I should have gone to Perkins. Yes, for grad school.

GOD FUCKING DAMN MOTHERFUCKING BASTARDS.

They towed the van.

FUCK SHIT PISS CHRIST.

“They” = Mankato, which is in a state of snow emergency (apparently, though things seem fine to me). I knew about the snow emergency yesterday, when a little bar ran across the bottom of the TV screen while Ivanovich was watching football. Mankato in Snow Emergency, it cried tinnily. No Parking on City Streets. I went outside and moved the car into the bottom of the driveway, effectively blocking the sidewalk, which I felt pretty bad about. I then shoveled our sidewalk, stoop, driveway, and so on. While shoveling, I watched a few people navigate the front of our van, and I continued to feel bad about blocking the sidewalk. Bad enough that, when I went up to Target and back later in the day (I felt I needed a snow shovel that wasn’t a flimsy plastic shell made to go in the back of Ganglebot’s car for emergency use), I decided to put the car back in the street, since the snowplows hadn’t come near us since ten that morning. I figured that maybe we didn’t count as a city street, since where we used to live on Broad had signs that said No Parking During Snow Emergency and since all the downtown streets had been clear for six hours. Plus, even though I’d shoveled out the driveway for Ganglebot to pull his car up, he could not, since his car is ALSO DEAD (two dead cars in one driveway? It’s beginning to look a lot like Flint) and shall stay where it is till he gets a new heater core or something.

So, long story short, the van was in the street when the wreckers came at 4 AM to tow the cars. Ganglebot and his houseguest ran outside to tell them to stop, but to no avail. You know, if I were a tow truck operator, I’d probably pound on some doors before towing every car on the street. It just seems like a lot of time to be out in the cold (not counting all the money coming in from taking people’s cars). So Gangles left a note for Ivanovich, who is now walking the hill to school to make sure there’s enough money in the account to get the van out of hock.

The real pisser? At 3 AM, I had been in bed, unable to sleep, for about five hours (as per fucking usual), except for an hour in there when I came downstairs to watch the end of Little Miss Sunshine. I thought hard about going to the Perkins in North Mankato, which is perhaps our only 24-hour restaurant these days (seriously, Mankato, what the hell?) to work on some plans. Instead, I decided to just draw blueprints in my mind for another fifteen minutes or so in a last-ditch attempt to sleep. Apparently, it worked; I was dead asleep when the racket started outside my window. So now Ivan’s hair is freezing solid and we have to figure out some way to get to the towing compound, which may be downtown or may be up on Madison, which is much farther a walk when it’s cold out.

Fuck you, Snow Emergency, fuck you.



So Ganglebot’s guest, Art Teacher, is an Ohioan who loves chalk pastels and long walks to the bar. He showed us this very cool art project, and soon we will have decorations on our walls!

Unfortunately, right now I am SO PISSED AT EVERYTHING. AT is an incredibly responsible houseguest who insists on washing the dishes. But, as I found from stepping in a puddle of ice-cold water this morning, though we know the safe side of our sink is no longer safe, people keep using it. We realized that the sink is out of commission last night, when AT (who devised a pretty cool system for using the dead side of the sink) poured a tub of water into the good side and most of it ended up saturating our socks. Someone, though, is still putting water in the drain. So even though the kitchen looks great, I have to get everyone to STOP USING THE SINK! JUST STOP! NOTE THE WATER POURING OUT FROM THE CUPBOARD!


Nine o’clock update: our street looks pretty much the same, except that now there are a bunch of people opening their doors and crying My car!




Plus, I yelled at the dog. He just wanted to play. Fuck.