Echo Base distress call

Glancing out the window just now, I saw a tauntaun running by, with Han Solo on its back. I told him the AT-ATs are coming from the west.

It's been snowing all day, and shows no sign of stopping (though it's shifting to ice, says the tapping on the windows). We're up to about a foot now, to judge by the trapezoidal prism of snow sitting on the front porch railing. The car is not quite hidden—there's still a stripe of green visible—but it looks more like a fluffy white SUV than it usually does. We don't have stairs anymore, just a smooth ramp of snow leading down to the yard. I stood at the kitchen window at dusk, watching the snow fall; everything outside the streetlamps' circles was velvety blue and deepening toward violet. Streets in the snow look the same everywhere, I think.

( This is what the side porch looked like many hours and inches ago. You can still see the stairs. )

I shrink-wrapped my bedroom window this afternoon, which will supposedly stop some of the heat loss in my bedroom. And I've just finished wrapping all my Christmas presents (except for the two which are too big for our current wrapping technology). After a few more tasks tomorrow, I'll be ready for the trip. Hopefully I'll have some time to play in the snow. I haven't made a snowman in years....

White Christmas

I'm taking a break between baking pepperoni bread to take on the trip and packing.

It's been a busy day. My back and shoulders are a little sore; the foot of snow turned out to be a bit less fluffy than it appeared from inside, as I discovered during the course of ninety minutes of shoveling the stuff. But the car has been freed from its frozen tomb; I reckon I moved about 400 cubic feet of snow in the process, which is something more than 2 tons (depending on how compact it was). I made a mental reckoning of which of the songs my iPod chose to play were good snow-shoveling songs (Otis Reddings's Shake, Lovely Ladies from Les Mis) and which were not (Simon and Garfunkel's Cloudy). A cross-section of what I had to deal with appears below, along with some snow-related prettiness from my walk through Tappan Square.

( Below is here. )

K. and I had our own private Christmas tonight, watching the Grinch, sipping eggnog, and opening our presents to each other. I am now the happy owner of The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra on DVD and the first Beautiful South album on CD; K. was particularly pleased to receive the first season of Home Movies on DVD, which she didn't know existed. (She sort of sat there giggling at the box for a while.) We each reserved another present to open at her parents' on Christmas day, which will mark the first Christmas we've ever spent together (after twelve apart).

We'll be heading out tomorrow morning, braving the snowy highways, which means I'll have zero to intermittent internet access until we get to Swarthmore on the 28th or 29th. We'll be at Hogmanay for New Year's, drive up to my mom's for a third Christmas in NH, and then head to the APA in Boston so K. can interview for jobs and hang out with her classicist buddies. (We'd like to see some Boston people on the evening of the 6th, if y'all are up for that.) It'll be a long, roundabout trip, but we'll see all sorts of lovely people we rarely get to see.

Back to packing for me. I'll pop in briefly tomorrow morning, to post the final advent icon and wave on my way out the door. Merry Christmas to y'all!