One Really Good Reason to Look Forward to Snow

I LOVE SNOW. And here's one really awesome reason why:

Snow Cream

4 Cups fresh powdery snow, more or less

Approx 1/2 Cup heavy cream

1/2 Cup granulated sugar

1/2 teaspoon real vanilla extract

Add snow to plastic bowl; pour in 1/2 cup cream, add sugar and stir gently with plastic spoon. Add vanilla extract, stir again. Do not over-stir. Snow Cream should resemble either fluffy ice cream (add more snow to get this consistency) or a firm milk shake (add more cream for this). After the first addition of all ingredients, adjust snow, sugar and cream to your taste.

Mixture is best when eaten right fresh, right away (yum!) but can be frozen in a tightly covered plastic bowl, for up to 3 days.

The secret to the best Snow Cream? Real vanilla extract plus really, really clean, newfallen snow. Powdered sugar vs. granulated? Half and half, or whipping/heavy cream? Either/or, por favor.

To Ohio

"Absence is not emptiness. It is energy with its own weight and nowhere to go. It's why you always feel what's missing in a photograph, in life, before you see what is actually there". ~ me

We didn't make it back to "my" Ohio this Christmas. My choice and my despair.

So many things have changed there, as they always have when I turn my back on that beautiful place and the faces of the people hurting there.

Bleed with me, by listening to some good people say it better than I can:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-c7ir1K_1Q

Haiti-ing This

We're back and I'm finally through with the jetlag, so what fresh hell is this?

Haiti, Haiti, I am so very sorry.

Get well soon.

Snow Ho Ho

Made it to the 'burgh just ahead of that 20" of snow that hit the Midwest and Southeast, so we started the annual oinkfest just a bit early this year.

To date we have eaten at 5 fast food joints, 3 popular restaurants, 1 campus dive, had pizza and Italian and Chinese take-out, plus eaten at the so-called bistro in this Hyatt Place hotel. Some of this food has been barely edible--The O in Oakland being the one junk food place I will endorse--none of it was presented prettily and all of it was expensive, by Krakow standards. Market District salads and soups, fruit and fresh veggies rock, but we're on the other side of town and too far away for that, now.

Oh, how I long for a roasted chicken and avocado salad, with a goat cheese medallion rolled in sunflower seeds sitting way up on top, like any of the Rynek restauraunts can do. And mmmmmm....that cast iron pot of Casserole Lapine, from Szara. Wait, scratch that. I want to order the planked trout, so crispy and cute with rosemary branches baked inside his tummy and the little Langostino lobster riding his back like a jockey, and the wild mushroom soup, from Miod i Malina.

I know it sounds fancy, but it would cost less than this crap we've been "enjoying" and the leftovers could be eaten the next day, instead of having to be used as doorstops.

The Tortoise and the Hare

At the ISK Winternational Show for the N-3 grades, Boodle played Hare, in The Tortoise and the Hare. He's no Olivier, but he had fun, looked cute and remembered all his lines. He did great singing The Feathered Serpent Song for his Spanish class, too.

His tail is a bath puff pinned on to his bum and his ears were made from an old headband of mine, plus some construction paper and glue, with staples and jewelry wire sandwiched in-between. He had to do a costume change for the Spanish portion, plus throw himself down and "fall asleep" on the stage, so we needed something quick to transform and easy to do in the darkened theatre.

Bravo, Boodle! Daddy would have been so proud.

Weird Science

In trying to keep up with The Big Bang Theory and some jokes my R & D engineer hubby likes to tell, I find myself reading Gaskell's Introduction to Metallurgical Thermodynamics, 2nd Edition.

"Read" is a misnomer here. It's full of math symbols which cannot be understood by normal mortals and anyway, math symbols are a personal pet peeve of mine : they rank number one, ahead of liars and stickers that won't come off glassware. They're the personal playthings of the devil.

In addition to my regular book diet and at holiday time, maybe this is asking too much of me. I have a limited amount of mental capacity in the numbers-related area AND I am also dealing with the Big 3: trying to pack for 3 people, for 3 weeks, for 3 different locations in the US.

I am finished with the Secret Santa/Holiday Market at school, that's true, but there's still the Winternational Show, in which Boodle features as the Hare (of Hare and Tortoise fame), and the IWAK Charity Ball yet to go.

I am a huge BBT fan and an admitted nerd. I love Geeks and have never shied away from a challenge in my life. Okay, so there was that disastrous newsletter and website editor thing I just gave up after only one try...but normally, I just dive into something and carry on. Usually with some degree of success.

But I have my hobbies, hubby has his and never the twain shall meet. Yet I am perfectly willing to slog my way through this brick of a book.

On one condition: If I do, hubby has to knit me a cooter cozy* with his own two hands.


*Thanks for the idea, Dara!

Fat Chance

Nothing like a little ball gown shopping to really throw you for a loop. I don't care how confident you are: this and trying on bathing suits were designed by demons to give you the uglies.

Harsh fluorescent lighting, salesladies thin as brittle twigs, bad 80s music blaring away, winter white skin and my own personal nightmare, curtained-off dressing rooms instead of ones with real doors.

At Bonarka Centrum Handlowy, Krakow's newest mall, my friend and I checked out every store. Nothing that fit, until Peek & Cloppenburg. P&C is a German department store, a little like my late, beloved Lazarus back home. My European dress size turns out to be a 40-42. This is an XL over here, because all Polish women are both beautiful and tiny and I am not surprised to see that they have exactly 3 dresses in this size.

I'm an hourglass, but my bottom half translates to a US size 6. My top? A freakin' 12! Plus, I'm 43 and I've had a baby. A very nice baby, who has now become a very nice 6 year old, but still. My hips don't lie.

While I was trying on these little filmy puffs of nothing, those hips were whispering "Enough! Stop trying to crush us and just be blissed by our magnificence".

I think what I actually heard was the saleslady on the other side of that damned flapping curtain, saying, "I'm sorry. We don't make that in your size."

I ended up with an emerald green thing which will require major bulwark reinforcement from the Army Corps of Engineers in the upper chestal region--or at the very least, the services of a very talented corset maker.

And Thank God or Whoever's Up There for my friend Gosia, who stepped in when I needed her most. Or I'd probably STILL be stuck in that long, purple, asymmetrical-strap number which tripped me, then gouged out a kidney when the zipper got stuck.

Because I don't know the Polish for "I just trapped my panties in this zipper and wedgied myself bald! Get me an ambulance and some vodka, STAT."