The Snow is Snowing...

...And The Mister, the dog, and I are weathering the storm rather nicely. For once the Experts Meteorological if anything underestimated the extent of colorful weather in store for us, so our decision to treat this Sunday as a sort of belated holiday turns out to have been an extremely sensible one. Yay, us.

We didn't manage to cook our usual Thanksgiving/Christmas meal this year—apathetic for the former holiday, and too engaged with houseguests for the latter (I do adore My Dear Sister, her wife, and their dog, but their four-night stay at Out Little Condo was definitely... all-consuming). So when this morning I awoke to the scene above (well, five floors down), I had a pang of smugness knowing that there was a turkey in the future, not to mention the inevitable corn pudding, port wine salad, and other fixings, not least among them a nice bottle of our favorite festive tipple, an Australian sparkling shiraz.

I will have to report in on the turkey, however, as it seems that in purchasing the only whole one available in our usually well-stocked local supermarket, I seem to have bought some kind of frozen, pre-cooked FrankenBird.  We're apparently meant to keep it in its bag and pop it into the oven, still frozen, for three hours or so. The Mister, whose technique for brining and preparing a turkey is baroque in the extreme, is highly dubious, but if worst comes to worst I suppose we can turn the result into a series of casseroles.

The supermarket was, in its (weak) defense, a madhouse yesterday given the impending baddish weather. Our Nation's Capital is notable for many things, and high among them this time of year is the level of mounting hysteria displaying by its populace at the least sign of wintriness. Egged on by the radio, television, and newspapers, the locals rise to ever-greater heights of nonsense (to those of us raised up north on the bank of a vast, dark lake of ice), and never more so than in "preparing."

What, I wonder, are people going to do with the heaping piles of frozen vegetables, loaves of bread, gallons of milk, and reams of toilet paper they were desperately acquiring on a fine, clear Saturday afternoon? Answer, as the dear Provincial Lady was wont to observe, comes there none.

In furlough news, well, things remain annoying. My Viennese jaunt is off, and if it goes on a few days more, my next class will also be cancelled, leaving me almost entirely without projects to complete before I go into full retirement-prep mode in early March.  There is something in this nebulous, uncertain state that makes any form of useful concentration nearly impossible, but I have at least significantly upped my gym time (much needed) and maxed out on cooking. With today's feast over, we're going to have to spend much of this week eating not cooking at all, as the fridge is as stuffed as I suspect we be by about 6:45 this evening.

Beyond being a snowy Sunday, it's one that I think must have attached to it a certain powerful juju, as it's the birthday of a nice little group of stellar favorites, including our dear Kay Francis, the Café's patron saint; the indomitable Sophie Tucker; terpsichorean goddess Gwen Verdon; and two of the '70s great crazy-pansy uncles, both Charles Nelson Reilly and Rip Taylor.

To see us out, why we don't we pop in on Ed Sullivan and enjoy a little late-period Soph? She's got a useful message for us as we totter into 2019, I think...