48 hours of pure hell and an ice storm.

Hey there. Perhaps you have read of my plight. I think it's been a leading story on cnn.com, so that means it's a big deal. Yesterday, I awoke to the strange combination of snapping trees, thunder and sizzling power lines. A veritable winter symphony that Dickens himself couldn't have better written. Or something. A few hours later, the power finally went out. You were right Mike Mitchell England (only funny to native Oklahomans, apologies, also, it might not be funny to them either). Shain (for his version, click HERE) forged a path across town amidst tree debris and stoplightless traffic (what's so tough to understand about a four-way stop people?) to pick me up so we could do important things like seek out coffee, pastry and toilet paper. Shain chose to dress for the occasion by wearing a freshly pressed white button down oxford, pin-striped mid-weight pants and shined dress shoes. With no real coat - some puffy thing he claims he got in Prague or some bullshit. Business homeless chic, I say. (I had on fleece upon fleece, mittens, scarf, heavy coat, etc - like a normal person.) Anyway, we make our way to SuperTarget where in addition to toilet paper, I remember my mom has requested hot dogs in the event she was able to start a fire in our fireplace. I left her as she was frantically tearing pages out of our second copy of The Riverside Shakespeare to use as kindling, so I was skeptical. Turns out it didn't matter as all that was left on the shelves turned out to be pepperoni. Mmm. After my superhappyfuntime with Shain, I spent some superhappyfuntime with my fam in the dark. We only had scented candles. Our living room rivaled my brief stint trapped in a ventless office at Yankee Candle Co. headquarters. Ugh. However, power was returned and I finally succumbed to the migraine graciously supplied by my mother and went to bed retardedly early beneath a pile of quilts and a dog. I awoke this morning to a bevy of texts from my workstudies happily alerting me that XXX had no power. No school! Yay! I went back to sleep and continued to drool while dreaming about appearing on The Barefoot Contessa. I wish I were kidding. Work's back on for tomorrow, but after almost 48 solid hours of family time, I couldn't be happier.

That's the sadness that is my backyard and a tree that used to be more complete. It continued cracking and breaking all day till there's not a lot left.

Close up of crunchy, frozen grass. But I finally got to break out my Montrails and clomp around just like the old days of New England!

More tree sadness. And my neighborhood was pretty fortunate in that it's a cheap, newish subdivision with no real trees, just crap Bradford pears that snap like my mom when she misses her 4pm snack.

Hey, yeah, I'll just run out and grab something from the store. NOT! That's probably 1.5 inches of ice encasing my car, folks.

Hmm. Pepperoni or pepperoni? I just don't know!

Ice encapsulated holly. Pretty. Sort of.

Music for winter misery:
All That I Want - The Weepies
Cold December - Matt Costa
Sister Winter - Sufjan Stevens