Of snow days, sledding, and slamming into people.
Yesterday, we had snow and my siblings got a snow day, but I had to go to school. It was awful. I cried when I found out I had to go.
Today, however, I got off school, along with my siblings. I visited my 88-year-old neighbor, Virginia, and we watched The Price Is Right while her bichon frise, Fanny, tried to squeeze as much affection out of me as she possibly could---she did a bang-up job. I talked to Virginia because she's actually quite fun to talk to, if you keep her away from subjects like feminism and race relations because her views are rather, um, outdated. She's so funny, though, and she loves to talk about how Fanny seems to stick to me when I visit.
All of the excitement culminated when my family and I went sledding with our neighbors. Specifically, I sledded (or is it "sled?") down the hill on my younger sister's boogie board. I nearly ran into several people, but they jumped out of the way just in the nick of time, and I sort of felt like Clark Griswold in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation when he and Cousin Eddie take their kids sledding and he put too much grease on his metal saucer sled, so he keeps going full-speed-ahead through the woods until he stops in the middle of a Wal-Mart parking lot, except that I didn't end up at Wal-Mart.
The real excitement happened when I met my brother at the bottom of the hill and we struggled to climb back up to the top. he trudged on, but as I slowly and delibrately tried to walk up the hill, as seven-year-old girl with a speech impediment that rendered her incapable of saying her "R"'s correctly slammed into me head-on on her plastic, purple saucer. As the saucer hit my stomach and I fell face-first into the snow, I remarked, "Fuck this." I had said that earlier when I couldn't get down the hill on my old sled, but this time I really felt it. I kind of hope the little girl didn't hear it, but she probably did; I hope she isn't scarred for life, or anything. She apologized, but I was still ticked off as I lumbered up the hill, my sweatpants caked with snow. I imagine that collision was something like a football tackle, only without the padding (unless you count my heavy winter coat as protective gear), so I guess it was more like a rugby tackle. My mom said it was a spectacular wipeout from what she saw from the top of the hill. I wish someone had videotaped it---then we could've sent it to America's Funniest Home Videos and entered to win $10,000 dollars. Ah, well.