Sometimes I Hate Winter

OK, ice storms make the trees look pretty. But everything else about them pretty much sucks. They cause damage, they make people fall and hurt themselves, and they get you up early in the morning just so you can spend that many extra hours stressing out about the appointments you can't get to. And wondering how it is that other people got out of their driveways so easily. And wishing you lived someplace where ice is known only as what clinks in your glass. Or that you at least had chains on your tires. Or maybe one of those ridiculous driveways with heating elements built into it so you could just switch in on when you woke up and by the time you had gotten dressed and eaten breakfast you'd have nothing but a little slush to clear away.

And really all I want to do - all I have wanted to do for about three days - is make hot, buttered popcorn and watch Beauty and the Beast on VHS. Yes, really.

An Open Letter (7)

Dear NY/NJ Metropolitan Area,

I love you, you know I do. I grew up here - I've spent the majority of my life here. I love the way the leaves change color in the fall, I love the chaos and crowds of The City (and that anyone from here know that The City is the *only* city). I love that I can find gluten free vegan pizza AND gluten free vegan cupckaes within a few blocks of each other, and that the best *normal* pizza I've ever had is just a mile from my parents' suburban house (in their little Italian town).

But we need to talk about this weather. Today I left the house wearing long johns under my jeans and a wool sweater and a down vest between my shirt and my knee-length, heavy down coat. Need I mention the hat and mittens? And yet I was cold. The wind, the maybe-sort-of-freezing rain, the complete lack of sun - they stole all my warmth, and a little piece of my soul.

And so, NY/NJ, I'm giving you fair warning: I'm afraid I won't be able to continue this way. Everyone says the globe is warming, and maybe you can take advantage of that and turn "winter" into "two weeks of fluffy, snowglobe snow in January flanked on both sides by months of warm sunshine with temperatures no lower than 50*." Wouldn't you like that just as much as I would? Imagine all the happy children who could play outdoors in November and February without worrying about losing toes!

If you can't manage that, though - that one minor concession - I just might have to leave. Because I value both my warmth and my soul and am not prepared to surrender them to your weather.

I'll miss you.

Spring has truly sprung.

Happy April Fool's Day!

I gave up trying to play practical jokes before I was ten, because my big brother was always a million times better than me and it just didn't seem worth the effort. Fittingly, that same brother's birthday happens to be the first of April. Happy Birthday, big bro!

Instead of failing at pranking people, I spent today enjoying the extraordinarily (for NJ in early April) gorgeous weather. I drove the long way out into farm country and walked in a few different parks and gardens, just enjoying the fresh air and the warm sunshine. The blooming flowers didn't hurt, either.

I sometimes forget during the winter just how much of an outdoor person I am, but one of my favorite things in all of life is feeling the air and the sun on my skin. (Through some kind of SPF-ified lotion, of course, since I go from ghost to lobster in approximately twelve minutes.) Days like today, with its perfect weather, make it crystal clear to me why our religions and myths so frequently include rising-from-the-dead allegories for the return of spring.

Instead of attempting to describe just how glorious today was, I'm just going to show off some of my photos. I'm pretty pleased with how they turned out - I think they do a decent job of capturing the day's beauty. Maybe someday I'll even upgrade from my point-and-shoot....

Snowy Day Update

Since the snow has been falling for nearly 24 hours now, and that's always an invitation to bake, I decided to go for the holy grail: gluten free yeast bread. I got out the tapioca flour, the xanthan gum, and a recipe for which I have very high hopes (http://www.artisanbreadinfive.com/?p=1396) and started mixing. The dough is resting now, so I'll have to give you an update on how it turns out.

In other news, the reason I vanished again after recently resurfacing is that I've been doing a lot of traveling and logistical business, the upshot being that I'm now back in scenic NJ and will be here for probably the next year or so.

It's a long story, and not particularly interesting, but the time has come to conclude The Nashville Experiment. The irony is that I've finally found some things in Nashville (namely a handful of people) that I'm reluctant to leave behind. But such is life, and in a couple of weeks I'll be making one brief trip back to pack up my apartment and drive the thousand miles home.

Which means... we begin the next chapter in the saga! Right now I'm hoping that this one will include things like a food processor and a large kitchen to house it. The main goal, though, is good health, and to that end I'm going to walk away from the computer, make a cup of tea, and watch the snow fall.

The view out my window this morning:


We've got about two inches on the ground, maybe a little more. The Tennessean is reporting 82 traffic 'incidents' so far today, and apparently there were 148 yesterday by some point in the afternoon. This is why I'm not leaving my apartment all weekend: 1. Tennessee does almost nothing to combat snow on the roads, and 2. no one here has the faintest idea how to drive on anything white or frozen.

I think Nashville's relationship with winter weather can be pretty well summed up by an interaction I had in December 2008, when approximately 1/4" of wet snow fell one afternoon. I was leaving my job to drive home, and one of the other tutors stopped me and said (completely seriously), "Are you sure you want to leave now? It's a blizzard out there!"

May you live in uneventful times.

Back in Nashville just in time to catch the tail end of the cold snap. It's been even colder here than in Jersey the last week or two, which I guess means I picked a good time to be out of town. Today the temp was about the same in both places... but somehow the cold in Nashville doesn't feel quite as cold.

Fortunately it's due to warm up in both places this week, and of course a bit more here than there. As much as I love my down coat, I'll be very happy to leave it hanging in the closet.

Meanwhile, the highs in San Francisco are nearly 60 all week...

The best thing I can say about the traveling I've been doing the last year and a half is that TRAVEL has finally stopped seeming like a BIG DEAL. You just get on a plane. Well, you stand around the airport for a good long while, and let people invade your privacy pretty thoroughly, and then sit around a while longer, and THEN you get on a plane. But still. Not that big a deal. All it takes is money. ("All." Ha!) And so (as I try to find some magic money tree seeds) the list of places to travel to continues to grow.

As for today's travel, the best thing I can say about it is that - except for the unexpected extra hour of sitting in Newark airport surrounded by college students who apparently all think leggings are the same thing as pants (THEY'RE NOT) - it was uneventful. That's my favorite kind of travel: uneventful.

In fact the whole day has been monumentally uneventful, and right now that seems about perfect. Kroger was uneventful. Whole Foods was uneventful. My Netflix DVD and frozen (gluten free!) dinner were entirely uneventful. And now I'm going to get into my uneventful bed and have some (hopefully) uneventful sleep so I can be ready for what I can only pray (to any god who might be listening) will be an uneventful week.

This Was Not Full Disclosure

Not long after I arrived in Nashville I added a second weather widget to my Mac dashboard: now I have one widget showing the Nashville weather and one showing the Cambridge, MA weather. It's made it just that much easier to crow about how much warmer it is here than there. More than a few times, now, I've pointed out to friends and family just how nice the weather was here than there. Since it stopped being 95 degrees and 100% humidity, I've been reveling in the glorious weather here. It's hardly rained at all, and generally been beautiful since about the middle of September.

That is, until now. When I checked at around noon it was 46 degrees out. A little later in the afternoon it went all the way up to about 50. A whole 50 degrees. In October. It was WARMER IN MASSACHUSETTS THAN TENNESSEE today.

Who thought that was a good idea? I know I definitely did not okay that. I had to wear a sweater and a coat when I went outside. And for my grocery run tonight I wore my down coat. MY DOWN COAT. IN TENNESSEE. IN OCTOBER.

I was under the impression that the South would be a land of warmth and glory where milk and honey flow freely through the land - or at least I wouldn't have to wear more than a sweater until December. I've even been told, in so many words, that it stays warm here until Thanksgiving. It is NOT Thanksgiving, folks, not for another four whole weeks. So what gives? What's the big bonus of living in a red state (I LIVE IN A RED STATE) if it's not going to allow me to wear absurdly little clothing in complete comfort until after Massachusetts has seen at least one snowfall? Do you mean to tell me that I get strip malls, no ocean, poisonous spiders (oh yes, folks, we have those here), and pickup trucks with gun racks and McCain/Palin stickers...and it's not even WARM?

Seriously. I want my money back.

Allergic to Tennessee

Who knew it was possible to be allergic to a state? or maybe a region - maybe I'm allergic to the entire South.

I don't mean to imply that I've never suffered seasonal allergies before. Last summer in Boston I spent many lovely days Claritin Clear...except not really, because Claritin doesn't actually fix my allergies. But something about this fall's allergy season has knocked me on my ass. Perhaps there are other explanations for it, but I suspect it might have something to do with the fact that the pollen count here is approximately twice what it is in Boston. Awesome.

This means that even though the weather became totally gorgeous over the weekend - the temperature and humidity both dropped, so it's been cool in the mornings and evenings and gloriously warm and sunny in the afternoons - I cannot open my windows. I tried opening my windows, and it made me amazingly happy as far as the soft autumn breeze blowing through my apartment but fairly miserable in terms of the itchy, sneezy, phlegmy, awfulness.

So I have given up and become one of Those People who, despite the beauteousness outdoors, sits in the house with the windows shut and the air conditioning on. I really, really hope that this is effective. At about 3:00 this morning a handful of aliens decided to try to rip my stomach out of my body, and I can't help but think it is somehow related to the allergies. This is the only reason I'm willing to shut out the beautiful weather. I REALLY hope the pollen goes away soon. I mean, how badly do we need the trees to reproduce, anyway?

I'm now going to finish my recovery day by watching a DVD that's come highly recommended from a few sources: Once, and I'll let you know if it's any good. I can definitely say with confidence that Netflix is the best thing ever.