the ground) but when we shook him off he stood up again.
It COULD be that the reason I was otherwise distracted from our landscaping was that I was worried about my husband. He left work at 3, when it was still just sleeting, but the federal government also let their employees out at 3 so it was a traffic jam from the get-go. Then the snow started coming down really heavily, and people started getting in accidents and getting stuck and clogging up the roads. Around 9 p.m. he called me from Tyson's Corner, where he was trying to go down back roads to get to a more main road. His Australian tour guide (GPS) Karen was driving him crazy so he came back to his wife for that duty, and I talked him through a few roads till he could get to a better one. He did stop for gas and food, and pushed a LOT of people out of where they were stuck.
Around 11 he said he had finally made it to get on I-66 in Fairfax, and then I fell asleep. When I woke up at 12:30 he still wasn't home. Also the power had gone out, and it was a creepy feeling. I was thinking "OK, my husband is dead. I am a pregnant widow." But my cell phone worked, and I called him... and he answered -- YAY! He got home at 1 a.m., completely exhausted after at 10 hour commute of 40 miles (it takes him 45 minutes to get to work in the morning -- he leaves early.)
Then guess what he did the next day (after sleeping in)? He dressed in boots, jeans, and a work coat (just in case things got rough) and drove back to work. Crazy man! I threatened to throw his keys in a snowdrift, but he's bigger than me. I tried to reason with him: "You're an ECONOMIST! What can't you do from home that you can do from DC?" To no avail. Luckily the roads were much better, and many of the abandoned vehicles had been towed -- he said the night before it had felt positively post-apocalyptic out on the roads.
But his main incentive for going in might have been that he could shower in the gym there. Our power was out until 2 p.m., and it was starting to get cold in here (though actually we spent a lot of time outside playing and shoveling). But that just made us very grateful for electricity when it came back on.
