Snow days are awesome.

In Texas, freezing temperatures are accompanied by a small amount of hysteria. Network television stations broadcast Action Danger Super Winter Weather News Action Alerts all day, and people stock up on bottled water and canned food at the grocery store -- just in case, you know, it never gets warmer, and Austin becomes the final battleground between good and evil for possession of the endless tundra.

I'm from Cleveland, where we drive on snow and ice for recreation and drinking story fodder. But they don't salt the roads in Texas, so any moisture turns the streets into one big, hard-to-drive-on hockey rink. This is a great excuse not to drive to the job you'll only have for another couple weeks anyway, so instead I holed up in the house with Lady-A, where we bummed around like junior high kids who scored the day off school.

That's when we remembered that my parents recently shipped me the Nintendo 64 (a video game system) that used to host the most epic Mario Kart battles between my brother, sister, father and I. I fucking kick ass at that game, but hadn't hooked it up yet because we were missing some important cable. (Fie!) But after 45 minutes on the phone, calling every Best Buy and Circuit City in a 20 mile radius, Lady-A -- rockstar that she is -- found the part we needed at a Radio Shack up the road. Only those geeks at Radio Shack would have a little-used part for an out of date gaming system in stock, God love 'um.

So, while most Central Texans were huddled together with $500 worth of emergency groceries, we ventured out onto the ice -- without flares, flashlights, or sticks to beat off the looters. Well, first we scraped the ice of the car. We tried using a spatula, then a cheese grater (which was surprisingly effective), because in 2 1/2 years down here this is only the second time I've seen ice on a windshield, and we don't own a goddamn icepick.

Fortunately, nearly everything except Radio Shack was closed, so the streets were free of dumb asses taking turns at 30mph (it's like the ice makes Austinites even worse drivers than they were in the first place). We were assured by the friendly clerk who sold us the all-but-irrelevant piece of nerdy techno-gaming-junk that the store stays open in case of emergencies because they sell flashlights, batteries, etc -- "it's a community thing." I think this translates into: your corporate bosses are dicks, and make you skate to work even while the cool heads at Fox News are declaring a state of fucking chaos.

But our emergency was taken care of, and now I'll end this post so I can go waste the rest of my evening whooping the ever-living shit outta Luigi, or Toad, or Princess, or whichever cute little cartoon character Lady-A picks to try and defeat me. Hooray for the snow day!

*As an addendum to this post, it should be noted that, for the life of me, I couldn't figure out how to get the damn Nintendo to work. I plugged it into the system, and then into the TV, but nothing happened. Finally, frustrated, I gave up, and in about 30 seconds Lady-A had it fired up and ready to go. I feel just a little bit ashamed of myself.

tags: snow, weather, mario kart
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