Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson for January 22, 2025

Once again, God exists and He has a sense of humor. Luckily for us He finds us hilarious.

Arlo’s tongue is out?

Good, now you can charge your phone and call 911.

Imagine Janice suffering through a real storm.

You would think that at their age they would have some sand or de-icer by the door so they could reduce the chance of such misfortune.

But there is little humor in common sense.

I have a driveway that has a big slope and just in general I don’t need to break a hip so I have boots with spikes to walk in the ice and snow. The tricky part is they can be slippery on hard surfaces.

Typical Janis. All wasted energy fretting instead of getting her backside in gear, sprinkling salt, and helping Arlo bring in some wood.

Arlo: don’t mind me, I’ll just hang out here awhile.

Where I live we have a tradition: when the juice goes off, our side of the road’s always in the dark and the other side’s always in the light. Thus, about 6 years ago during a nasty squall, it was satisfying when we all lost power at around 5 pm. The temps were below 0, the wind howled, and there were also thousands of other customers whose juice was off, too. I figured that we were in the dark for the long haul. To my astonishment crews (bless them!) restored our power by about 2 am.

timing is everything

Arlo: “Great!” \s

(ಠ_ಠ)

We had a power outage last evening — with temperatures dropping below zero Fahrenheit, before figuring in the wind chill! Fortunately, they got the power restored before midnight, by which time we were bundled up in our bed, so having the temperature inside drop down to 54 didn’t bother us. Good thing our phones were charged up for entertainment and updates from Consumer’s Energy, and we were praising God and thanking those hard-working folk who braved that weather to do that essential job.

There should be signs along the road that say, “Bridges, overpasses, and your back deck freeze first”.

There is a tragic Russian story about people living in city apartments stealing firewood from each other to survive the cold. It’s an old story, long before electricity was everywhere. The apartments were like caves and they were all slowing freezing.

The story makes me think how lucky so many of us are in America, and how unaware we are of the misery others live in.

Where are you almost out? Inside the house or your outside stash? When remodelled/renovated all those years ago we added space to make it a 3 car garage. We have used that for storage and in the winters we store about a cord and ½ of wood. Yah, the garage is cold, but no water, ice or snow. Dry wood burns better than wet wood. Less smoke, too.

Janis scared Arlo and caused him to drop the logs. Hopefully those are the only logs he dropped!

Crampons Arlo

Kosher salt melts icy walkways.