Pleasantly Disturbed Thursday: Digging Out

It that's time again: another Pleasantly Disturbed Thursday, hosted by our fearless leader Marty Duane Scott, who lives somewhere near the Arctic Circle (Iowa).

This past week has been all about – digging out.

The big winter storm that started Monday night and concluded Wednesday turned out not to be the “snowpocalypse” or “snowmageddon” it was predicted to be – for St. Louis. Actually, the snowpocalypse was farther to the north – I saw the pictures of Lakeshore Drive in Chicago, and Interstate 70 was closed from just west of St. Louis to Kansas City – that’s some 200 miles of highway. My youngest son reported a foot of snow in Kansas City.

We had about two inches of sleet on Tuesday (which was an absolute blast to remove from the driveway; yes, it was frozen solid) and about three inches of snow that finally ended late Wednesday afternoon. And, since you asked, that is indeed a picture of yours truly, victorious at having just finished shoveling on Wednesday, at least until the predicted snow for this weekend.

Yes, I fully understand that weather does not equal climate, but forgive me for what I think and mutter under my breath when I hear former vice presidents and various scientists try to explain that all this snow is happening because of global warming. I would like to invite the former vice president to come to my driveway and shovel all the global warming off of it. I’ll make him a cup of global warming tea while he shovels. Green tea, too.

Our offices at work have been closed for two days, which means working at home. It’s no surprise, but I get more work done at home. We’ve still had some of our scheduled meetings via phone, but they don’t last as long. Since a great deal of my work happens online, I’m good to go as long as we don’t lose power. Four years ago, we lost power during an ice storm, and we lost it for four days.

I’m almost finished One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp. Oh, what a book this is. It’s mediation, rumination, reflection, devotional – all these things and more wrapped up in simple, plain language straight from the heart. She takes the everyday and finds the beauty and the thankfulness in it. But then she takes it to another level altogether. It’s a wonderful book. (A lot of other people think it’s a wonderful book, too. It was just published in January, has more than 200 reviews at Amazon, and hit #10 or #11 in its category on Amazon’s best-sellers list.)

I met Ann at Laity Lodge in Texas last fall. She’s from even farther north that Marty Duane – she lives in Canada. Her husband Darryl is a farmer. To read her book now is like talking with her then – she is exactly like the book she’s written.

Another good thing this week – the long-awaited DVD set of series eight of the British spy drama M1-5 arrived in our mailbox. Since last spring, we have watched seven seasons (via Netflix, mostly). We had a real problem with Season 5 – Netflix didn’t have enough copies, and someone was keeping the first disk set forever. We were such fans that I finally said phooey on Netflix and ordered series 5 from Amazon. It was buy it or wait six months. We bought it. It’s one of the best written, best produced television series we’ve ever seen, even if the Americans (the CIA) end up being the stereotyped bad guys most of the time (or, if not the bad guys, at least Machiavellian and untrustworthy). We’ve seen two of the 10 episodes, and we’re torn between wanting to watch them all now and pacing them out.

That’s plenty pleasant disturbances for one week.


To see more Pleasantly Disturbed Thursday posts, visit Marty Duane Scott at Scribing the Journey.

Photograph: Husband Freezing by Janet Young, taken from the doorway of the nice warm house while husband shoveled in the freezing cold. Used with laughing permission.