More suburban wierdness

In keeping with the (admittedly broad) gardenish theme of the blog, I'd intended to post pictures of the aftermath of a nice snowstorm we had on Friday. The powers that be at Grace's school informed us by automated call at 5:38 am that it was a snow day, and so we stayed home, mostly, and wrote our dissertation, played cards, watched TV, and ate when we felt like it. I have a few nice pictures of the post-shoveling state of our front walk, and an amusing anecdote about the snowblower (just pretend you're doing magnetic poetry with the following words and you'll get the gist: snowblower, newspaper, clogged, stop, fix, burn, arm, cut, hand, set aflame, snow, extinguish, stupid f****** snowblower.) There was a neighborly exchange between me and the neighbor's middle-aged son, who told me I shouldn't go running before shoveling my walk and then post-run while I was shoveling stopped his car to lean out the window and point out that he'd been right, but all in a funny and jovial way.

However, I managed to get pictures of the above (mama in her winter running gear, cute outdoor kids, before-and-after shots of the sidewalk) only on the internal memory of the digital camera, and I can't upload them to the computer or transfer them to the memory card, so you'll have to imagine all that. (Imagine me doing a hell of a lot of shoveling during the period when the remaining newspaper clogging the snowblower was being set on fire.)

So, instead, I'll tell the amusing tale of how we were put on lockdown in our local Super Target as police fanned the area looking for the guy who shot up the nearby Lane Bryant. Huzzah. While we were cruising through the bread aisle, the store manager announced that no one could enter or leave the store because of a "police issue." We were perfectly safe, and finished up our grocery shopping and then waited a few minutes in an increasingly nervous but totally polite and obedient crowd of Target shoppers. We held out the Target Starbucks as our last-ditch option for food and drink, if necessary, but it didn't come to that. It was as close as I've been to very large guns in quite a while - a dozen years ago when I took a trip to Italy I got pretty used to seeing 18 year olds standing around the piazza with huge machine guns, but in Target it's a little jarring. The police asked nicely if anyone had seen anything suspicious, like "someone fleeing," but no on had. They gathered up everybody at the front of the store, searched the place, and then let us all out. We deduced that we must not fit the profile of their suspect and made our way back to the car.

This is all made slightly wierder by the fact that it's the second murder outside the Target since we've lived here. It's enough to turn a girl to Peapod.