I spent a few hours late thisafternoon shoveling out our driveway from the blizzard. As this is a shared driveway with our neighbors, it gave me time to reflect how much I hate their decorations.

The most obvious example is Christmas decorations. Those of you who know me are aware that my appreciation of Christmas decorations to begin with is roughly halfway between Ebeneezer Scrooge and the Grinch. Our neighbors had giant inflatable nonsense (which couldn’t just be inflated and left there, but needed to have the frequently-running extra-loud inflator running half the time), as well as extra-blinky epilepsy-inducing lights which kept making me think the cops were outside our house (which, in our neighborhood, is not uncommon). Those decorations were up for the entire month of December.

But the decorations I hated most today were the three shovels standing in their front yard, which remained purely decorative as I shoveled the entirety of the driveway for the second time this week.