Hey snowplow drivers - _I_ rule this hour!

No potshot at snowplow drivers is intended in the above title, except to the extent that I happen to be using one of them as the butt of my sociological observation for the day. I thank snowplow drivers for the much-more-cleared-than-expected surfaces that helped me finish not _too_ embarrassingly late this morning.

The "than expected" part, incidentally, was due to the fact that we only got perhaps 3 inches between yesterday afternoon and the delivery time this morning, instead of the 6 to 10 that everybody including this blog had been predicting.

The fodder for the following sociological observation happened as I was preparing to do the closest-to-Sunset half of the main section of Sleepy Hollow by foot.

This morning, I was, for the time being, back to not having the bike along. I'd left it at home because it was broke down.

The freewheel of it had started to fall apart, and I'd waited until the last minute to try yanking another one off of one of the umpteen bike wheels that I've got lying around. At 11 pm last night, I gave up on that after a few minutes, when the fact stared me straight in the face that getting some iota of sleep before the delivery was more important.

Nor did I try any iota to fulfill my pipe dream of bringing X-C skis along (it'd probably take a lot more snow for them to become advantageous for even one segment).

So anyhow, this morning, I was doing Sleepy Hollow (or to nitpick, the "main" section of it, i.e. the section that parallels Woodland Way) the way that I'd been most routinely doing it for basically the second half of 2008: I come in off the Morgan Highway (after doing W. Grove), do several houses by motoring on my way in to the Woodland Way splitoff, and then: Just before and just after doing Woodland Way by motoring, I do the "main" section of Sleepy Hollow (which has about 16 subscribers) by foot by doing an 8-paper armload from either end.

This requires (unlike the cycling method that I boasted about earlier for this whole Sleepy-Hollow-to-Hilltop neighborhood) doing at least some motoring north along Sunset after Woodland Way, so as to be incidentally cruising past an efficient parking spot from which to walk onto the half of Sleepy Hollow closest to Sunset and do that second 8-paper armload for Sleepy Hollow. (I do all this on my way to a still-further-north-on-Sunset parking spot from which to do _Hilltop_ in _one_ walk. I do that one with a shoulder-bag-full in _addition_ to an armload, because it's a 15-subscriber dead-end).

Be patient; I'm getting to the "sociological observation" part: This morning, just after I'd finished Woodland Way and as I was approaching the spot on Sunset where I park to do the second Sleepy-Hollow 8-paper armload, I observed - in front of me a couple hundred feet further north on Sunset - a snowplow going back and forth by backing up, each time, to closer and closer to where I was. So, just for in case he might want to eventually come all the way back and plow a little looking-like-it-needed-plowing area where I was parking, I decided to only run to _one_ house on Sleepy Hollow, namely the one closest to where was parking, and then reluctantly motor a little bit into Sleepy Hollow to park and run to the other 7 houses. That way I'd be giving the snowplow driver a maximum number of options of places to expand his plowing operation into while I'm doing the 7 houses, without my pickup truck being in his way.

Well, after I did the above-mentioned one house and was getting back in to begin motoring to my more-accommodating-of-him parking spot, he _did_ back the whole rest of the distance back to where I'd parked.

Except, as I would soon deduce, his reason for backing up there wasn't to plow that area. Nor did he do any plowing in Sleepy Hollow, which he followed me a couple hundred feet or so into. Nor did he do any plowing in the driveway that he finally turned around in to go back to Sunset and mind his own business - after, as I'd by then deduced, watching me all that time expecting to perhaps catch a marauder.

Well here's the story of how his expectation to see me remove something from somebody's property was self-fulfilling:

It was entertaining to watch how the time that he picked to do his longest-duration single closer-to-zero-than-three mph (obviously-watching-of-me-with-his-headlights - as if a thief, even if there _are_ any that aren't going to _bed_ by this last hour before dawn, would conduct his profession under the glare of headlights!) segment of his little diversion, was as I was picking up six objects and removing them from somebody's property.

He _hadn't_ seen me _drop_ those same objects there 20 or so seconds earlier. Therefore, as he watched me pick them up, remove them from that property and go to the next property with them (my mode for the first few feet of which was by aerobic-walking, ala Mort Malkin - being careful not to transition too quickly into my preferred-in-such-lightly-loaded-situations modes, namely jogging or running - due to the need for caution regarding the concept of "suicide by busybody"), it must have taken him a while to see that those six objects were papers and that I was a paper boy.

Needless to say, that busybodying snowplow driver was probably the _reason_ that I dropped those papers _and_ did several other things that must have made it be, overall, quite a show for him. Such as: I forgot about the presence of a 3' drop-off as I was running from that property onto the next (the only time in my going-on-two-years of running across this route's various stone walls that I ever fell while doing so; so, go figure).

I'll save the several older stories for until I get around to unleashing them sometime, about how much faster other elements of the ruling-the-streets-at-this-hour subculture got used to my presence therein.