| Poem for Tuesday and Endless Winter |
[Feb. 9th, 2010|12:23 am] |
( The Fit )
Nothing exciting to report here except that the small snowstorm we were supposed to get on Tuesday evening is now expected to be a major storm lasting from midday Tuesday through evening Wednesday and dropping 10-20 inches of snow on top of the snow we already have piled everywhere. My father took my kids out for pancakes, then to watch National Treasure on his big TV; ![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) apaulled was working from home, so I stayed and had lunch with him, then worked on chores until mid-afternoon, when we decided we had better visit the drugstore and food store before the next storm hit.
After spending the better part of an hour in line (and we didn't even buy toilet paper, though we couldn't have gotten fresh produce if we'd wanted to -- they were completely wiped out of lettuce, peppers, etc.) Then we went to my parents' for dinner and to retrieve the kids -- we may not see them for days, since we all may be snowed in again. Came home and watched the season finale of Heroes -- are they off till September so early? And are we positive they're getting another season, given the decline in plots ratings? ( Spoilers. )
( Get Used To It ) |
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| Poem for Monday and Super Bowl |
[Feb. 8th, 2010|12:06 am] |
( Money Talks )
We had a very quiet morning courtesy the Blizzard of 2010, which has left many local roads impassable and most parking lots unusable. My kids' schools have already been closed for the next two days, and since we're supposed to get another storm with another 4-5 inches of snow on Tuesday night, that may not be the end of it. My parents finally got their power back, as did my oldest friend, who sent an e-mail announcing that her family's annual Super Bowl party was on, though they couldn't get the foot long subs and chicken wings they usually serve so there would be more of an emphasis on shrimp and cheese. I would have been delighted to go no matter what we ate, but she warned that her neighborhood hadn't really been plowed, so we might have to park several blocks away and walk. The prospect of walking back and then driving home on slippery roads after dark made us nervous enough to decide, reluctantly, that we probably shouldn't go.
So we had our own Super Bowl party, for which Paul served homemade low-salt tortilla chips and cheese dip, plus veggie buffalo wings, hummus and pita, fresh bread with peanut butter, and homemade Mississippi Mud Cake. We were all rooting for the Saints here, mostly because we love New Orleans and felt that the city deserved to have something nice happen, though as Maryland residents we also have some residual resentment toward the Colts for sneaking out of Baltimore in the middle of the night. I like Indianapolis's new coach, I like Peyton Manning, I'd certainly have rooted for them over Dallas or Philly, but it was the Saints' turn. ( More Super Bowl blather. ) Now we're watching the news, warning us that local roads are still bad and will get worse when temperatures go below 10 degrees tonight...
( Morning After Snowpocalypse ) |
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| Poem for Sunday and Snow Everywhere |
[Feb. 7th, 2010|12:02 am] |
( Sunday Afternoon )
The Blizzard of 2010 dumped more than two feet of snow overnight and all day Saturday, which did not break the 1922 storm record but that is fine with me considering that lots of people died in that storm from roof collapses. We lost power briefly during the night, resulting in our sleeping late since we couldn't tell what time it was, but we were lucky -- my parents and several local friends had no power for hours. Mostly we had a quiet day interspersed with snowy kids coming in and out -- we recruited them for a lot of the shoveling, particularly dumping the snow off the deck before it could bring down the deck. The neighborhood was quite quiet and peaceful considering that the plow got stuck in the middle of the night, so they sent a smaller Bobcat-type thing to scoop up piles of snow and dump it in bigger piles off the middle of the street, which did not make it possible to move vehicles any distance, as a couple of our neighbors discovered.
So we had a quiet, relaxing day, mostly reading and catching up on computer stuff -- I uploaded a boatload of stuff to Google Docs, only to have it alert me to a previously unmentioned maximum number of files, and now it not only won't let me delete some so I can add others, it won't even show me the largest of my folders, arrgh. In the afternoon when most of us were sick of basketball, Paul -- who made Ethoipian food for dinner, mmmm -- suggested that we put on Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and although it was never my favorite, I never say no to Lucius Malfoy with his hair tied back. The kids wanted to beat some Chocobo level in the evening, so we listened to classical music and had cats snuggled in various spots. The real question is whether we will be able to get out of the parking lot on Sunday to go to my oldest friend's Super Bowl party, and even if we can get out, whether her street will be plowed sufficiently for us to park there.
( Scenes from a Snowpocalypse ) |
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| Poem for Saturday and Snowpocalypse |
[Feb. 6th, 2010|12:48 am] |
( The Winter They Bombed Pearl Harbor )
The snowpocalypse arrived right on schedule, starting innocently enough at 10 a.m. with some powdery flurries. The kids were dismissed from school two and a half hours early and walked home in slightly heavier snow; Adam promptly went over to a friend's for most of the afternoon, while Daniel chatted online with the members of the robotics team responsible for hardware, who are having a weekend-long sleepover at the home of one of their families so that they can get the robot built. Paul was home several hours early too to work from home. We bailed on going to my parents' for dinner when we realized there was going to be more than a couple of inches of snow on the ground and the county asked people to please stay off the roads. I worked on a bunch of projects, including a review of "Schisms".
( Yet More Snow Pics )
fannish5: ( You're Fired ) After dinner -- jacket potatoes with spicy cheese and veggie bacon, which actually crumbles better than other bacon -- we watched Smallville's "Absolute Justice" (which I keep expecting to see on a vodka bottle). I am not nearly familiar enough with superhero lore to have an opinion about the Justice Society and how it was portrayed; my major point of interest is that Hawkman and Dr. Fate were played respectively by Michael Shanks and Brent Stait of Stargate and Andromeda respectively. My favorite moment was ( this tiny spoiler, and a bit of squee. ) |
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| Poem for Friday and Native American Art |
[Feb. 5th, 2010|12:49 am] |
( If Truth Is the Lure, Humans Are Fishes )
I spent an awesome few hours with cidercupcakes, who came over for lunch and brought Avatar: The Last Airbender, about which you are all in big trouble for not telling me that Jason Isaacs played the voice of the first season villain. Having been subjected to many, many years of Pokemon and Digimon and Yu-Gi-Oh movies, I am skeptical of kid-oriented anime in general, and American-made anime just sounded scary, but it has delightful characters, especially the women, and so many moments when one can quote LOTR, Harry Potter and Star Wars that it's just pure fun. I can't decide whether the main trio reminds me more of Harry, Ron and Hermione or Ash, Brock and Misty, but I like them a lot, especially since Katara gets to do more cool stuff than the other girls. And there are flying bison and seals with turtle shells and magical carp and mouse-eared lemurs, and Sokka has to learn to fight in woman warrior's garb. So it's really all good.
The rest of my day was spent preparing for the snowpocalypse, which is supposed to arrive late morning tomorrow and bury us under two feet of snow by Saturday night. I wanted to get some packages to the post office beforehand, and both kids ended up staying late at school -- Daniel for robotics, Adam to make up a math quiz. Hopefully we have enough milk, toilet paper, hummus, cheese, etc. to survive -- Paul helpfully bought lots of junk food in case we can't get out of the neighborhood to go to the Super Bowl party, though we made it despite a big snowstorm a couple of years ago, so hopefully the fact that we now have more food in the house than is reasonable will keep the snow under control, like washing the car to try to make it rain. Both kids brought home excellent report cards and we spent a lot of the evening talking about schedules for next year, plus college stuff, when we weren't watching the Trek episode I need to review tomorrow (evil alien story "Schisms"). They only just went to bed so I am disorganized and hoping they have school at least for a couple of hours before the storm arrives. Since there will likely be snow photos over the weekend, here are some pictures of my in-laws' collection of Native American art from their travels in the southwest:
( Native American Art ) |
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| Poem for Thursday and More Snow |
[Feb. 4th, 2010|12:19 am] |
( Chinoiseries: Falling Snow )
Guess what? It snowed again! And my kids had no school, since half of the four inches that fell overnight arrived during the hours when the superintendent had to make a decision about whether to close the schools or merely delay them. It might not be such a big deal that they missed another entire day except that they'll have to add days to the school year if they miss much more school, and we have a huge storm predicted for Friday-Saturday -- the weather service alert says 12-20 inches! Naturally, the kids were not sorry; older son slept till nearly noon, younger son went out to play in the snow and ended up at a friend's house from lunchtime till dinnertime.
( Are You Sick Of This Yet? )
By then the streets were clear, and Paul, who had worked at home doing phone conferences all morning and computer stuff all afternoon, took them to Cici's Pizza while I went to meet gblvr at Tara Thai, where I had the fabulous seafood panang curry. Then we went to Bath & Body Works, which has a delightful new sandalwood fig aromatherapy scent, though I had gone to buy wonderful Twilight Woods shower cream while I had a two-for-one coupon. And then we went to Target to grab a couple of little things and I don't know how that dress got into my cart, honest. |
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| Poem for Wednesday and Groundhogs |
[Feb. 3rd, 2010|12:40 am] |
( Pescadero )
I had a delightful if uneventful Imbolc/Feast of Brigid/Candlemas/Groundhog Day -- in fact, I did not leave the house. I saw the bad news early from Punxsutawney Phil, before I looked up the Oscar nominations, in fact (and I will confess that, while I will root for Avatar to win Best Picture, it's fine with me if Bigelow wins Best Director or even Tarantino -- I just don't want George Clooney's latest male mid-life crisis drama to win). My day consisted of excitement such as working on moving the entirety of a fic archive to archiveofourown.org, which means getting codes and doing imports for several other writers; emptying and reloading the dishwasher; and finally getting the laundry folded, which I did while watching The Graduate on TCM. I've seen it many, many times, and even wrote a paper on it for a grad school seminar on film and popular music, but I never really focused before on Anne Bancroft's cougar-print clothes, hee. Since those of you who are long-time readers of this journal know that I love groundhogs, here is a small celebration of them:
( A Celebration of Groundhogs )
Paul loves finding recipes to celebrate various holidays even if they're holidays that we don't celebrate personally, so while I would gladly have settled for cheese, winter squash and poppyseed muffins for Imbolc, I certainly wasn't going to complain when he announced that he was making crepes with ratatouille for La Chandeleur. (He made them with yellow squash, so I got my winter squash anyway.) Then Adam decided we should watch Ratatouille since we'd eaten it and he and Daniel had finished their homework. While we did that, Paul made chocolate crepes for dessert, since he was on a roll making crepes -- a recipe from Cooking Light, meaning they only had way too many calories instead of way, way, way too many calories -- not that that stopped me from having two of them. Hail Brigid! |
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| Poem for Groundhog Day |
[Feb. 2nd, 2010|12:21 am] |
( Ceremonies for Candlemas Eve )
On Monday I went with my mother to visit the Bar Mitzvah photographer, and eight months after the event, I have finally ordered an album and a couple of individual photos. I am very happy with how it looks, too -- I sent a whole list of little things I wanted and the photographer did them all. I only got home a few minutes before Adam did, so I didn't get a lot else done (the laundry is STILL not folded), but I did clean up my LiveJournal and Dreamwidth tags -- some of them had far more than 100 items and I had to make a sequel tag for each of those, then move the appropriate entries. Here are a few last photos from the New England Aquarium, including many jellies, a leafy seadragon, a representation of the pollution in Boston Harbor, and of course a penguin:
( Boston Jellyfish and More )
I'm trying to think of something meaningful to say about Heroes, which I enjoyed because it was yet another backstory episode about Noah Bennet even though it's very clear they just keep reinventing bits of his backstory as they go along and don't even try all that hard to integrate it with what we already know -- I just love watching Bennet and Claire together, though ( spoiler. ) I liked the Peter-and-Sylar storyline this week, too, despite the fact that we were yelling suggestions about ( spoilers. ) and things just went downhill from there.
Happy Imbolc, Candlemas, and Groundhog Day, whichever one(s) you may celebrate! And hope everyone who celebrated Tu B'shevat over the weekend had a lovely celebration, since I forgot to say so beforehand. |
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| Poem for Monday and A Bit More Boston |
[Feb. 1st, 2010|12:32 am] |
( Blue Pitcher, Empty and Full )
Though our street was pretty well plowed by Sunday morning, we had a pretty quiet weekend in deference to the snow. We had planned to meet my in-laws in Ellicott City to go to the train museum and some of the antique stores, but both of them have colds and we weren't thrilled at the prospect of looking for parking in potentially unplowed streets and lots, so we agreed to postpone. Other than a visit to the Bethesda Co-op for assorted organic stuff our Giant doesn't carry, we didn't accomplish a lot. I didn't even get the laundry folded.
( Boston Museum of Science )
My parents invited us over for dinner, so we went -- I had a crab cake, younger son had a veggie burger, everyone else had hamburgers -- then we came home so younger son could record music for his orchestra playing test. We also watched the Grammys, where we were happy to see Stephen Colbert, very entertained by Pink's performance, reasonably entertained by Lady GaGa and Elton John, happy Beyonce had a good night award-wise, amused by the Michael Jackson tribute only because we still have our free Super Bowl 3-D glasses so we could see the effects such as they were, and impressed that Taylor Swift decided to conduct herself as a musician rather than a showgirl in the nearly-nonexistent clothes most young women present were barely wearing -- I am not particularly a fan of her music, though I got a kick out of her wanting to sing with Stevie Nicks, but I am impressed by how she conducts herself as a celebrity.
My kids may or may not have a two-hour delay tomorrow...the county hasn't told us yet. Sigh. Happy February! |
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| Poem for Sunday and January Snowstorm |
[Jan. 31st, 2010|12:04 am] |
( In a Beautiful Country )
The weather reports Friday night said that we'd get a couple of inches of snow on Saturday. "A couple" turned out to be about, oh, six. It started in the morning just as Adam was heading for Hebrew school to volunteer and Daniel was heading for robotics; both were dismissed early, and the county closed all school buildings for the rest of Saturday and all day Sunday because there was so much ice on the roads. I never even left the house, letting Paul pick up the kids while I did laundry, coded and uploaded a bunch of stuff, and made sure the cats stayed off the heating vents. Here's what things looked like from our doorways:
( White Winter )
In the evening Paul made lentil and couscous pilaf with yellow and green squash for dinner, then admitted he'd been in the mood to watch Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone since we got back from the exhibition in Boston. I never say no to Harry Potter, though I liked the first two movies less than the next four, and I haven't seen the first one all the way through in several years -- certainly not since I read the seventh book. I still love the adults in it but it completely creeps me out seeing pre-teen Ginny talking to pre-teen Harry, and Hermione is totally Ron's mother; I knew Harry married the popular red-haired girl with the big family for obvious reasons, but I never thought before about Ron's mother issues, which I think are more pathological than Harry's even though Harry's the one with the huge family trauma in his past. Draco is somehow much less unnerving as a little boy than the trio. |
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