Sorry to those of you who have had to listen to a previous weather rant over at LiveJournal. This one will be slightly different, if that is any consolation!
For those of you who didn’t already know: I am an idiot who moved from Hawaii to Illinois. Away from year-round pleasant weather and the ocean, and to harsh weather extremes and urban ugliness. Not exactly a Mensa candidate for that move alone (which is sad, because otherwise I could qualify). I did want a change of scenery, and quite honestly, I do believe that everyone should go far away from home for at least a short time when they are young. The change of climate, though? Not so much.
So I do have a lot of weather rants, although you can see they are largely due to my own stupidity.
My rant today is not really about the weather, although I am certainly not thrilled about the snow that fell last night and today. There was quite a lot of it, but the snowblower is functioning (it did give us a bad moment of doubt though) and my wonderful husband took care of most of the snow removal. All I had to do was the front steps. We help one of our elderly neighbors since his grown kids live a good distance away, and one of our other neighbors helped, too.
So that part was fine. The rant-worthy part is how some other people on the block are just plain jagoffs and never help with snow removal. I am not talking about elderly people or people with health issues. I am talking about people who are healthy enough to pitch in, but can barely manage to move their car off the snow route we live on so the plows can clear the road all the way to the curb.
Those of us clearing snow today were all fortysomething and older. There are younger people on the block, and kids of an appropriate age. Where the hell were they?
And while I’m on that topic: do kids of middle school age not shovel snow for extra cash any more, and why not? I know that kids now get “real” jobs as soon as they are old enough, but you would think that kids who are not old enough for real jobs would jump on the chance to earn some extra money. In the almost 20 years I’ve lived in this house, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times an enterprising youngster came to offer snow shoveling, leaf raking or lawn mowing.
We talked, or ranted, about this at work. As mentioned before, I grew up in Hawaii, so obviously I never shoveled snow for extra cash. But my business partners, also fortysomethings, all said they shoveled show for extra cash when they were youngsters. One lives near a school, and still can’t find a useful kid to help shovel. In fact, he said that not only did kids in his neighborhood not shovel, one of them stole his snow shovel off his porch.
Apparently that is an advantage to having Rottweilers often seen in one’s yard. Our shovels have never been stolen when we leave them out!
No snow tomorrow, just plummeting temperatures, so I guess I’ll need another rant topic by then!
Ummm....Yeah...... says
This brought back the memories of when we had all of the hurricanes come through and we had PILES of debris waiting at the curbs for the trash collectors to pick up. We had yet another hurricane coming and so we had to pull all of the trash between the houses so that it wouldn’t become projectiles. There was one couple (very capable age) who we actually had to move theirs for them. Later we saw that they were just hiding in their house while we moved all of their trash….GRRR!
kathi says
Oh wow, that is like what I am mad about, but even worse. If people can’t pull together to help each other… or apparently even just themselves… during an impending natural disaster, that’s way worse than being a lazy jag during a normal snowfall!
Hotch Potchery says
I don’t think we will ever move out of the south. It is 41 and we are “dying of frostbite”.
kathi says
Oooh, for sure you wouldn’t want to be here then. Our highest temperature for the next week is supposed to be still below freezing – about 29°!