Dear Diary,
Went to the front door early this morning with the intention of clearing the front walk and driveway of the night's accumulation of snow. Upon opening the portal I was confronted with a monochromatic wall of hard-packed snow from toe to jamb. Initial investigations with a broom handle revealed sufficient thickness to deter even as stalwart a digger as I.
Resorted to cracking open a bedroom window and climbing out that way, saved only by its being on the lee side of the house, and so marginally protected from the drifting effects of the gale-force winds. Walking around to the front of the house took the better part of 15 minutes, blinded as I was by the driving snow and encumbered by wading through drifts as high as my hips.
Clearing the front door took until noon. My right pinkie is turning black and, having lost both physical sensation as well as the nail, I may have to gnaw it off at the third joint to prevent the gangrene from spreading.
Lunch was the last box of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, shared between four of us. The dog just whined and we ignored him. The weakest must be culled. After lunch we let the dog out to attend to the call of nature, and inadvertently forgot about him for over an hour while watching some really cool battle scenes in the movie 300. (It looks so warm in Sparta!) Electricity, thankfully, has been mostly reliable, but the gas cut out some time in the middle of the night, so we have candles burning and all the elements on the electric stove are dialled up to Max. We're doing what we can for the third degree burns on the oldest boy's hand, but we don't hold out much hope against amputation once an ambulance is able to make it to the house. The smell of burnt flesh is making me hungry. (My wife thinks that's gross, but I can see the primal look in her own eyes, too.)
Remembering the dog, I again dug out the build-up at the front door and waded through the backyard in the vain hope of an ad hoc search and rescue. I found nothing but disappearing evidence of paw prints much too large to attribute to a Jack Russell, and can only surmise that our erstwhile canine companion succumbed to a ravening pack of wild wolves, emboldened by the encroachment of winter's icy grip, and so extending their range into the suburbs of Canadia.
I refuse to venture outside again alone, or as the slowest person in a group.
Water no longer flows from our taps. A main burst several blocks away and that, combined with our lack of natural gas to heat what's in the house, has resulted in our having to melt snow to sustain ourselves. There will be no shortage of water. Or sponge baths.
Best as I can tell, supper is going to consist of what pretzel and goldfish cracker leavings can be scavenged from sofa cushions in the living room and the basement. My sons' snacking inefficiencies, so long the root of much of my ire, may yet pull our family through this climatological nadir. Mother Nature, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.
The worst blow, though, has struck at the very core of our moral fibre. Hardy and resilient as we are, there's a part of me that quails at what we now have to endure. Our high-speed wireless is out, and we have resorted to surfing the internet via a 56-k baud dial-up connection.
Please pray for us.
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* - this is not an arbitrary number; I checked, and the first permanent snowfall of the season was on 21st November 2007, which was 153 days ago.
