Greg Karber's iBlogopedia

Wow. What a day. Four Awesome Things happened yesterday, and I wrote about it here, but then set it to publish today because I already had something written for yesterday.

Awesome Thing Number One: I drove into town today with Kara and I read this Stephen King short story called N. It’s written in the style of those Oliver Sacks books like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

The King story was sort of like H.P. Lovecraft + Rainman.

Basically, a guy’s OCD keeps nameless monsters at bay. I had actually read the first half of it a couple weeks ago while I was falling asleep, and it was terrifying then, but reading it yesterday, it was a little predictable and not as scary as I remembered. Still, Stephen King is always good, so, awesome thing number one!

Awesome Thing Number Two: It snowed today, and Kara and I are such snewbies (that’s snow-newbies) on account of having been born and raised in Arkansas that we decided it would be awesome to take Eva out on a walk. And it turns out . . . it was.

Here is a picture of Eva and Kara in the snow:

We were going to take more. In fact, the picture above depicts Kara walking over to a perfect place to take more pictures. Then we lured Eva over with half of one of her favorite treats (a Snausage: they’re like crack). But right when the two of them were in place and smiling, and I was holding up the iPhone to take a picture, this happened:

Bam! Phone’s dead. It was the worst. We spent the rest of the day walking around the park saying, “Oh, there would be a good place for a picture . . . There would be a good place for a picture . . . Oh, look how beautiful that would have been.”

I searched online for something that was comparable, and I think this comes close:

(If you would like to make paintings of your own like this, you can read this Vanity Fair article.)

Awesome Thing Number Three: Everything was going great on the walk until Eva Dog noticed something in the woods and started barking. At first, Kara and I kept telling her to hush, but then we saw what she was barking at.

Stepping out of the woods was some kind of winter bigfoot, a snowy sasquatch, a Yuletide Yeti. Unfortunately, on account of my camera dying, I was unable to capture footage of the famed beast, but the closest thing I could find online was this:

Anyway, at first I was hoping it would just do a cool walk-by-and-look-over-its-shoulder-at-us like in the famous Patterson footage.

But I don’t know if it was territorial or if Eva Dog barking at it caused it to get angry (this wouldn’t be the first time she got us into a fight we didn’t want), but it turned and roared at us, and that was pretty terrifying, so I turned and took off.

“No, don’t run away!” Kara shouted, but I could barely hear her over the sound of me running away. “That’ll just cause it to chase you!”

Which seemed like a pretty obvious thing to say, because I mean, if I’m running away, I’m pretty much expecting whatever it is I’m running from to chase me. That’s why I’m not walking away.

But maybe she had a point, because the creature was on me in a second and he grabbed me with his giant, furry snow monster hands and threw me over his shoulder. “He’s gonna eat me!” I shouted to Kara, and to Eva Dog–I guess, though since the creature attacked us, she hadn’t been nearly so aggressive toward it. Now she realized that it was a giant fucking monster that could eat all three of us.

So I’m flailing my arms and legs and pounding on the bigfoot’s back with my fists, but the beast doesn’t seem to care, probably because it weighs like ten times more than me and is used to living outdoors while I sleep on a mattress + 2 mattress pads. So my odds of escape aren’t looking too high.

And that’s when Kara–thank God–did the one thing I never would have thought to do: she rolled up a hunk of snow around a rock (usually a cheap strategy but acceptable in life-or-death situations) and hurled it at the beast.

It whizzed by my head and struck the sasquatch square in it’s back. “Direct hit!” I shouted. The bigfoot apparently decided that the appropriate retaliation for a snowball attack was to hurl me at Kara, which is exactly what happened.

As I was flying through the air, I remember thinking that I was glad I wore a scarf. I landed at Kara’s feet in the snow, which luckily broke my fall, but unfortunately managed to cover every square inch of exposed skin. I looked back at the snowman, and it had apparently decided that we were more trouble than we were worth, because it was walking back into the woods.

And Eva Dog, now certain that the danger had subsided, started barking at it again. Thankfully, it just kept walking.

So, I say surviving an attack by a snow monster is pretty awesome, wouldn’t you?

Awesome Thing Number Four: Before the walk, we went to Pickleman’s, which has great sandwiches!