What I Did on My Winter Vacation

or Tomorrow Could Totally Suck...

As has been well-documented, the Washington, DC region has been experiencing winter for the first time in years. It's roughly 6 winter drought years all spilled out over one snowy winter. I love snow and snow days so I am pretty okay with the arrangement, would just like to do something about the other 6 years.


Tomorrow, the Federal Government returns to work, and my email, which has seen mere flurries of business marketing emails for a week is gonna get hit with a blizzard of OMGIneedthisrightawaytodaykthanksbye messages. I can already predict the subjects. But there are still 36 minutes left in Thursday, the day of CLOSED, before "Unscheduled Leave" returns. I am going to cherish these moments. It's just you, me, Anderson Cooper, three feet of snow, and memories of the long weekend.


Things A Person Could Do During A Snowstorm of Undetermined Duration
1. Dig Out. Jac handled this. Repeatedly and beautifully. Massive props to him.
2. Make Chex Mix with Crispix. Crispix is becoming my go-to cereal snack mix brand. Sure, we paid lip service to the Wheat Chex for years, but it was just too sad seeing their flattened, unflavored wheat-y ranks filing into the trash when all the good stuff was gone. Long live Crispix.
3. Brush, de-mat, comb, clip, dry dogs. Repeat endlessly. Realize there is much more work to be done.
4. Scan, shred and recycle paper. Apparently before I lived on the Internet I used to print everything out and put it in notebooks. I have scanned and purged hundreds of pages. Now I just have to sort the electronic files I created...
5. Finally move recipes from web to recipe software. I have one remaining pre-digital habit I've yet to break. I love magazines, especially ones with big glossy recipes. When I read leaf through the magazines I often dog ear the ones I want to ... okay here's where it gets wild... go on the web and download. Because the print version is so wonderful to read peruse but the digital one is so much more versatile. But the volume of recipes and tchotchkes I like in magazines far exceeds my cutting and pasting capacity so I take the magazine, find the recipe online, create a temporary bookmark with Read It Later and then later I come back and copy the recipe into my software which requires some tweaking for each recipe. The upside is that nine times out of 10 I can get the recipe and the great photo into the software with a few clicks. The downside is that some magazines are quicker than others to post their recipes online so I have to hang onto some magazines for months creating a clutter conundrum.... So, yeah, I put about 100 recipes into my software. Need any?
6. Watch so much weather coverage that your biting criticism of the on-air talent reaches new lows in inventiveness and humor.
7. Religiously (mentally) catalog the most peculiar behaviors of your most peculiar neighbor.
8. Facebook. Twitter. Apparently now I have to Google Buzz? WTF.
9. Argue over things like whether the tissues are "too far away".
10. Seven. That is the number of days I must be cooped up in my home before I will tackle the task of cleaning the pantry - the pantry where spices have created drifts to rival those outside our back door. I spent about two hours on it today. I got two shelves one and a half shelves into some semblance of order.