Chester Molests

In this day and age it is hard to avoid news and the weather and yet somehow Cristin and I continue to do so to our detriment.  As I was looking for tupperware storage in Target on monday I overheard a couple talking about the difference in snowfall between two forecasting models.  Later that day we discovered they were referring to a storm (Chester) that was due the following day that was going to affect much of the eastern seaboard.  It began late tuesday and the time between Cristin’s text of “leaving work” and her arrival in the driveway was 4 hours.  That meant that she was able to hear the entirety of the Stern Show rebroadcast in addition to another hour or so of terrible music.  Wednesday I woke and looked out the window and saw the neighbors kids out shoveling.  The temperature read 9F with “feels like” temps around -10 due to the wind. Nothing like northern New England but enough to prompt me to find and wear a hat.  The neighbor kids are pretty hardy and I later found out that there was some financial incentive.  I had no incentive to shovel other than getting some exercise and relieving the anxiety from my ever growing OCD about such matters. Phoebe came out to “help” which was fun.  By help I mean repeatedly strike the side of the boat with her plastic broom. When I queried her actions, she explained she was “brushing off the cars”. Seemed reasonable to me.  After shoveling I came in and rallied everybody to go back out again on the sleds and was met with resistance across the board. They relinquished and we towed the ladies down to the beach to watch an amusingly helpless Ellie try to move about on foot.  She is generally pretty lazy and snow deeper than her ankles causes her level of effort to fall to absolute zero.  When we got back I raced them down Baker Lane on their sleds which was fun enough that they stopped complaining about the cold and eventually I had to make the call to end the fresh air experience when I noticed their cheeks were becoming unusually rosy.