It’s been a bad few days at work– not in the “come home and pull my hair out” sort of way, but in the “come home and curse the world for letting this happen” sort of way, which is in some ways worse.  We had– did I mention this?– the first real snowstorm of the season on Thursday of last week (it snowed on Halloween, too, and I know I mentioned that, but it didn’t stick) and it’s been really cold and intermittently snowy for the last few days.  It was somewhere in the neighborhood of ten below zero wind chill when I left for work this morning, and most of the districts in northern Indiana and southern Michigan were at least on a two-hour delay today.  (Not ours.  We are a hardier folk than most.)

The thing about cold weather?  Depending on how charitable you’re feeling, it either makes it harder to ignore how poor most of our families are or makes it more visible.  It becomes real clear real fast which families can’t afford to pay the bills once it starts snowing.  If a kid shows up at school in the same polo shirt that he was wearing (and I mean literally the same polo shirt) when it was seventy degrees outside, chances are that kid’s family can’t afford to keep the heat on.

There are an awful lot of kids in this building who don’t seem to have winter coats.  An awful lot.  And we ended up having to send our social worker over to a couple different houses where it turns out the heat isn’t on at all.

You may be wondering what the picture at the top of this post has to do with anything.  Not much, except as an exemplar of my general lack of fitness as a human being.  We’ve spent the last few days at work with the problems of poverty full and center, right?  I got home yesterday to discover that one of the dogs had done that to Kitty.

Kitty is my son’s favorite toy.  Kitty’s the stuffed animal he screams for when he hits his head or falls down or is scared.  And the dogs– I have my suspicion which one– had destroyed it.

The rage was immediate and incandescent.  I’m not sure I’ve ever been that angry at one of my pets before.  I could have killed the little bastards, and I ended up shoving both of them into the back yard until I calmed down, which should have taken a lot less time than it did.

My kid’s three.  He’s got his own room.  He’s got a big house with blankets and heat and food and plenty of toys and books and all four of his grandparents and his uncle and his aunt are in town and he has two parents who are still married and hold steady jobs.  He’s fine.  And despite my worries to the contrary, when we told him about Kitty, he was basically okay with it, although my wife did promise him she’d try to fix him.

I probably ought to find something worth getting angry about.