Ada and the Big Snow

Then early one morning it started to drizzle.
The drizzle turned into rain.
The rain turned into snow.
By noon it was four inches deep.
The highway department sent out the truck plows.

-- Virginia Lee Burton
(Katy and the Big Snow)

On Saturday evening, it started to snow. Two inches fell over night and then after a smattering of rainy ice pellets, it started to snow in earnest yesterday morning and there’s still a light snow in the air now. All told, we’re at hour 46 of continuous precipitation and we have approximately ten new inches of heavy, wet snow to show for it.

I’m glad I haven’t had to go anywhere. I’m due at work this evening, but doubt they’ll need a second person on tonight. I suspect most people are still busy shoveling themselves out. At this point in the winter, I’m somewhat apathetic to the accumulation of snow, but I do hope this latest dumping will correlate with a pick up in winter tourism. You could almost feel a collective sigh of relief when everyone opened up their shades to snow yesterday morning. They’ve just been getting rain in town and I’m not apathetic to that. I can say with conviction I’m really glad we didn’t get that!

I must have read too much Julie and Julia because I’ve started to have kitchen disasters. Yesterday as I reach for the turmeric for the Coconut Basmati Rice, I somehow nudged the rice cooker off the counter and it flipped in midair, landing upside down on the floor after its contents of raw rice, water and coconut milk had splattered across the wall, fridge, coffee grinder, and floor. It cleaned up easily enough and I had all the necessary ingredients to start over again, but now we don’t have a rug in the kitchen.

Maybe the rice was trying to tell me not to make it in a rice cooker because the batch I actually cooked last night glued itself to the bottom and sides of the pot. I remember making the same recipe in the rice cooker and it turning out fine, but that was in the early, early days of my life at the Shack and the endorphins and adrenaline of new love make everything so effortless. Now I exist in a truer reality where rice scorches and sticks arbitrarily.

I finished Julie and Julia last night. I’m glad to have gotten the “real” story behind the movie even if it was nothing like that I expected. Given the lackluster reviews of Powell’s latest effort, I won’t be going out of my way to get my hands on a copy.

The snow has spawned productivity around here. I’m not much closer to getting those four queries sent out – I really, really need to get to the library – but this morning I did start out on a silly little article for the heck of it. I hate writing on spec anymore, but this specific publication’s guidelines specify that they prefer receiving completed articles so a tip tapping at the keyboard I will go with marginal hope of financial reward for my labors. I do have a new article assignment though (yet another topic I would never have thought about had I not been assigned to write it – who knew there were so many of those?) and I got another chapter of the novel edited today which means my self-imposed deadline of having the novel completely rewritten by the end of March is looking more and more realistic every day.

Good Lord, what am I going to do when this mother is edited and I’ve written a synopsis and a cover letter to go with it? Submit it places? It’s just so scary!