Trapped!

Oh, my. The weather outside was frightful! We've been trapped at home all weekend. It's funny how it doesn't matter whether you stay home all day until you truly can't do anything else. Then you feel bad about it.

What happened was, it snowed yesterday, and then it rained a freezing rain, and then it did some sort of precipitation which I will now christen, "SOMETHING AWFUL," and then it froze. Bad, bad, bad. The streets were completely impassable by midday yesterday. At breakfast this morning, we speculated about when our street would be cleared. Tomorrow by 3 PM? Tonight by 9 PM? By 11:00 AM we were snapping at each other as though, I don't know, we didn't like each other or something. Even Zelma, who usually only cries these days for some sort of good reason, was just in a general funk, randomly crying at the slightest provocation, or really at nothing at all.

Then I baked oatmeal cookies, which helped a lot. At least I know it helped me. Miraculously, the snow plow came today at 1 PM. We would have gone out and cheered by the side of the road at the snow plow (which was a monster truck rally sized tractor) except that I was cutting Brian's hair and he was in his underwear. Immediately after the tractor plowed, we went out to shovel, and it was like the world had been given a coating of slurpy, with an inch or two of solid ice underneath it. It was a horrible muck.

There was still no place to go and nothing to do, however, so Brian started playing Christmas songs on the banjo. Zelma took a turn for the better, kicking her feet and smiling. Things were looking up. And then it came to me, the most brilliant idea of the week (or at least the weekend): What if we made a Christmas album and played actual Christmas songs on it? Wouldn't that be something?

The world outside is still frozen. But we have a plan.