"Get On The Bus, Gus!"

David and I are in Tom's River, New Jersey right now visiting family. There is tons of snow here, much more than at home. When we left home, our yard was down to lawn, but here, there is about 2 feet of the white stuff on the ground. Three more inches are expected tonight. That will close the schools and businesses for days. My calculations are that for every inch of snow, there is a closure day. The polite thing to say is that they don't specialize in snow removal down here. They seem to be just waiting for it to magically disappear. Walkways are sheer ice and David took a nasty, flat on his back fall at the hotel entrance. He did a back flip, double gainer with a triple rotation that rivaled anything I've seen going on at the Olympics so far. What snow has been plowed has been left as mountains blocking views of all the intersections where a driver is obliged to simply pull out blindly into oncoming traffic and hope for the best. It's exhausting just trying to drive here. There is traffic galore and "jug handles" to negotiate because you can't make a left hand turn anywhere. A jug handle is someone's idea of traffic engineering brilliance where to turn left, you must get into the right hand lane and go around a loop to face the intersection and go through where you would like to have simply turned left. This is a lot to get my head around at 75mph in four lanes with a busted thumb. We've been to a wedding (which was also the bride's birthday), a family dinner with fourteen of us including two babies, a post wedding brunch with the whole wedding crew and guests on Valentine's day, where we also celebrated a loved one's 70th birthday. Somehow, at the raucous wedding reception where we danced wildly all night, I managed to break my right thumb, or at least sprain it terribly. Half of that hand is black and swollen. This is the kind of thing that happens when one of my advancing age tries to keep up with the twenty something bunch and abuses my chubby little temple. Now, I'm going to go punish myself on the hotel treadmill. We are going to try for some birding and photography, but the snow may not allow for that. Wish us luck. We'll be coming home to the Land Of Milk And Honey on Wednesday, back where the wind don't blow so strange.