January. 2013.

Oh my stars and garters, winter is in full force out there, and it isn’t happy with trying to kill you anymore. Now there's booby-traps, too. NASTY ones.

Black ice, hidden snow-dusted wet ice, freezing rain, salt ball bearings everywhere, deep puffy snow that'll eat your dog entirely (Have YOU fallen off the path recently?), rough ice-paths designed to kill and maim you, and drivers not real familiar with high snowbanks that hide oncoming traffic. Especially the oncoming traffic on sidewalks.

The path leading to your house? (So I don’t shovel regularly. The mailman hasn't brought me any money of good news in years anyway.) HA! Can you say free-fall?

Onward. Don't focus on the deadly nature of this country country, there's only 50 days of winter left now anyway. (Please, god. I was good this week.)

Monday I warned fellow workies about the dangers of bill-6. (The feds here can take your house for putting dandelions in a labeled bottle. THEN put you in front of a tribunal (no rules of evidence, assumed guilt, etc) for your trail. And charge you for the privilege.)

Tuesday, it was GM foods and the gene-VI relationship to fiberouses. (Your skin sprouting colored fibers. Apparently, a bacterial-repression function of the piggybacking virus used to transfer new genes into a host.)

(Oh, and the horribly itchy and painful colored fibers are identical to the extra gluten in wheat. Go figure.) The fatal results of 100% GM diets on newborns ( and 3 gen sterility for heavy diets of it for everybody else) also got mentioned. Repeatedly.

Wednesday, it was climate change. (The big arctic upper air inversion inversion currently freezing Canada (It was -35 last night here) is one of the 6 or so things that has to happen all at once so you can flash-freeze mammoths. (Or melt Greenland.) And since we're short of mammoths these days....)

Thursday, my pay was short, I got dumped on while on the line and I had to walk the long walk home in -30 weather with no winter-gloves. (My usual ride was sick.) Doors got auto-locked and people spun away and out of the lot at speed as I tried to scrounge a lift. I'm both a smoker and smelly, officially.

(Actually, I eventually got dumped at a bus stop. Very lucky, that. The plant is empty 6 minutes after closing, usually. Missed the bus by minutes. Missed it again at the transfer point, by the same. Had to walk the last forty minutes home anyway, as there aren't any buses out that way at all.)

The result? Frostbitten hands and feet. Me and my new crop of sausages stayed home today, feeling sorry for myself.

There's a hint in all this somewhere.

My take on it is 'winter sucks and you're on your own, kid.'

So.

Enjoy, eh?