There is no milk for my cereal this morning. Two days ago, when there was no milk in the morning, my husband got his car stuck in the snowplow-created snow dam trying to get milk for me before I got up. (Yes, he is a sweetheart. But I’m OK, too. After we got him unstuck, I shoveled out the snow dam while he shopped.) Today there’s no snow dam in the driveway but he’s puttering in the basement and either did not notice the problem or thought I would not be up yet since I was working until 3 or decided I could live without my cereal this time. Why do we have a problem with such a simple thing as keeping milk in the frig, you say? The emptiness or fullness of our nest oscillates. Our adult children may or may not be in the house and, when around, may invite over a number of other people which, itself, is a random variate. The younger people often arrive and eat in the wee hours. We joke that we can’t go downstairs in our underwear at midnight because we might have unexpected company. It could be amusing to try to model the fluctuations. But first I’ll fix peanut butter toast.
Just thought those of you with little children might want to know what you can look forward to. (For the record, yes it is much less work and yes we are glad our offspring feel comfortable about inviting their friends to hang out here. Peanut butter toast is a small price to pay, although I’d still rather have my cereal.)
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my mother always mock-complains about how high her grocery bill is when we come to visit. i know she really loves it though :)
As a vocabularous coincidence, I just read something that said the name the wall of snow left at the end of a driveway (etc.) by a snowplow is called a “berm.”
I can’t count the number of diner breakfasts I’ve had both my eggs transfered to Kid’s plate, one “egg, please!” bite at a time. Maybe I should make a habit of ordering a side of peanut butter toast. :)
Living between two “snow route” streets, those berms get me every time.
Peanut butter on toast sounds delicious. After hosting my parents, sister, and sister-in-law this past week, though, I have a new understanding of the sheer amount of groceries one needs to consider when hosting guests for extended periods of time and a new appreciation for my parents who always seem to have the fridge stocked when we’re around.
I hate those berms. Last winter I thought I would just ram through a big one at the end of my driveway with my 4-wheel drive truck. I had been out of town for a couple of weeks. Evidently the berm was no longer just a dam of snow, but had refrozen and hardened to ice. The berm made horrific scraping noises on the underside of my truck. I then had to get rid of the berm with an ax because it was too solid to just snow shovel through it.
This is another example of the kind of knowledge that people who grew up in snowy places must possess, but that I lacked since my only experiences with winter weather came from vacation visits to mountains for snowy recreation.