It is two below (-19°C) and getting colder, and we are expecting 3-6 inches of snow.
One of the things I often mutter about when Hollywood attempts to do winter weather is that usually you don't get a ton of snow when the temperatures are really cold. (Have I blogged about this pet peeve of mine before? I fear my middle-aged brain is getting repetitive here in year 17 of blogging. Luckily most of my readers are middle-aged too, so maybe you don't remember when I grouse about the same things all over again.)
Maybe I have even told this specific story: I once read a kid's book, set in Pennsylvania or somewhere not far off, in which it got down to twenty below and three feet of snow fell. Except (A) three-foot snowfalls don't happen overnight in Pennsylvania and (B) you're not very likely to get even a one-foot snowfall at twenty below. That's too cold for heavy snow.
***
There's a bunch of stuff I am not-blogging, and it's interfering with my blogging rhythm.
Work is really hard -- really, really hard. It's going okay. I am working a lot of hours. Once I posted about my tendency to monitor fractions of difficult tasks completed. On Tuesday I will be a third of the way through the semester. I don't really want to live a life in which I am counting down the days until the next thing, but sometimes that's how it goes.
***
My sister-in-law is out of the hospital. I appreciate your prayers for her. It's almost the anniversary of my friend David's death. He died with symptoms very much like hers, back when it was shocking and unprecedented for a previously healthy person in his fifties to go from minor annoying symptoms to dead within a few hours, back before we knew there was already community spread in California.
I wonder how many previously healthy people in their 50s have died since then.
***
COVID numbers have been falling here; we're finally back to October levels across all of our metrics. And as much as I want to be a good neighbor, I am feeling the itch to get back to normal or at least normal-er. Yesterday at Mass they added one more musician. The two vocalists and I form the vertices of a roughly equilateral triangle with 12-foot legs, and yesterday our friend Joe played guitar in the middle of the triangle. Earlier in the pandemic I think I might have been skeptical. Higher density! He's closer to the vocalists, who are singing without masks! Don't want Joe to get COVID! But yesterday I was just plain glad to see him, glad to be back in a larger ensemble, glad to be doing something different and familiar at the same time. Playing bass is comfortable enough now that when one of my strings went out of tune during Mass I could work around it without being stressed out about it.
Our parish is distributing individual bags of blessed ashes on Wednesday, so the weirdness does not appear to be over.
A different local parish offers drive-through confession on Friday afternoons. I'm a fan of that particular flavor of weirdness, it turns out.
I'm thinking about going vegetarian for Lent. How about you?
*Maybe* you could get 3' of snow in PA in the mountains. MAYBE. But I doubt it.
My husband said that last semester, they were all excited to Get Back in The Classroom! And See The Students! This semester it's all a grind with no break in sight. I agree, counting down to the next thing is not great but it seems that's where we're at right now. :-/
At least you are at mass -- we're still watching online because I don't know that our church is doing a great job with this (even though our pastor was hospitalized with COVID at Thanksgiving and has since announced his retirement). Most of the parishioners seem to be in the age group that's eligible for vaccines, so maybe we can go back at some point sooner rather than later.
Going vegetarian for Lent: as we tried to plan meals for TWO meatless days this week, we realized that we rarely eat vegetarian and have no idea what to cook. We don't like fish, which vastly compounds the problem. Therefore I applaud you even THINKING about going veggie for Lent!
Hang in there!
Posted by: mary d | February 15, 2021 at 08:20 AM
I thought of you tonight as I received my ashes at a parish in NYC - kneeling at the communion rail, the priest used a cotton ball to apply them to my forehead. My son went to a local parish and they had the drive-by version using a q-tip to dispense.
happy Lent, I suppose.
Posted by: ann | February 17, 2021 at 10:22 PM