Local girl becomes weather-induced shut-in.

Greetings from balmy Wisconsin!!

Since this photo was taken, the pile of snow behind Local Girl and Devil Dog has grown by another foot.

To my readers in northern states: Doesn’t all this snow we’re getting make you feel like a kid again (well, minus the shoveling and driving in it parts)? Because when you were a small, short person, those snowbanks were like mountains! And now as somewhat taller adults, they are mountains once again! Remember how much fun a day in those snowbanks could be? Clambering over them, sliding down them on plastic saucers, arranging them into forts, hiding behind them during epic snowball battles…forget that nasty business about them sucking your boots off, or that one time you could have sworn the snowbank had teeth, that you saw it winking at you and licking its chops, that it actually snaked a snowy foot out to trip Jimmy Kohlman before eating his moon boot AND sock and then it gave Sara Welsh a facewash that made a pound of raw hamburger look like the gold standard for complexions?

To my readers in southern states: I’m sure there have been one or two moments in your life, perhaps in your youth, when you caught yourself thinking or saying, “I should like to see this snow substance they speak of “Up North.” But then you promptly forgot all about it and crawled back into the hammock strung between the two palm trees near your backyard pool.

I just love that story.

And here's what I love even more: when an inch of snow falls in certain climes and the local stores sell out of bottled water, batteries, generators, canned goods, and propane tanks and the snow melts before everyone gets back home, which takes an hour longer than usual because everyone is driving like marbles and banana peels have been scattered all over the road surface.

But back to the feet and feet of snow that we’ve received to date this winter. As I wrote this blog, we were expecting another foot of snow before nightfall (plus freezing rain and sleet and giant ice crystals the size and shape of He-Man’s magic sword). When so much snow is falling or anticipated to fall, your ability to just get out and about takes a nose dive, unless you LIKE frostbite and wet socks and calling tow trucks to tug your risk-taking ass out of the ditch. When the weather forces you to be housebound, terrible things can happen, such as:

Your husband is playing a new game on the Xbox. And at first, you think, Gee, that music is so soothing and relaxing! But don’t worry—this is just because the first fighting sequence hasn’t happened yet. There are fighting sequences every four seconds. After two hours of this, your right eye will begin to twitch, and your right hand will begin to make an involuntary stabby-motion. It’s a reflex, really, and at first you attribute it to chopping too many carrots for dinner (Because, oh, I don’t know, you eat lots of carrots when it snows), but then you notice the stabby-motion speeds up when you get near the XBox. And guess what? You can’t leave!! BECAUSE YOU ARE HOUSEBOUND.

You have a bottle of red truck wine in the kitchen. As you watch a movie called Sunshine (which is not blown up anyone’s ass…it’s actually a fantastic sci-fi flick starring the delicious Cillian Murphy), the wine begins to call to you in a soft siren. Small dogs start barking two miles away. So you heed the siren’s call and pour a glass. Or two. Or three. Soon enough, you find yourself weeping upstairs as you put away laundry. Your husband comes up to hug you and declare, “You get like this every year right about now.” Which you violently deny; really, you got this way just this once, just tonight, BECAUSE YOU ARE HOUSEBOUND.

(And drank a lot of wine, but whatev.)

All of that wine wakes you up at four thirty-seven the next morning. You arise, because your bladder urgently needs to be voided. (Speaking of, who came up with that one? “Voiding” the bladder. “This bladder is null and void in Tennessee, Maine, and New Mexico.”) After the voiding, you decide to take a vitamin and some aspirin. You don’t have a headache yet, but you can feel one weighing its options in the back of your skull, deciding whether or not to submit its application. You return to bed. Your husband, sleeping so peacefully when you woke up, has decided it is now time to Commence with the Snoring. Your right nostril has decided it too wants to join the program now in progress, and begins making killdeer calls with every exhalation. Two and a half hours later, you finally twitch off to sleep, your right hand making the stabby-motion again. When you get up later that morning, you think: what a great day to do some badly-needed shopping! But when you pull up the radar on weather underground, you realize you can’t. BECAUSE YOU WILL BE HOUSEBOUND.