"never read a book through merely because you have begun it" - witherspoon

Winter would seem an ideal stretch to rip through a few good books...

Set up a small little corner of the couch, maybe a cup of coffee or a snack.  Imagine yourself in the author's world...sweeping the dusted sidewalks in a tiny village in southern Serbia, at a PTA meeting in Cambridge wishing the parent next to you were dead, searching for places in the Sudanese desert to park your plane.  You visualize what each character looks like, sounds like. You assign them each movie actors in your mind...this one's Dev Patel, she's Emily Mortimor, and he's John Malkovich...no, Hugh Laurie.

All good in theory.  But in practice...I never could sit still long enough to read past chapter two.  Mr. John Witherspoon's advice..."Drop it."  He was a signer on the Declaration of Independence...seems worthy a enough man to listen to. 

So, we put down our books (after Kate finished hers) and went snowshoeing last week up "Passaconoway"...as Kate like's to say.  That's Abenaki for Past Conway, NH.  

Blistering wind and snow pushed our little Toyota Scion around the icy highway like a hockey puck.  We chose to "shoe" down in the protected valley of Crawford Notch.  The fresh powder was so deep our snowshoes still compressed two feet of snow...at which point the side walls of snow would collapse on the board of our shoes, making it that much harder to lift our feet.  Add a couple of dogs on the back of each foot and forget about it.

This week I stopped reading (like I was planning to read in the first place) to write my own chapter two for a B-Boy (that's birthday boy) snowshoe hike with Drew up Mt Major looking over Lake Winnipesaukee.  Which is Abenaki for...well, Lake Winnipesaukee.

I've always felt Mt Major to be one of the best bang-for-your-buck hikes in New England...short little two-hour hike in the snow, bald face with 270 degree views of the lake and beyond...

Awesome!!

So here's my story...wildly unrehearsed...

Little after note here:

Tired of reading about "how great the snow is", "snow is so pretty", "snow is our friend"...

If you're thinking to yourself, "Who's Jamie think he is, Captain Snow?  When everyone wants to read blogposts of snow, they go to him.  Oh, now he's Johnny Snowshoe, snowshoeing away like he's friggin' Tommy Noble.  What the hell's he doing?  Thinks he's got it goin' Bossanova...with the little dogs in the back goin' Craaa-zy.  What is this garbage?"

Not this time.  No way.  Never.  Monday, I had to jump out my window to shovel a four-foot drift from in front of both stormdoors.  Good story...but that last dumping just about broke me...definitely ready for non-snowblogs.