The terribleness which haunted my impending move made me dread that I'd never live through such a moment, that I'd be stuck in that apartment, surrounded by a makeshift fort of boxes and plastic tubs and garbage bags, defending my empire of squatterdom while I tried to will the snow to stop and hired armies to come dig me out of this predicament. But after a sound night of sleep and a bleary-eyed morning of confusion, I went and met with Dawn and Steven and got some coffee and conversation, staring out the window to watch the sun come blazing through, making things drip and melt. And I felt a little better. I made my way home, getting trapped at the end of my still-unplowed street, until two people magically manifested to help me dig out enough to limp my car into a spot across from the bare spot I'd barely managed to dig out the day before.  I noticed, again, that the shovelpeople my building's management hired to come clear the sidewalks had basically reversed every bit of digging I did, packing most of it right back from where I'd moved it. And this made me mad.

Despair is a terrible motivator, unless your goal is to go fetal on a couch and watch Ghost Adventures til your brain bleeds.  Rage, however, is a great medium in which to push yourself to new heights. So I picked up the magic shovel, stepped outside and dug out three car lengths of snow, stopping to watch the rest of the neighborhood dig itself out and arrive home from Christmas, marvelling at the sheer amount of snow that'd dropped on us. For five hours I dug, making a huge mountain of snow all around me, revealing little bits of blacktop as I went, until the sun began to sink. My next-door neighbor moved her car back into one of the spots I'd dug out and I took the other and I crawled upstairs where I began to thaw myself out, feeling very little pain even as the blood began to rush back in. If they refused to put the pod down, if they were going to be bastards about it, it wouldn't be for lack of trying, because I'd done just about all I was capable of.

The next morning I was woken up by a craigslister I'd called the day before, whose ad said he and his friend had been laid off and they'd shovel anything. He came over, pulled his shovel out, looked at what I said needed shoveling and quickly gave up before even starting, mentioning how frozen it looked. Given that this was his job of choice, complaining about the conditions seemed pretty baffling, but this is the nature of the craigslist, full of time burglars who have nothing better to do than waste strangers' time due to some void in their lives. He promised to call me back and send a plow my way, which I took to mean "I'll never see you again."

I shoveled some more, watching as a guy in a Bobcat tooled up and down the street, doing what the city government was apparently incapable of, until I approached him and begged him to plow everything past the spots I'd dug out, offering him money or thanks or whatever he'd see fit to take in exchange. He looked unconvinced, but he nodded and in 2 minutes cleared out what it took me the whole afternoon to do the day before. He refused my money, asking I just pray to whoever I pray to for him, and wandered back down the street. Victory dance done, I waited for Shena to drop her car off in front of my house, tucking it into place along with mine to strategically hold the spots that'd been dug out, fending off the mob of 4x4s and SUVs that were the daily traffic of my block, construction workers who apparently have jobs for life working on the St. Luke's construction that has been going on for the last 10 years and is ostensibly never going to end. My little slice of street was saved and I crossed my fingers that the weather would hold, no one would squeeze a smart car into my plans and the pod people would consider it clear enough to drop my cubic dreams.

 Which, amazingly, they did. With pod delivered, I could feel the stress of the past 5 days bleed quickly out of me. The loading was, comparatively, a breeze, until the morning they came to pick it up. When the pod was delivered, I got an email and a phone call from the pod people the night before, a warning call when they were an hour out and a 5 minute warning. I thought the same would apply to the pickup, but the closest they came was a call when the flatbed was parked outside my apartment asking "Is that your car in front of the pod?" Besides waking me up, the call delivered a metric ton of adrenaline into my bloodstream as I ran upstairs and down, moving the car, moving last-minute boxes and items into the pod, until it felt as good as I could get. I watched the truck drive off with my life chained down behind it and I went back upstairs, collapsing on the couch and passing out.

The rest of the day was a blur of cleaning, moving stuff to the dumpster, tossing the couch over the balcony and dragging it into the chorus of abandoned furniture and severing all the last-minute ties I could think of. The new year's eve party I was due to attend was cancelled due to food poisoning, but the Sanderses were still kind enough to take me in for the night. With all my valuables and clothes and other random crap shoehorned into my car, I took refuge in Waldo for the night, hanging out, chatting and eventually totally passing out in my chair. All my limbs sore and dead, my brain fuzzy and inept, I crawled onto their sofa and slept the sleep of the hobo, too spent to be excited or terrified by the big wall of oblique that lay ahead.

you'll just have to take my word that that second E is totally in the mix

 You know that gag about how to make god laugh, right?

 On Christmas Eve, the sky opened up and dropped a ton of problems, resulting in the biggest snowstorm Kansas City has seen in a long time. The kind of apocalyptic blizzard that makes those old chestnuts like ice storms and tornados seem tame in comparison. Due to the storm, my plans to go to Omaha for Christmas had already been scrubbed, keeping me here to make extra-sure I'd be ready for my pod to arrive on Monday. So I'd sucked it up and stayed home and made dinner and watched Die Hard 2, like all good Americans should. And then I looked outside.

 Moving cross-country is a pretty stressful endeavor, but I've kept my chin up. For every burst of fear, there was a bigger stretch of excitement. New city! New state! New time zone! I focused on the things I would be doing, the places I'd be seeing, the people I'd be meeting. It has been, through it all, an adventure. But moving cross-country when mother nature decides to get all literal with her Bing Crosby fandom, that's like moving overseas. And then moving back 2 weeks later. For kicks. Where once my biggest concern was "Where will they put the pod, in the parking lot or on the street?" now my big concern is whether or not I'll be able to get out of here by the 31st. And this is not idle doom and gloom, this is a hard & fast fear with 10 inches of snow pushing up against it. The pod people, they won't put the pod down unless there's 3 car lengths of bare ground. 3 car lengths with a 14 foot width. This is small-scale geographic math, hardly worth thinking about, until you have to shovel it all.

 I went and bought the baddest-assest shovel I could find, and settled on a monster that looks more like a futuristic art-nouveau sled than a shovel. I wedged it into my car and muttered to myself "I'm getting the hell out of this town if I have to shovel from now until Monday morning." And it felt good, I felt reassured, I put the needle back on the "You're the Best Around" 45 playing on repeat in my head and drove home, getting trapped behind one of those bobcat baby earth movers, a vehicle that surely is the Rascal of automobiles. I parked my car out front (or more properly wedged it into a low snowbank) and got to work.

 Did you know shovelling snow sucks? Like a lot?

 I managed to shovel out a spot the size of my car, realizing about halfway thru that the snow that seemed to be tapering off when I walked out of the hardware store was in full-on snow mode again. Snow can be magical under most circumstances, it does tend to make everything prettier. But when you're up against it and the only thing that can bring you relief is the sky drying up, all that magical snow makes you understand why crazy people shout at the sky. I took out my phone and called the pod people, getting some fancy British lad who gladly moved my drop-off date to Tuesday. It wasn't salvation, but it was some breathing room. When I'd finished my spot, I decided to call it a night, the 45 all but unplugged in my head, the thought of radiator heat and a meal sure seemed mighty good. I helped my neighbor wedge her car closer into her spot and she offered to bake me cookies in a day or two to see me off. That was nice, another little spot of warmth in a Dante-esque frozen circle of hell I call home.

 Right now I'm inside getting warm, watching Die Hard 4 like very few good americans should, making plans on the internet, re-strategizing. From where I sit, I have some options, some of which will be spendy, some of which might collapse under the weight of more snow, but I'm trying to look past it. My thousand-yard stare is now 1800 miles long, and where it ends, something new starts. Now I just have to find my way to it.