It's been a turbulent 24 hours around here.

As per usual at this time of year, buckets of snow were dumped on it and guess who had to shovel it up?. In spite of the inevitable aching, it was sort of fun...and a much sounder idea than digging out the snowblower (quick backstory: our garage is jam-packed with two and a half decades of crap that a person can barely make their way around, and getting out the snowblower would create a bigger mess than the one already in there). Just as I was about to finish up the driveway, a neighbor comes by with his snowblower and clears the rest of it away. Apparently, he and another guy had done some clearing for the surrounding houses. I couldn't help but be thankful.

Later on, I head to work. It was still snowing (though not as hard as before), so a lot of people got chased away. It was so dead, my supervisor allowed me to close early. I expressed concern for punching out early, so she recanted. 'Twas pretty tempting, though. Unfortunately, I found that a little snow would not drive away all the fruitcakes. These two guys came in with buckets of change to dump in the Coinstar machine. They'd been at it for a good 20-30 minutes, but then the machine stopped. It was full. One of them started to raise a big stink about not getting back some of his coins (Dumping a shitload of change into a Coinstar for 30 minutes and it fills up? The mind boggles.), but I was taking care of customers. What was I to do? The customers were gone and since I was never trained in handling the machine and my supervisor was on break, they had no choice but to wait. They drag over a manager on duty (who, it must be said, I don't particularly like, but that's for another time) who tells me to get my supervisor. I page her and she tells me that there's nothing that can be done right away. (If the machine fills up, the technician has to be called in, as is my understanding.) The guy mutters something about how I should be fired and I pretty much tell him (as I've always wanted to tell someone who lays the 'f'-bomb on me), "Greater people than you have tried to get me fired." The day went smoothly, if lethargically, after that, but that cock-gobbler cast a serious pall on the proceedings.

It's said that more snow is set to fall in the next couple of days. If it keeps away people like that, I'd call it a mixed blessing.