Snow Day

Well, the gods are being kind to me. They are sending me a big blizzard, and there's to be more over the next few days. Dave went to get Lily at noon and said the roads were nasty. A friend at work said it took her friend an hour and a half to do what is typically a half hour trip to Greenfield, the next town after Deerfield, where Lily's school is. Other reports coming in to the office were that the roads were terrible--it took one of my friends two hours to get home to Springfield, typically a half hour--and there was a sense that the snow would pile that much higher and it would be hard to get home and hard to drive on Marian Street and hard to get down my driveway.

Today at work I wasn't sure what to do about leaving, "should I stay or should I go?" Some folks were heading out early, often because the schools let out early and they had to take care of their kids. But by about 1:45, the folks who live in the Hilltowns to the northwest of us, who have good winter cars and were used to driving windy, hilly roads so they know how to drive in this stuff, were still there.

After thinking about it, I decided that being from New York City--and even though I grew up here and lived most of the first 28 years of my life in Massachusetts, I really am from New York City--I just do not know how to drive in this stuff, and I need to honor that. I need not to take unnecessary chances. I figured I'd better go while the going was good. So I left at 2 pm, and yes, it took 10 minutes to clear off the car, it's very powdery, snowy stuff, and a half hour to get home, 3 miles. The roads were very slippery and I never went above 20 and rarely above 15. Thank goodness I was going north; the road going south outside my office was bumper to bumper and not moving.

Here's the weather link for our area. Yahoo! Global warming, begone! This is why I moved here.

So now we have a fire going -- I am really into fires! -- and I am reading my friend Cynthia Fox's book Cell of Cells: The Global Race to Capture and Control the Stem Cell, published last spring to fabulous reviews. Cynthia and I went to high school together, Milton, and she's immensely talented and hard working. It reads really well.

On an entirely different, way-late-to-the-party note:
"Dragostea Din Tei" by O-Zone -- here is their site and here is Wikipedia on them -- a Moldovian group, is a great song and the original, in Romanian, apparently, is a fun video.

The song is also know as "Numa, Numa". Here is a link that has parodies -- I gather Gary Brolsma did the ultimate parody, and keeps doing them.

Here are covers.

And here are the lyrics.