Snow (and more snow and more snow)

Since marrying a winter lover from the Midwest, I've developed a certain fondness for the season. Last year, I blogged about not enough proper winter. Not enough snow, sledding, hot cocoa, fire place opportunities. I should be so lucky this winter. Having survived the 16.8 inches Snowpocalypse in December, we just "enjoyed" the mind-numbing, back-breaking Snowmaggedon (26+ inches) this past weekend. And now, my beloved Capital Weather Gang tells me we're looking at another blizzard and possible additional foot tomorrow. Even Uncle Sam has panicked and shut down government for the second day in a row. It's been a long time since we've gotten consecutive days off (the Post thinks it was 2003 but I am 99.9% sure that isn't right since that Monday was a federal holiday and OPM closed us down on Tuesday as well.) Ugh.

I reached a certain desperation point on Sunday, vowing that come hell or high water I would leave the house on Monday. I am just not made out for full time housekeeping- three meals a day, endless loads of laundry, snow pants on, snow pants off. Thus, the girls and I escaped for some retail therapy this AM. Tysons Corner never looked so good. The indoor playground was enough to give somewhat sane parents nightmares. Kids who probably not been outside since Friday paced the perimeter of that damn place like the hounds of hell. In between you had ninny parents trying to capture that magic moment on film. Hello? Still, I was heartily grateful for this brief interlude with the rest of humanity especially since I came home to the dire warnings of more snow on the way. In fact, the forecast not only drove me out to shop just because, it also drove us to a restaurant for dinner since we probably won't see one of those again for days. SNOW (Imagine me raising my fists to the sky in a somewhat pointless gesture.)

For those curious about how we survived Snowmaggedon, OPM called a 4 hours early release on Friday so we were safely home as the snow began to really come down. We are gecko-sitting this week which makes the weather even more of a challenge, as we discovered to our peril on Saturday after we lost power. Geckos, being cold blooded creatures, require a heated tank. Only after wrapping the gecko tank in blankets and surrounding it most ritualistically in candles, we discovered that our elderly Dutch neighbors had power. Gecko was thus shipped next store after an extremely laborious explanation that when we said "gecko" we did actually seem small lizard. Power was restored in due course (we were one of the very lucky ones) and gecko was returned (I believe much to gecko's delight. Our neighbors are relatively quiet people unlike our two children and felines who spend the better part of any given day crawling around the kitchen counter to check on the lizard.) After 7 passes we liberated ourselves at least out of our driveway but are still waiting for our street to be entirely liberated.



And so we wait for the next wallop. Florida never sounded so good. And remind me to revisit the topic of trying to "make up" to my now three years old her birthday spent almost entirely indoors with her sister, gecko, and cats for company.