Hunkering Down

Bring it on, Old Man Winter!

Winter Storm Jonas only brushed us here in North Carolina. While folks from Richmond to DC to Baltimore to Philadelphia to New York were dealing with snowfalls measured in feet, we only got a few inches, but a good deal of that was in the form of sleet. We were lucky enough to dodge the dreaded freezing rain, a form of precipitation that does no one any good and tends to bring down tree limbs and power lines. Still, in the gentle Southland it doesn't take much snow to shut us down - since significant snowfalls occur only once every few years, we don't have much in the way of snow removal equipment and no one bothers with snow tires, much less chains.

When snow is predicted in NC, bread shelves
take on the look of a Soviet grocery!

Thanks to advanced weather forecasting, we knew this was coming and had time to prepare. Having lived through ice storms before, FryDaddy was taking no chances - we now have both a coffee percolator (no power would mean no way to brew coffee and we agreed that would be bad. Very, very bad) and a butane-fueled burner for cooking. Add to that the propane grill and gas logs and we figured we could ride out a moderate-to-severe ice storm. We made our grocery run (which included chocolate, puff pastry, and ingredients for a variety of soups) and went to bed Thursday night, convinced we'd done all we could. We never did lose power (yay!), but there was enough ice, sleet, and general nastiness to keep us basically snowed in since Friday morning. Approached with the proper attitude, this doesn't have to be a bad thing - and I suppose I've been training for such an event since I started my French journey. Some things you simply cannot control and the weather is one of those things.

So what did we do with ourselves?

First and foremost, I didn't work on "work stuff" over the suddenly-longer weekend. The college was closed and I was with the man I vowed to love, honor, and cherish. Therefore, some things could simply wait for a change in the weather. That was actually difficult, but I put my back into it and managed to find other ways to occupy my time, including:

Nutella & puff pastry - heaven!

Trying new recipes. Knowing that bad weather was coming in, I dug out a few recipes I wanted to try and made sure to include ingredients on the grocery list. I made a loaf of rye bread and one of a Russian-style black bread (yum!), along with chickpea & pasta soup, Nutella croissants (I now want to always have puff pastry in the house!), spicy chickpea salad, and I even made ricotta cheese that I used in both a spread and a pasta sauce. (I was blown away by the last one - cheese! I've never made cheese before!)

Watching movies. We have wide-ranging tastes and we watched two documentaries (one on Scientology and one on rough poet Charles Bukowski), an oddly-touching classic (Galaxy Quest), and a true winter epic (David Lean's Doctor Zhivago).

Eat! I think my jeans may have somehow shrunk over the last few days (ahem), but I had to do some experimentation to find out if anything doesn't taste good when spread with Nutella. The answer, so far, is no. In addition to the new recipes I tried, there was also lushly rich hot chocolate and other delicacies.

Do something new. My beloved Carolina Panthers were in the NFC Championship game Sunday night and I had teal put into my hair just before the storm hit. Since I was at home with time to spare, I painted my nails Panther blue and used the Internet to figure out how to add a snowflake design to one nail. The end result wasn't that great, but hey! it looks like a snowflake if you squint a little. (And the Panthers absolutely destroyed the Arizona Cardinals, so we're Super Bowl bound.)

FryDaddy and I also took our inner children sledding. Yep, we trudged over to the local golf course (the sledding hill is Hole #13, by the way) and borrowed a sled from a neighbor. I haven't gone sledding since I was little. I couldn't believe how much fun I had flying at breakneck speed down an icy hill!

Speaking of which, we also just had fun being together. Being snowed in is good for that sort of thing, whether you're speeding down a hill on a golf course or sitting by the fire reading. (Oh, and I also downloaded an app that is trying to teach me French. [It's also available on your computer.] Why not? I'm not going to learn any younger.)

Today things are nearly back to normal - there's still some ice and some of the back roads continue to be treacherous, but you can see that clear roads are coming. It was a lovely, graceful break in the drear that can be January in the South and I'm thrilled that I took the time to enjoy it.