Fluff

Best I can tell, over a 24 hour period (Wednesday's wee hours through today's wee hours) we received about 16 inches of snow, half of it after dinner time last night. Yesterday afternoon, after we'd received maybe 4 or 5 inches already, the two younger boys went out in the backyard to build snowmen. They had a blast! I reminisced about the monster snowfalls of my Long Island youth when we not only built snowmen but snow forts and igloos which we actually carved out and used as clubhouses until the big melt. If you have snow, I hope you're enjoying it too!

Never Promised You a Rose Garden

Last night, while driving home on the Long Island Expressway, I saw a plain blue bumper sticker with white letters, on a little black sportscar. The sticker said:

Eve Was Framed

That would unravel a lot of old arguments, wouldn't it? ;-)

Super Silly Bowl

We customarily get a bunch of families together at our place on Super Bowl Sunday. Yesterday was no exception. Lots of pictures were taken, but none of 'em involved football. Why? Well, we did keep tabs on the game, but much of the activity involved the kids. Six boys, two girls...including two crawling babies...plus one dog to round out the menagerie.

Here we see one of the menfolk wrestling with three of the younger boys. Actually it was the grownup against the three boys. Each faction claimed victory.

Nerf guns are one way to turn my husband and our friend C into 40-something children. Who won that battle? I don't think they kept score, because there was too much laughing like banshees! The rest of us ducked for cover!

I Am Not an Android, Part 2

Last night I went to the ears-nose-throat doc to see what it was all about, Alfie. Ever since I recovered from the stomach virus a few weeks ago, I've had a transient ache in my ears, sinuses, and throat. A couple of days on, then a couple of days off...a bit of congestion, but nothing awful.

All the medical mavens who think they should play doctors on TV will tell you, "If you have yellowish or greenish mucus, you have an infection." Fine, but what they don't tell you is that you can have an infection if the mucus is clear. The latter is my current situation, and I ought to be as good as new after ten days of amoxicillin. Also, thanks to our doctor's miniature sinus cavity vacuum (Hoover? Electrolux? Dirt Devil? not sure!) I slept much better last night than I had in several days.

Happy Friday! It's certainly cold enough to support the snowy forecast for Lawn Guyland tonight.

Mush

Every couple of weeks, my office brings in Chinese food for lunch for anyone who fills out the order form and pays the gal who manages the money. They usually have a pile of fortune cookies left over, so I grabbed a couple this afternoon. I think they may have hired a new philosopher. I never saw anything like this before:

Life is like a dogsled team. If you ain't the lead dog, the scenery never changes.

The other slip of paper had a modified version of my high school yearbook quote which was not found on a fortune cookie but on a sugar packet at our local diner:

It is vastly better to try to do something and fail than to try to do nothing and succeed.

Pretty good observations about leadership and accomplishment, I think.

Assume the Pose

Tonight was my first session of the rerun of the continuing education yoga class at our local high school. The instructor, Helen, has a voice and a manner inspiring to me. About half the class was new to yoga this time, which I found exciting.

We went through roughly the same "welcome" class as the first session in the fall, as far as I remember, with some starter poses (Mountain, Child's Pose, Tortoise, Warrior, Triangle, Sphinx). But I already knew how to breathe through them, and I already knew about the alignment and the muscles that are supposed to be stretched during each pose. As a result, I worked them much more deeply than I did the first time around. It was a good feeling, too. Let's see how the old spine feels tomorrow morning!

On the Edges

Yippee, my new ice skates had their maiden voyage yesterday afternoon. How strange not to rent a pair of blades at the rink. I had to loosen and tighten them a couple of times but hey that's not unexpected. The padding seems more suited to my feet than the padding inside the rentals.

Kids had a good time too, skating with my friend M's two daughters. And we saw my friend E (who also happens to be our family dentist) who was there with his daughter for a birthday party. He plays hockey on ice, so he was able to give Son #2 some pointers about how to come to a stop gracefully, side to side, spewing some cool shavings. I slept pretty well last night too!