Rant #2,823: Nature's Way

Well, we certainly did get zonked on Friday and Saturday.
 
Long Island got hit with the first major snowstorm we have had in several years, and most places on the Island received at least a foot of the white stuff as a gift from Mother Nature.
 
In my neck of the woods, 16.5 inches fell to the ground, and while we have gotten more during storms in the past, well, I wasn’t 64 years old way back when, so everything kind of equaled out when it came to getting rid of the stuff.
 
We also had to contend with gale force winds and temperatures in the low double digits, so yes, it was a bloody mess without the blood.
 
The snow plows probably did as best as they could do with the snow falling roughly for two days straight—all day on Friday, although the early stuff was nothing, all the way through to about 4 p.m. on Saturday—but let me tell you, while the main roads were pretty good yesterday, the side streets around me are terrible—and that is the best word I can use to describe them.
 
They are full of ice and snow, and pretty treacherous if you don’t know what you are doing, or worse, think you know what you are doing but actually haven’t a clue.
 
I had one incident yesterday that shined a light on that thought.
 
I was driving on one of the side streets to get home after dropping my son off at work, and as I was about a half mile away from my house, a small truck was coming towards me—and I do mean coming towards me.
 
He was on a straight path to my car, and I beeped and honked and finally stopped my car as he ever-so-dangerously moved out of the way a few feet before we would have had a head-on collision.
 
Yes, the side streets are so bad around here that the driving area has been halved, what with the snow and the ice and people parking on the street about a foot from where they would normally park, putting their cars in the middle of the road, but this guy—or gal, I never got a good glimpse of the person—was either not paying attention—quite possible—or perhaps simply misjudged the driving area that was available—also quite possible.
 
Whatever the case, having had one accident that I had nothing to do with about a month or so ago, I certainly did not need another one, but happily, the driver woke up just at the right moment.

 
Today, everything is back to normal, pretty much, other than the fact that there is still plenty of snow on the ground. You can see the before (at the top) and the after (t=right here) photos of my street to see that while plenty was done, we might need Mother Nature to help us—and she is supposed to do just that, with temperatures in the near-50 degree range later this week, and a lot of rain too.
 
So other than taking care of the snow around our house, what did I do this weekend to make the time go faster?
 
Well, I digitized more singles and albums that I had in two months in just about three days. I am now 100-percent caught up in everything I wanted to put into MP3 format so I can listen to the music in the car.
 
Sure, I have thousands of other records that I have not yet digitized, but for right now, for the things I wanted to put into that format, I am all caught up for the first time in years.
 
I watched a bit of television, and the Decades channel had a marathon of the earlier “My Three Sons” episodes during Saturday and Sunday. The show was really something a little different in its early years than what it became later on.
 
It was fun to watch these episodes, with William Frawley as Bub, the combination grandfather and chief cook and bottle washer, in these early years of the show. If you have not seen these early shows, Frawley basically continues his Fred Mertz character from “I Love Lucy,” but Bub is really Fred Mertz on steroids in his “My Three Sons” role, and as with “Lucy,” he demonstrated once again what a talented actor he was.
 
And I also watched a few movies, none of which really demand much mention here, because they weren’t very good—

 
Except for “The Haunted Strangler,” a movie starring Boris Karloff that I missed on Saturday night’s “Svengoolie” entry on MeTV because I watched a WWE pay-per-view event with my son—which was quite interesting in itself—and which my wife fell asleep on when she tried to watch it herself.
 
We found it on YouTube and watched it on Sunday, and this 1957 film was about a man—Boris Karloff, who gave a great tour-de-force performance—who dives into what we now call a “cold case” about a strangler, and ends up being the strangler himself.
 
Karloff was relegated to trashy films later in his life, but this one is one of the better of the later films that he appeared in, and while it wasn’t a movie that I say that “you can’t miss,” he was absolutely terrific in it, so if you want to see an actor take what he is given and life it to a higher level than it should be, this is the film to see.
 
So that is how I spent my winter weekend, nothing that great but nothing that bad either, other than the wretched snow.
 
Did you suffer, too, at the hands of Mother Nature?
 
I guess it is nature’s way of telling us that she is still the greatest force we have to deal with, even through everything we have had to deal with lately.
 
“Don’t mess with Mother Nature!!” indeed!