February and Puppy Tails

Schnikes! How the heck did it get to be February? It seems everyone I talk to share a mild disgruntlement over how quickly January passed us all by.

The roads are slippy out. The cars are taking nosedives left and right off of the road. On Saturday a large pickup truck (by large, I mean, this thing was designed to keep us dependent on foreign oil supplies) appears to have spun around on the highway before plopping softly into the ditch at the top of our road. It’s been a week since we’ve gotten any substantial snow which leaves the roads with a snow cover glaze. A nice steady pace and no sudden applications of the brakes seem the best methods for staying on the road and out of the ditch. And that goes, whether or not you have four-wheel drive and even if you have a big-ass truck.

Andy’s truck isn’t in the ditch, but he’s thinking of ditching it. For the past year, he’s been involved in a long, intrapersonal soul search for a new, slightly larger truck. Today may be the day. He’s headed to Duluth to check out a couple trucks at a couple dealerships.

Got Friday’s article sent off for fact checking from the source. Hopefully I’ll be able to turn it quite a bit ahead of schedule. I stumbled upon this Gloria Steinem quote last night while Andy was watching We Were Soldiers and I was idly flipping through a magazine: There’s really a shortage of good freelance writers . . . . There are a lot of talented people who are very erratic, so either they don’t turn it in or they turn it in and it’s rotten; it’s amazing. Somebody who’s even maybe not all that terrific but who is dependable, who will turn in a publishable piece more or less on time, can really do very well.

That shall be my mantra from now on.

It’s an early morning for me. I’m trying to get some writing done before I head to work because it’s going to be a long couple work days. (Since we’ve all been working an average of 20 hours a week, any day longer than 4 hours now constitutes a long day: I spend more time and am getting close to making more money writing.)

But today the restaurant is the mid-way checkpoint for the John Beargrease Sled Dog Marathon which means we’ll be serving up burgers and cocoa like nobody’s business. In my middle school days, a friend and I always used to always help out at an annual dog sled race. I’m looking forward to being close to the action again after a ten year hiatus. I'll let you know how it goes.