Big snow on Thursday night and Friday morning meant I was working at home yesterday. I took care of a lot of my magazine stuff (getting advertisers’ profile-pages approved for the year-end issue) in my home office while about 8 inches of snow piled up outside. At one point, I noticed that my neighbor across the street was clearing his driveway out pretty quickly with his snowblower. The snow was thick, but powdery, so the snowblower had an easy time of it.<\/p>\n
A few minutes later, I noticed that he was clearing my driveway<\/em> with it. I smiled, then ducked under my window, hoping to avoid a scene. My car was in the garage (no windows), so it was possible that he thought I was at the office. Either way, I just didn’t want to step outside and thank him.<\/p>\n This isn’t to say I wasn’t thankful. It’s just that I find it pretty uncomfortable to thank someone for doing unpaid labor in the cold, then walk back inside my warm house to drink hot toddies and think lofty thoughts. I would’ve felt obliged to get a shovel out and clean my walkway or something, just to show him that I, too, was man enough to work out in the cold. Even though I really wanted to be inside, where it’s warm.<\/p>\n He went on to do the driveway of another neighbor after finishing mine.<\/p>\n I also got my wood-burning stove working yesterday. It was the first time I tried it in about two years, since the “why is there a tremendous volume of smoke pouring out of the stove?” episode. Worked like a charm. Even better news was that I remembered the enormous cache of wood in my shed. The wood was left there by the previous occupant, so it dates from early 2003 or thereabouts. Since it’s so old, the wood catches fire really easily.<\/p>\n I still had my neurotic “let’s look inside and make sure it’s going” compulsion for the first hour or so. It’s the first fireplace\/stove I’ve ever had, so — as with every other thing in the world — I’m afraid that there’s something I’m supposed<\/em> to be doing that I just don’t know about, but is glaringly obvious to everyone else. (That fear has actually played a huge part in my life, but it hasn’t stopped me from achieving my long-time dream of having a successful career as a literary author. The fact that I can’t write has stopped me from achieving <\/em>that dream.)<\/em><\/p>\n