Pursuit of a feral anserine

I knew that everything this morning was likely to be gummed up because of last night’s ice storm, so when the alarm went off at five this morning, I phoned the employee message line as we’d been instructed to see whether I should report to work.  The message said the service center would be opening at ten, so I went to sleep again.  At eight I got up and dressed, and slithered carefully down the street to the bus stop, where I waited for better than half an hour, with temperatures in the mid-twenties, before a southbound bus came.  (Buses on this route normally run on a fifteen-minute interval.)  While I waited I saw two northbound buses go past, so I knew something must be going on.  At last two came together, and I learned the City hadn’t sanded the transfer point at Highland Mall, so half a dozen buses had been stuck up there, unable to move, for around an hour until a sand truck could be got out to help them.  The two buses finally made a rendezvous south of downtown and the second one, which was running empty, took on all the passengers from the first which then dead-headed over to pick up its place on schedule further down the route.

When I got to the service center I was turned away at the door, with the news that somebody had decided, while I was on the bus, that we weren’t going to open at all today, so I had to slither back across the parking lots to the bus stop and wait another fifteen or twenty minutes in the cold for a northbound bus to come along.  One finally did come, and I got on for another three-quarter hour’s ride back uptown, now thoroughly chilled from standing in the cold and damp.  I slid home the three blocks from the bus stop, only to find that I needed to go out and get my laundry, in order to have clean shirts for going to work the rest of the week.

I bundled up and started out once more, this time in the car.  Fortunately, last night I’d tarped over the windshield and front windows, so I didn’t have to stop and scrape ice before I could go.  I got to the dry cleaner without mishap, but in the parking lot I stepped on a patch of black ice I didn’t see beforehand, and went down in a Mack Sennett-type pratfall, as ungainly as the time I got knocked over at the Vermeer exhibition in the National Gallery.  The only blessing was that I didn’t hit my head, which I could easily have done, but I bashed my funnybone and gave myself a backache that I still have.

I got myself and the shirts home without more embarrassment or injury, and here I mean to stay.  I covered up the car windshield again, just in case, scraped down and swept the sidewalks, and came in to sit and stare at “The Sword in the Stone.”  That’s as much excitement or labor as I need for the rest of the day.

The shark spanks the deadly business card in your place.  Fnord.