I'm starting to reconsider some of the career choices I've made. It's starting to become increasingly clear that what I ought to have been is a big-shot trial lawyer. Sure, I may not have all those fancy diplomas from fancy law schools plastered all over the walls, but I've seen my share of "Law and Order" episodes, and what's more I have that one thing that any trial lawyer would give his habeus corpus for: a 100% success rate pleading my case before a judge!

As you may already know, I've been entangled in legal entanglements with my Crazy Ex Landlord for almost a year now. Oh, she's nuts alright, that's been well established! Well, today was the day that our little dispute came before the Franklin County Municipal Court, Small Claims Division, the Honorable Antonio Paat presiding, and today was the day I heard those sweetest of all words: "Judgement for the Plaintiff".

I must admit, I was quite nervous going into the courtroom. I mean, you know, you never know how these things will turn out. Sure, I had a briefcase packed with evidence, and not all of it made up. Cancelled checks! Postmarked envelopes! Sure, I had put on a tie and kind of combed my hair, and tried not to look so glassy-eyed and vacant. But the thing is, who knew what sort of stunt Isabella was going to pull? I mean, you knew she was going to pull something, given her manifest looniness, it just remained to be seen exactly what sort of unorthodox legal shenanigans she had in mind to short-circuit the Small Claims machinery.

Even though I was expecting something extreme, I really didn't expect she'd adopt the unprecedented strategy of NOT BOTHERING TO SHOW UP TO SAY A WORD IN HER OWN DEFENCE. Frankly, that didn't seem to be a winning strategy when it comes to impressing the Honorable Antonio Paat. In fact, he saw right through that ruse. A wise and perceptive man, he didn't even need to look at my collected bank statements, phone records and horoscopes to know that she was guilty as all hell.

With a mightily gavelled "Bang", Judge Paat pronounced me the victor of my litiginous contest! He informed me that I'd get a copy of the judgement in the mail in seven-to-ten days. Presumably, Isabella will also get a copy of the judgement in seven-to-ten days.

Which means that in seven-days-and-five-minutes to ten-days-and-five-minutes, I'll receive a phone call from an enraged- and completely mad- Crazy Ex Landlord.

Over the weekend, we got hit with what the TV weather people gleefully (and incessantly) reminded us was the largest snowfall over a twenty-four hour period to fall on Columbus, either in forever or just for a real long time. We ended up with, I don't know, well over a foot.

Remember Travis Bickle? "Someday a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the street..."? Well, until that day comes, I for one, am perfectly happy for a real snow to fall.
It may not wash away all the scum, but it does cover it up. Along with all the empty cans, litter, dogshit, cigarette butts. Indeed, I've never seen Columbus look so pristine, so - so actually attractive as it does when it's concealed under hundreds of tons of snow.

Sunday was especially delightful- the storm had passed, and bright blue skies shone down over the exquisite, sparkling expanse of Neil Avenue. Down the unshoveled stretches of sidewalk, the pathway is reduced to a series of startlingly deep footholes in the snow. People walk along placing each step carefully into each successive foothole, as though afraid to sully the unbroken snow with unnecessary holes. The difficulty of doing this in deep snow gives our gaits a look of comically exagerrated caution, like Elmer Fudd hunting wabbits.

Everybody is cheerful. Strangers help strangers give a shove to wheel-spinning but otherwise motionless cars, and gangs of neighbours-who've probably never before exchanged more than a dozen words- laughingly team up to excavate the cars parked on the side of the road. When one of the neighbour-teams does manage to exhume a car, it hesisitantly trundles off down the road with such caution that it looks like it is driven by one of those drunks who, realizing that he's loaded, tries to look inconspicuous by driving excessively slowly and carefully. Nobody is in a hurry to get anywhere anyway, even if they did have someplace they had to be, the've got a pretty unassailable alibi. Such goodwill and cameradamie among strangers is a wonderful thing, although I suspect it might not long persist if we got a blizzard like this every week.

The saddest thing about blizzards is how ephemeral their beauty is. In a few days the perfect white evenness will increasingly look disfigured and walked upon, the margins of the roadways becoming a grey sloppy soup of slush and filth. Every day a little more of the snow will melt away, unnoticed in its passing, until you realize that there's nothing left but the cold craggy remnants of the heaps once pushed by plows into the corners of parking-lots, grey and gritty and not so much snow anymore as just broken-down ice.

Blizzards are a lot like falling in love.