Old Man Winter needs a good swift kick in the snowballs

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Snow is pretty! For about a day. Then it's just a pain in my fat white ass.

We received a good 8 inches of powdery snow last Saturday. Now I love being snowed in as much as the next guy. We had plenty of food, snacks, beer, and DVDs, and had a great time just being lazy the whole weekend, and the neighborhood is always pretty under a pure white blanket. But when it comes time to go back to work Monday, I hate snow.

Saturday's snowfall forced us to cancel our plans to go to Raleigh and meet my wife's dad for dinner. We had also planned to transport a piece of furniture to store in her grandparents' house, and retrieve more stuff from my parents' house. Sunday afternoon we had to scoop and scrape all that snow off our cars in preparation for the next morning's trudge back to the Gulag. Then came the fun of making sure our cars could get out. Mine wasn't much trouble, but we had to push and shove my wife's car to get it moving. We decided it was unsafe to attempt to go anywhere, which meant I was stuck paying an extra buck for each of the 3 Redbox movies we'd rented and already watched.

Then Monday came. My office has an adverse weather policy, but I knew that the main roads were clear and only my cul-de-sac was problematic, so I didn't really have a good reason to skip work. So I had to get dressed, put on my rubber boots and carry my regular shoes in a bag and go out into the cold, unforgiving world. I had to circle the whole office building until I found a parking spot that had thawed out enough not to be a terrible slip-and-fall hazard.

As if all that shit weren't bad enough, Tuesday bestowed us with freezing rain. My wife was sent home from work over an hour early and complained of slick spots on her drive home. I had to cancel a personal trainer appointment thanks to the foul-ass weather.

Today we were shown some mercy. Temperatures got up into the 40s today, melting snow off pavement and concrete. Our cul-de-sac, however, is so shaded that it will likely take at least a week to get rid of the slush and ice. We'll be pummeled yet again by more winter weather this weekend, too! So of course plans to go to Raleigh must be postponed yet again.

On an unrelated topic, this made my day, as it reflects the kind of thoughts that go through my head every time I look at my dismal paycheck:


While I'm on the topic of salaries, I'd like to take a moment to bitch about how much physicians make. It's absurd. GP's probably take in at least a hundred grand a year, and some specialists can rake in half a mil or more. You can argue all you want about the amount of schooling, testing, and licensing they have to go through, but the shitty service my wife and I have been receiving lately from medical personnel leads me to conclude that doctors are overpaid for what they do.

Last week I went in with a fever, sore throat, congestion, etc. After waiting 45 minutes to be seen, the doctor was in the exam room all of 5 minutes and pronounced that I have a bacterial upper respiratory infection. A week and 30 antibiotic capsules later, I still have a sore throat and yellow mucus. So the guy probably got around $100 just to make a half-assed educated guess and throw some pills at me. Fuckin'-A, I wish I could get a hundred bucks just to glance at someone's head-holes for 5 minutes. But I don't. I work in a job that requires precision and great attention to detail, plus a comprehension of principles of color, value, and space that not everyone has. I can spend hours on a single project, getting it arranged just right. And I get paid probably a fourth of your average general practitioner. So somehow, someone somewhere decided that my time, effort, talent, skills, and education are worth a fourth as much as that of a guy who's in his office maybe 3 days a week and probably misses the mark a good 10% of the time. If I had that kind of failure rate with the stuff I create, I'd be out on my ass.

The longer I work for a shitty salary that doesn't reflect the true value of my abilities, the more of a socialist I become. I find myself lauding budgetary plans that I would have decried a few years ago. Tax the rich bastards and send some of it my way! And give me some free god-damned healthcare while you're at it, paid for by people who earn over 100K a year, because I'm sick of forking over $600 a month for the two of us to get shitty coverage. I'm beginning to understand how democrats get elected.