Boom! Brrurrrrrr! Beep Beep Beep!

5 a.m. The Beest and I jolt awake and about 4 inches off the bed as a Shire snow plow goes back and forth, back and forth, right outside my bedroom window. "Holy crap!" I say to the cat. "We must've gotten real snow." Well, I went to bed at 11 last night. It hadn't started by then. Beest and I head for the bathroom and I look out there. "What?" There's maybe an inch out there. As the Tonka toy plow goes back and forth another dozen times over the same patch I catch the snow falling in its lights. It's a light, swirly snow.

Really, is it necessary to plow one inch of snow at this hour? And to run over the same ground a dozen times, spinning lights and beeps on high, plow banging the ground again and again, for one lousy inch of snow? Sounds like the sound of eagerness for overtime to me.

There's no going back to bed. I'm not deaf enough to ignore that much noise. So the Beest and I make our way to thekitchen and I start making coffee. Oh good, the plow has left the back of the building for the front. There's no more snow here than out back. But he makes a 45 minute job of plowing the 30 feet of street down this end of the Shire.

It's 6:30. It's seriously snowing, as I see in the headlights of another truck that's just pulled up and is idling in the road. I think whoever's in the Tonka toy has created an all-day job by simply starting so damned early before there was any snow or traffic to bother. Ah, here comes the sidewalk plower/blower. Running over the same ground the plow just did. Don't you love efficiency? I guess the office will appreciate it, when they come in to work in a few hours. It'll have been plowed for 4 hours already by then.