Snow

[mallorys_camera]

I’m thinking we got somewhere around 16 inches total.

Which, you know, is awful.

But not as awful as the 30 inches that one of the forecasters predicted.

###

The Hideous White Stuff From the Sky is not the big story this morning, though.

No, the big story this morning is that Mendocino County went ahead and offered Ichabod the junior public defender job—here’s your starting date, here’s what your benefits look like, just sign on the dotted line, please.

The legislation analyst people in Sacramento have only tentatively offered him a job. He did accept it but no formal offer has been made since the formal offer is subject to a bureaucratic review process that has been inching along with the speed of a banana slug.

He accepted the informal offer because times are tough, and a job that you only half want is better than no job.

But he really wants to be a PD.

So, he’s gonna accept the Mendocino County offer.

I don’t think he owes the legislation analyst people anything, though of course, the situation must be finessed.

###

After I got off the phone with Ichabod, I started to cry.

And more-or-less, I haven’t stopped crying (although wait! Yeah, I did stop crying when I was asleep.)

Tears of joy?

I suppose.

Though my mind interprets crying as sadness. And generates emotional responses to match.

A billion or so years ago when Ichabod was a wee thing, I was sitting in a dentist’s chair, deep in the throes of nitrous oxide narcosis, undergoing one of those eight billion or so dental procedures that were so large a part of my life in my younger days.

Nitrous oxide is great because it takes you just close enough to the brink of death to hear the voices from the other side.

And what the voices from the other side were talking about was Ichabod. They were outlining his life. And this interlude—country lawyer fighting on behalf of the wretched, the poor, the oppressed—was one of the things they were talking about.

So, you know. Very weird.

###

I hear the dulcet hum of Buff Ken’s snowblower!

But he hasn’t stripped to the waist, which means it’s still cold out.

And so, the world begins again after the faint fall of the snow upon all the living and the dead.