snow day

Our weather in recent weeks has been erratic, as is typical for January. Just last week, it was 82 degrees. And then we woke up this morning to a SNOW DAY! 

I was sleeping so very soundly. My mom knew around 4:00am that the entire city would be shut down, including my school. And it was all she could do to keep from waking me up right then since I had so desperately wanted a white Christmas. Instead of letting me sleep late and enjoy a lazy day off, she thought it was far more important to get me up (isn't there some kind of golden rule about never ever waking a child up on his day off?) to go outside as soon as it wasn't completely dark. When I first peeked out the window, I was still dizzy and could only open one eye. One glimpse of the beautiful snow, and I was ready to run outside. 

We went for a walk. The snow was more like solid sheets of ice. It certainly isn't the snow I read about in my books. We saw not one single flake fall from the sky. sad. I kept telling my mom what snow is supposed to be like . . . you know, where it keeps snowing day after day after day and it's fluffy and glowing white and you can build snowmen. This is the best we can hope for here. We enjoyed the snow and the cold for maybe three hours until it was nothing but a slushy mess and I had moved most of the snow around the yard.

Tomorrow it is supposed to be 70 degrees. Sunday will be 75. I prefer snow.

what not to do

When you wake up in the morning and it is 21 degrees, it might seem like the perfect day to accept your good friend's invitation to go ice skating at Whole Foods . . . especially if you are a boy who will strip naked and happily run through the sprinkler when it is in the 40s. (For my Canadian and European friends and everyone else living in every other country in the world sensibly following the Metric system: I do mean Fahrenheit. really.) By the time we got to Whole Foods, it had warmed to 25. The wind was fierce, making it seem far colder. Whole Foods made an unprecedented error by neglecting to have the ticket booth properly staffed. or staffed at all. We waited in line for over 20 minutes before someone was sent up to sell tickets / hand out skates / open the rink. By that time, me, and most other children were frozen solid and psychologically damaged, no doubt. I made it one time around the rink.

As always, pizza was my salvation.