How To Keep Smiling Through The Snow or What To Do With Opossum

Well, as predicted and expected, Mother Nature and Old Man Winter have returned to Cleveland to heap upon us a new batch of wintery abuse and I am left with only a heap of seed packets to console my weary soul. I want to plant them, I really do.   But I have been doing this long enough to know that I need to wait at least a month to start my seeds, lest I end up with seedlings that are making a go at becoming NBA stars straight out of the indoor high school. Too tall, too skinny and just not enough roots to ground them in the big world outdoors.

*Sigh* You just have to laugh about it all really.   Except S.A.D. makes that hard sometimes.   Which is why you sometimes need to turn to outside help (and not the sunshine kind) to help you laugh during the dark and dreary days.

My outside help came in the form of a short email sent to the contact desk at work. It simply said “I think you might like this” followed by a YouTube link.   No name, no email, nothing else. I clicked expecting the worst, or at least a bit of soft core porn. But truly, Ladies and Gentlemen, there is serendipity in the universe.  

The video was one of a set of videos about, wait for it, How To Care For Your Opossum. How awesome is that? And the format is great! Imagine your cat lady great aunt — or maybe the dag lady one. Not the scary one who will end up on Hoarders.   No, the one with one pet that they pay WAY TOO MUCH attention to.  The pet that replaces human interaction. Yeah, that one. Now instead of a moody cat or a yappy dog, picture an opossum as the pet. That is the heart of these videos. It is satire at its finest.

So, for your laughing-to-get-away-from-the-snow-and-ice-outside-and-I-can’t-garden pleasure… I present ME Pearl’s Guide to a Proper Opossum Pedicure (be sure to check out all the other opossum care videos as well! You can waste a whole afternoon on them):