Brrr!

Well, it's chilly here in Texas, amazingly: chilly enough that there are actually icicles outside! The top floor of the playscape is glazed with ice, and my kids -- who will be home and bored for the foreseeable future -- came in asking for ice skates. I ix-nayed that idea in a hurry. Can you say emergency room visit?

We don't have skates, of course, since we live in the subtropics, but then Abby started lobbying to create some out of blocks of wood and string. Which she would presumably attach to her flip-flops for a semi-aerial skating session. Needless to say, this plan did not get parental backing.

The streets are still wet, not icy, but the temperature is hovering around freezing, so all of Austin is shut down. And the forecasts keep mentioning that tantalizing four-letter word: SNOW. We're hoping, hoping, hoping... there's something magical about it, particularly if you never get it. Everything looks so different frosted in white! Even if it does melt by ten o'clock.

So we've walked the neighborhood twice now, crunching on frozen grass and touching the iciclets that have sprouted on trees and bushes. (Ian loves eating them, and I had to draw a firm line on consuming ice culled from trash can lids.) We've made two batches of hot chocolate already, and I think I'm going to make something called Cozy Cheese Strata for dinner. Yum.

I hope you are all snuggled in at your houses with big, fat, cozy books. I just finished What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller. I saw the movie last week, and was interested to see how the writer told the tale on the pages. Interestingly, the two were quite different in how they unfolded, but both were intriguing in their own way. So perhaps there never is one 'right' ending to a story. Which is liberating, don't you think?

I'm off to bake a strata now. Hope your evening is filled with fires (the fireplace kind), mugs of hot drinks, and good books.

See you Thursday!