You remember that scene from Crocodile Dundee where the hood has a switchblade and Dundee says blandly, "That's not a knife," and draws out the biggest, nastiest hunting knife you've ever seen and adds, "This is a knife!" I suspect that anyone from Canada, Minnesota or the Dakotas, upstate New York or New England who has seen photos of our snow is saying, dumbfounded, "That's not a snowstorm," instead pointing to three feet of snow in the backyard and adding, "That was a snowstorm!"

For down here, this is a snowstorm (or, by now, was a snowstorm). It's been snowing rather steadily, heavily and then lightly and back again, since about ten this morning. Nothing accumulated on the roads, and the lawns are barely covered; it's not even sticking to the cars anymore in what should be its final, sand-fine form. (It did stick on things like the deck, where it looks like we got not quite an inch.)

The trouble is that the temp is hovering around 34°F right now, enough for the snow just to melt a bit. The roads, the sidewalks, the bridges, are all wet. Tonight the temps are going to plummet into the teens, which means tomorrow Atlanta is going to be one big skating rink. That's been what all the fuss has been about, why the sand trucks are readied and the power trucks are on alert, why there was hour-by-hour coverage on the television and why things were cancelled.

However, we have all our shopping done and should we find it too dangerous to go out tomorrow, we don't need to. We had a jolly time today doing our errands; it was perfect snowball snow and I kept gathering small handfuls off the side of the car and tossing them at James. We stopped at Costco and got a great deal: between their discounted price and a coupon, we bought TurboTax Deluxe for only $20. We went to Borders and had a hot cocoa at the coffee shop and watched the snow. Dani Torres has been talking about a writer named Geraldine Brooks in her blog. The only Geraldine Brooks I know of is the raspy-voiced actress who passed away some time ago—my favorite role of hers: Lou Carson on Faraday and Company—but I noticed the author Brooks had written a novel entitled March, a slightly more adult flip side of Little Women, chronicling Mr. March's experience serving in the Civil War. So I bought that. James found a Christmas issue of Renaissance (where on earth was it at Christmas?) and bought me a copy of one of Susan Wittig Albert's Beatrix Potter mysteries. We also found a small Christmas or birthday gift.

We made a brief stop at Michael's, where I got two more "ornaments" for the library tree next year (a white seal to be Kotick from The Jungle Book and a German Shepherd—take your pick: Flax or Leader the guide dog in Follow My Leader, or whatever) and we picked up another future gift. We then went to the hobby shop, stopped at Love Street, then made our final stop at Kroger to get a new bag of dog food for Willow and all sorts of useful things including 6-grain French bread to go with dinner.

When we got home James pulled out the stock pot and filled it with the turkey carcass the Boulers gave us after Christmas Eve dinner, carrots, celery, and water, and it is now simmering merrily on the back burner, sending a heavenly scent throughout the house.

Labels: books, gifts, shopping, weather

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 5:30:00 PM

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