A Little This, A Little That, A Little Snow

We are anticipating our first snow of the season. Our first official snow. Our first snow accumulation. First snow angels, snowballs, and snowmen. I know this because I have been studying the NOAA website with an intensity that could rival that of a fledgling meteorologist trying to make it at the local affiliate. I am constructing charts and predictions. I don't care if we only get a dusting--my boys will each be bundled up in hats, mittens, four pairs of sweatpants, two tee-shirts, six pairs of socks, and a jacket, and sent outside to play. That's the tradition. That's what you get when you have a mother who spent the majority of her childhood either waiting for the school bus during a blizzard, or tunneling out seven foot high, snowplow-created snowdrifts during recess. I swear to God, snowpants were the required uniform at my elementary school. I have built more functional igloos than I care to remember.

The other tradition? Family walk to local Mexican restaurant for chips, tortilla soup, and quesadillas (which, on occasion, I have intentionally pronounced as "kaysa-dill-ahs," in a nod to Napoleon Dynamite's grandma and to be sort of funny; people--like my dad--have actually corrected me on this, as if I didn't know better).

No writing lately, though my finger click clacked their way across this very keyboard earlier tonight, skewering premium rooms and rates for our family vacation in March. We are going to Baltimore, which is only a forty-five minute drive from our house, but we will be staying overnight and having breakfast with a shark, and watching dolphins leap and cavort and flit across a pool, so we are very excited.

I'm reading "Get Happy" by Gerald Clarke. He wrote "Capote," which I loved. "Get Happy" is the biography of Judy Garland, and I'm liking it a lot. Amazon order arrived on Friday . . . I am knee deep in an accumulation of books . . . now, all I need is the snow!