How about:

Skunks are crepuscular and do not intersect with people very often.

Yesterday’s “snow-hum” turned out to be just about that here in the southeast corner of the Great Lake State. What did we get? Maybe eight inches? It was enough snow to challenge my little 6-speed manual Honda Civic and its so-called performance tires but not enough that I couldn’t get it out of the neighborhood and onto the main roads, which were actually pretty good and my little eight-mile commute was pretty much okay. The GG doesn’t seem to agree with me about the roads and his commute is three miles shorter than mine but it’s in a different direction so I dunno.

I dragged myself to a vertical position just a wee bit later than I wanted to this morning and then, when I went out the door to take my walk, my neighbor was out shoveling. Since I live under a rock these days, I took that as an opportunity to get caught up on all the neighborhood gossip. By the time that was done, it was really too late to walk. I started out anyway but as I was about to turn the corner at the end of the block, the sight of a skunk swimming across the street stopped me in my tracks. At least swimming was what it looked like it was doing. Through the snow. I waited until Mr. Skunk had made his way across the street and up the neighbors’ driveway, under their fence, and into their back yard and then I inspected the trail he had made. And noticed that there was another such trail a bit further away.

At that point, I came to my senses, realizing that it was late enough that I had better abandon my neighborhood prowl and involve a snow shovel in my morning exercise instead. As I walked back down the street and into my driveway, I realized that these little skunk swim-trails were absolutely everywhere. Up my driveway and across my back yard behind the compost bin and shed and I don’t know where they go after that. I grabbed my shovel. I started up every vee-hickle in the Landfill Honda fleet and turned on the defrost and the rear defrogger grok grok. I shoveled the sidewalk. I salted the sidewalk. After I yelled to the GG to put some more salt in my drywall/salt bucket, that is. I started shoveling the driveway. The GG and our houseguest came out and shuffled vee-hickles around. I shoveled whatever I could shovel in the driveway amid all of the vee-hickle shuffling chaos. I shoveled a path to the back yard and out to the compost heap. I don’t think I got as much exercise as I do on my neighborhood prowl but it was enough.

Our houseguest? Cap is our nephew (he’s married to our niece so neither of us can claim any common DNA). He is a mathematics professor at UMich and very wisely chose not to wrangle US23 to his home an hour or so north of here in a snowstorm. He has a life-blog and an, uh, mathematical blog, which I can sometimes actually understand, although people who were making prime number sieves in fifth grade could probably understand it better than I can.

So. Can anyone use the word “crepuscular” in a sentence yet? If you have actually read all of the above blather and gotten this far, that is (-; Did you have to look the word up? Don’t be shy. I looked “crepuscular” up the first time I encountered it and that was only a couple of years ago. Believe me, the definition was not what I expected. I fell in love with the word at that time and I was only too happy to have the opportunity to use it on Facebook today. So, send me a sentence. Or, if you prefer, shut down yer ‘puter, make a faaaarrrrr and pour yerself a glass o’ whine. That is just fine with me too! <insert huge smiley face here>.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 at 7:10 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.