Fred and Valerie

Stephen J. Dubner’s Confessions of a Hero-Worshiper is an interesting look into a man’s journey to track down his childhood hero and the resulting revelations.

At an early age, Dubner lost his father. Soon thereafter, he fell in love with Pittsburgh Steelers running back Franco Harris and began having a dream that involved himself and Harris playing football in the front yard. Dubner had the dream every night for quite some time until he grew up and moved on to college.

Now a grown man, Dubner takes a look at his hero-worship and contacts Harris about an interview for a book Dubner’s writing. He gets the interview and what ensues is a candid look into both sides of hero-worship and Dubner gets most of his answers from an unlikely source: himself.

Next Up: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling
I’m finally able to pick up the Harry Potter series again. This will be the third time I’ve read The Goblet of Fire and I will once again be interested in how many previously unnoticed references I pick up on now that I’ve read the entire series.

Two weeks ago, we got about 8 inches of snow. That’s typically a lot of snow for our area and is in line for our yearly “big snow.” Little did we know that the actual “big snow” was still to come.

As of right now, we have 29 inches of snow in Stuarts Draft. The previous records for a December snowfall in the area were somewhere in the 14 to 16 inch range. Despite the snow starting at 3:00 yesterday, most areas were well beyond that record by noon today.

We measured the snow on our deck and had 13 inches at 1:00 am. By the time 7:00 am came around we had 20 inches of snow. It was up to 22 inches by 9:00 and continued to snow all day.

Looking at the traffic cams, the road conditions are horrible and there are plenty of “parking lots” on Interstate-81. At one point earlier in the day we could see people walking along the interstate because they had been parked for so long.

While I managed to shovel out an area of snow on the driveway so that our car can get out if they plow the road, there’s still over 2 feet of snow on the road because the plows haven’t come to our area yet. In fact, we’re figuring there aren’t many snow plows out there at the moment considering the road conditions, number of stranded vehicles clogging the roads, and the continuation of the snow.

We’re actually starting to wonder if we’ll be able to get out of our driveway by Monday morning. We’ll see…