old dan tucker

i've been pondering my survival skills since thursday. the weather was beautiful: sunny, warm, a light breeze. i felt it was perfect to start planning for the big garage sale that i've needed to have before moving. so being miss organization, i placed an ad in the classifieds (now i'm out a whole $3.50!), put up signs in the yard, hauled all of my things out and got the garage set up for saturday morning. enter my darling husband who came home from work and asked me "don't you know it's supposed to get cold and snow this weekend?" crap. well, no, i didn't know. how could that be? it's late march and the weather was perfect...there was no way! little did i know. in any case, i carried on hoping for and expecting the best. friday began well, too. balmy, a little gray, but still nice and springy. then the wind started up. then the rain started to fall. then the temperature dropped. and then the precipitation turned to sleet and snow. double crap! so i crafted up a little sign to let the local yokels know that i would reschedule when the weather got warmer (what?! it was cold and i was not prepared to sit in the garage and wait around on people that might or might not show up with no heat!). the crazy thing is, as i was posting the sign, two dingleberries stopped to ask if i was still having the sale. it's crazy how sales bring people out of the woodwork in search of a good deal. however, the real issue that has been troubling me is still the fact that if this were 1848 and i were travelling on the oregon trail, i would have probably killed off my entire party due to my inability to read the forecast. :( we would have been trapped in the snow like those poor children in david laskin's children's blizzard. i realize that this is really not that big of a deal, but the thought just keeps nagging at me that i am perhaps not evolutionarily sound...just cross your fingers that i never set out in my car when there is a chance of snow in the forecast!