Partial to the bean…

As may be inferred from the previous post, we’ve had a bit of snow around here this week — over a foot of it, actually. We’re at the point now where shoveling takes twice as long because you can’t just scoop and throw because all of the convenient throw-spots are full. Now you have to scoop and then walk and then dump and then walk, over and over again. So much walking, your feet end up almost as tired as your back. The imposing walls of snow looming on the sides of our driveway make pulling out onto the road feel like attacking the Death Star.

So yes, snow. Snow snow snow snow snow. It snowed all day today, but didn’t really accumulate, except on top of the snow that’s already everywhere in big piles, and who would really notice if each of those big piles got another inch bigger? They say more snow tomorrow, maybe, and maybe another storm next week — “a big one,” they say, like the 14″ we got this week doesn’t even count. I don’t think it’s ever going to melt away. For Alice’s birthday this year, we’ll make snowmen.

So, I just got this email from our school district:

Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2011
Subject: CLOSED 1/27/2011

The [name] School Distirct is Closed for Wednesday, January 26, 2011. Due to excellerated weather conditions.

All Transportation is also cancelled for today.

I count one misspelled word, one completely made-up word, the wrong date in the subject, a sentence fragment, and two words that shouldn’t be capitalized but are. That’s pretty impressive right there. *sigh*

- When I hear the same artist on two different radio stations at the same time, I automatically assume that he/she has just died.

- Dear squirrel: I’m trying to be generous here in no longer jumping out of my seat and chasing you away every time you hop onto my windowsill bird feeder. Birdseed’s not that expensive, and you seem like basically a nice guy. Share and share alike, right? But I think it’s a little bit excessive of you to sit inside the feeder for an hour and a half every morning, stuffing your furry little face. Get a job, hippie.

- Shoveling the driveway is getting a bit tedious. It takes 30-60 minutes and it’s boring. I had to do it twice this week and that’s too much. Bleh.

- I am making pot roast again tonight, even though I have never successfully made pot roast. I’m trying yet another recipe. I’m not sure if this is a charming “hope springs eternal” situation, or a frightening “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” kind of deal. Picture my children clustered pitifully around me, clinging to my legs and begging, “Mommy, please don’t try to make pot roast again! Can’t we just have grilled cheese sandwiches? You make very good grilled cheese sandwiches, Mommy!!” I just really like pot roast, okay? Why does it never turn out right for me??

I’m not sure if it’s seasonal depression or mono or just contagious apathy, but the whole family has been feeling really blah and low-energy and verging on sick for days now. Getting anything done is a struggle, leaving the house is a trauma, and getting out of bed every morning is positively painful. I’m not usually sick of winter this early in the season, but spring can come any time now as far as I’m concerned. Blah.

I saw this video linked from several of the blogs I read, and I kept not clicking it because it’s 10 minutes long and I was all TL;DR. But I finally broke down and watched it, and it was completely fascinating and delicious, and I was totally engrossed for the full run time. Plus I learned what an oranais is (puff pastry filled with pastry cream and apricots).

I put up this new batch of pictures last night, but then there was some DNS caching Tomcat server error thingy happening and I couldn’t see them in the picture browser even though I could see them on my server. I had to wait for Anth to get home and spend a bitter curse-laden hour troubleshooting it, and then by the time he had it figured out and had a ticket submitted to the people who controlled the Tomcat thing, it was bedtime.

So all of that to say, this is the blog post and the batch of pictures (we’re almost done with May now, and I’m feeling very nostalgic for warm weather and summer clothes) that should have gone up yesterday. I’m not trying to blog every damn day any more, because Holidailies is over, but dangit, last night I tried.

In other news, here’s the next Classic Sigquote, an obscure favorite of mine:

My parents just came back from a planet where the dominant lifeform had no bilateral symmetry, and all I got was this stupid F-Shirt!

Someone come over and take the tree down and clean the living area up and vacuum it, KTHXBAI. I’m going to bed.

Here is a quick batch of new pictures. No time to talk. Gotta go pick up the big kid (little kid stayed home again today because she’s still feeling run down and a little touchy in the tummy)!

- I had a pleasantly low-key and lovely birthday, right up until the point yesterday evening when I was opening the presents that Anth and the kids had gotten for me, and Sammi started vomiting into a trash can. This represented a turning point in the “vibe” of the event, as it were. Today she is still rather warmish and floppy, but she’s perked up considerably since the trash can incident. I’m not sure if she’ll be well enough to go to school tomorrow, but then I’m not sure there will be school tomorrow; it depends on the timing of the snow we’re supposed to get, if we even get any snow at all.

- I’m looking through my file of old .sig quotes — all of the humorous, witty, or insightful quotes that I’ve attached automagically to the bottoms of all of my personal emails since I got email, basically. I love some of them so much that I want to resurrect them in some way and share them with the world again, so I’m going to occasionally be posting a quote now and then, here and on Facebook. (Same quote both places, but I’ll try never to make a blog post here that is nothing more than a quote, because my blog posts show up on my Facebook wall, and that would be just unbearably tedious for my Facebook friends.) So anyway, the quote that I’m sharing today is this:

“Women become intellectual and powerful despite the fact that this drastically lowers our chances of getting laid. This is so heroic and brave and unfair that it’s no surprise that sometimes we get despondent.” — Cynthia Heimel

- I also need to change the .sig quote that I’m actually currently using, even though I’ve kind of gotten out of the habit of using my .sig file a lot of the time. My days of posting on large, bustling email lists where I must re-identify myself with each message because the traffic is so high and the turnover so intense are long past. If I send a non-work email these days, it’s to one of three or four closed or semi-closed lists that I’ve been on for years where everyone knows me, so I rarely feel the need to provide a link to my website, a witty quote that represents my life philosophy, or (thank Maud those days are past!) a due date. Still, my .sig quote has been, “‘God never gives us more ice cream sandwiches than we can eat.’ — Lore Sjöberg, badgods.com” for quite some time, and so perhaps I should make a change. Henceforth, it will be, “‘I’ve learned from my mistakes, and I’m sure I can repeat them exactly’ — Peter Cook”.

- I apologize for the way I’m writing. I’ve just finished reading Russell Brand’s second book, and I read his first one before that, and I’m finding it difficult to get his voice and style out of my head. So if you know of Russell at all, please imagine this entire blog post read by him, because that’s how I’m hearing it as I type.

I’m 41 today! I haven’t been feeling too pleased about that, but only because 41 seemed like a not-very-interesting sort of number. It’s good to be back in my “prime” again, I suppose — haven’t been a prime number since 37. But other than that I wasn’t able to think of anything good about 41. Thank heavens for Wikipedia — it turns out that 41 is the sum of the first six prime numbers (2 + 3 + 5 + 7 + 11 + 13), the sum of three primes (11 + 13 + 17), and the sum of two squares (16 + 25). It’s also the atomic number of Niobium, so if you’d like to buy me some jewelry, this stuff seems nice. And it’s the number of times Paul McCartney sings the phrase “Let It Be” in, um, “Let It Be”, but I’m not really crazy about that song, so feel free to not sing it to me, ever.

The girls and I enjoyed Gulliver’s Travels substantially more than we enjoyed TRON: Legacy. Make of that what you will. I shall not be swayed in my opinion.

Ohhh, I missed a day! I realized at, like, 10:30 last night that I hadn’t blogged, but I was too warm in my bed to get up and go write something token. So sad, I was so close to completing Holidailies (it only goes through tomorrow)!!

The kids go back to school tomorrow, after about 2½ weeks off. Anth goes back on Tuesday; he’s been off since the kids’ break started. We all did surprisingly well with the togetherness, at least as compared with Thanksgiving break, which was only 6 days long and felt like a life sentence by the end. I only really hit that “I need you people to leave me alone, NOW” point for about 20 minutes sometime yesterday, and then I kind of got over it. I really do like hanging with my family, quite a bit, most of the time. Heh.

We finally got out to see a movie today — the girls and I went, with one of Alice’s friends, to see Tron: Legacy (in 3D). Alice rather liked it, I was disappointed, and Sammi was bored off her butt. Not what I was expecting. I’ve got to think about it a bit more, and then I might write more about it, if my thoughts gel a bit more.

We might go see Gulliver’s Travels on Tuesday, if we’re all up for it. And I’d like to try to nip out and see The King’s Speech by myself on Wednesday, as a birthday present. That’s the plan, anyway…

Yay, it’s 2011! We had a pretty good 2010, but I know it sucked rocks for a lot of you, so here’s a hearty “Good Riddance!” in your honor. Heh.

2011 has started out nicely here. We’ve got our pork & sauerkraut in the crock pot, and I’m very close to being completely caught up with processing pictures. I just need to process what we took in the last two weeks and I’ll be totally in the present! And on that note, here is a new batch of pictures.

Not much else to say here. I was in bed by the time the new year came through last night, but I wasn’t really asleep, so I’m kind of tired today. Time to go make mashed potatoes…