Soup Is Not A Finger Food

Snowpocalypse Now

It snowed last weekend. It snowed last night. And today, as the boys (home because school was canceled) trashed the house, they posted a winter storm watch for this weekend. Said "watch" is likely to be upgraded to a warning soon. There is a 400% chance of snow with potential for "paralyzing" accumulations around DC, along the lines of what we had in December.

Crippling I can probably handle. But paralyzing?

Be careful what you wish for.

Is this what it's like to live in Upstate New York, where the lake-effect snows dominate the winter weather? I knew a guy who moved up there with a Pontiac (remember Pontiac?) Firebird, but promptly bought a Chevy Citation to drive in the winter.  (In addition to the Firebird, of course. Chicks don't dig Citations.)

I can see the wisdom of buying a beater car if you're gonna do a lot of snow driving. And this year, we are feeling lucky to own two 4x4s. Normally way overkill, we're certainly putting them to use this year.  But if this snow keeps up and we retain the snowpack, I might have to buy me one of these:

Among its many features, it's "designed for ease in getting in and out and has an "angled back rest for passenger comfort."  I'm sure you agree these are both things worth looking for when choosing a dogsled. I mean, doesn't it look comfy?  Of course I doubt my lard-ass dog could pull it if loaded to its full capacity of one adult and one or two children. Not to mention, that's not even my whole family. We'd have to make two trips. That would probably kill the dog. Which would certainly eliminate that pesky dog-hair tumbleweed problem in my house...

I digress.

All this snow reminds me of the winter of 1996. I was pregnant for the first time with baby Bubta and was closely following all doctor's orders, including to drink lots of milk. (Which may partially explain the 50 pounds I gained that pregnancy. That, and the Wendy's Frostees.) Well,we failed to plan and ran out of milk, and I went into freak-out mode. WHAT IF I CAN'T DRINK MILK FOR TWO DAYS? WHAT ABOUT THE BABY??!

No doubt in an effort to shut me up, Soup Husband Curt strapped on his cross-country skis and a backpack and set off across the back yard, destination the 7-Eleven around the corner, half a mile away. (This was pre-4x4. We had a wee Honda Civic hatchback then, and it was not snow-worthy.) My hero!

Well, he didn't even make it to the street before the deep, heavy snow caused his bindings to break. He left the skis in a snowdrift and continued hiking on over to 7-Eleven and scored the last half-gallon of milk in the joint. On the way back, he had to help some lady who, walking, became stuck in a snowdrift. No, I don't know how that happens, either.

Hopefully, we won't be looking at that scenario again, where the only way to get around is by sled or ski or snoeshoe or foot.  Plus, I'm pretty sure if I did send Curt out for emergency provisions, it would be for a bottle box of red wine instead of a half-gallon of milk. Unless the kids wanted milk, of course.

 

Collectible

While visiting my sister recently, we had occasion to visit a quintessentially-cute small New England town. After browsing the toy store and book store, we entered the wayback machine this really cool shop that was combination antique store and old-fashioned ice cream counter.

Before we even set foot inside, though, I was taken with this gem on the front porch:

It's an old Coke vending machine. Here's another view:

 
Now, it doesn't look that old, does it? I mean, I remember using machines like this. Don't you?  You just deposit your twenty cents in here --

--and go ahead and choose whatever combination of coins works for you. It's flexible.

Then you open the side door and pull your 12-ounce glass bottle of full-on sugary goodness out from right there --

 
--and then you use the bottle opener to pop off the cap.

Oh, wait a minute.

When was the last time you bought a soda for two dimes, a dime and two nickels, or four nickels? One that came in a glass bottle with a crimped-on bottle cap that could only be removed by an opener?  From a machine that didn't dispense "diet" sodas, or 12-ounce cans, or plastic, 16.9-ounce bottles?

Or accept dollar bills for payment?

Yeah. I know.

So I marched inside and said to the nice lady behind the ice cream counter, you know, I remember using Coke machines like that... and it kinda bums me out that you have it out front of your ANTIQUE store! I mean, geez, I know I was born in the 1960s, but... antique??

She looked me straight in the eyes and smiled, and without missing a beat, she replied,

"It's not antique. It's collectible."

Oh.

Collectible, I can live with. But antique? How can anything I remember using or playing with or owning be considered an antique?

Yikes.

And then I ordered a scoop of peppermint ice cream on a sugar cone and ate the whole thing.

The end.

A girl's view from her room

Many of you know I grew up on a farm in rural south-central Pennsylvania. When I was but two years old, my parents left the nice suburban home they had built near Harrisburg and moved to what my mother often characterized as her "Green Acres" move. (Kids, click the link, or just ask your parents. It was a sitcom on television, produced in the late 1960s until 1971, featuring a city couple who move from NYC to a farm in Hooterville [yes, way] into a run-down farmhouse.)

My parents bought a farm that featured a pre-Civil war Georgian-style brick house of a type common in the region. The front door (which we rarely used; who really uses their front door?) had a central hallway with two rooms to the left and two to the right.  As part of the necessary, massive renovations, they changed the floorplan to combine the two rooms to the right into one large living room, ripping out a kitchen in the process.

The central staircase led upstairs to four big bedrooms and one bathroom in the center of the hallway.  My parents spent lots of time and energy redecorating the bedrooms, adding a closet to mine and, in my sister's room, blocking off the back stairwell in order to add an enclosed closet.

My sister and I each had our own big bedrooms, and in that way I was luckier than my older boys are now, for they share one of our three bedrooms. My room was on the road side of the house in a corner, so I had two windows facing the road and one facing in the direction of our barn.

At one point, my parents redid the full front porch and added a separate one at the other entrance, which was an addition to the original farm house. Thus, below my bedroom windows was a tin roof that made the rain sound lovely. Here's a photo of the front of the house when the porch was ripped off, mid-construction. Note, I shot this with my Kodak instamatic and attempted a panorama effect by taking two shots and lining them up in my photo album:

So as you're facing the house, the top two windows to the left of center? That was my room.

I was combing through an old album and noticed these shots, taken on different days but at around the same time.  I was around 10 years olad, I think. I guess I spent a fair amount of time in my room and wasn't opposed to aiming my camera out the windows to capture the view.

The upper left one is looking towards our barn. Our driveway was newly paved. You can see a low, cinderblock structure as you start out the driveway; that was our "incinerator." At my mom's request, it replaced our burn barrel. (In PA they still burn their trash.)

Upper right is looking out the windows on the road side, across to one of our fields (the few rows adjacent to the road was where we grew our sweet corn). I was enthralled by the snow, apparently.

Lower left, I'm looking out towards the barn again. This was probably the same snow storm. You can see our swingset (which we had outgrown by the time this photo was taken) and our giant Buick Limited in the driveway.

Lower right, there's that same Buick (we called it "Mommy's Magic Car" because it had electric everything) parked in the garage across the road from the house. Beyond that? Fields and more fields. It looks like it was late Fall; there's dry corn waiting to be harvested and the trees on the ridges are without leaves.

These are not stunning examples of photography. The colors have long since faded (I attempted to rejeuvenate them with Picnik). But because these pictures represent my view when I was young, I wanted to preserve them.

Ten Years Ago Today: The Millenium Baby, Baby!

DECEMBER 31, 1999.  In the spirit of Prince's hit song and in great anticipation of a very special New Year's Eve, we decided to bring it big with a special millenium-edition party. We invited neighbors and friends and planned to ring in the new year as it reached each country, marking the hour with food and drinks specific to the region of honor.
 
I deep-fried tempura. We busted out the blender. (What really good party doesn't have a blender whipping up icy-sweet drinks?) At some point, a propos of nothing, Curt and another guest set their sights on finishing a bottle of sambuca.  It made perfect sense at the time! I played "Party Like It's 1999" over and over and over and giggled like a loon. We danced! We sang! We drank! We toasted! We bid farewell to the 20th century and welcomed the 21st century!
 
Yet as we prepared to welcome the year 2000, we guarded ourselves, and not just because of the fears that all the world's computers would suddenly stop working, sending the electricity off-grid, darkening traffic signals and causing airplanes to plummet earthward (remember your Y2K shelter?). No, the concern was mainly Curt's. He was employed as communications director at a small, community-based hospital in Washington, DC, and when he left work earlier in the day, he was informed that there was one patient who was in early labor. This was potentially significant because hospitals like to brag about having the year's first baby - and this wasn't just any year - it was THE MILLENIUM. And not just any millenium baby, but the nation's capital's!
 
Curt made note of this fact but, as each sip of Sambuca followed the one before it, quickly shrugged it off. Of all the huge hospitals in and around DC that churn out scores of babies each day, the odds were extremely low that his small hospital would be the one. What were the chances? He did the math -- and another shot of Sambuca.
 
HOWEVER, at two minutes after midnight, the phone rang. The room fell silent.  It was the hospital calling. It seemed that the lady who was in labor had indeed delivered her baby at 12:00:30 a.m. Worse, there was another hospital in the city that was also claiming the honor.  After some back-and-forth and close examination of fetal monitor strips, it was official: Curt's hospital's mother had edged out the other one by a mere 15 seconds!
 
Well, that changed the tone of the festivities dramactically. My besotted husband, stumbled lurched sprung into action. 

This was Big News, the media was all over it. The Washington Post called next, then the Associated Press.  Press releases had to go out, gifts had to be presented and photographs taken.  Curt was due immediately at work, 20 miles away.

Herocially, Curt shaved and showered and poured his drunk ass into a suit. The one sober couple at the party (there was one!) offered to drive Curt, and his car, to the hospital in DC, and leave him his car so that he could get home after the ordeal. 
 
Curt's recollection is how exceedingly hard it was for him to type the press release error-free (thank God for smell spell check). Meanwhile, he joined his wild and crazy hospital IT comrades in the hospital's Y2K Command Center (remember Y2K?) for some roast-beef sandwiches and gallons plenty of coffee.  On TV, they watched midnight ball drops every hour from the central time zone to Anchorage, AK.

Photographers arrived, gifts were presented, the baby was oohed-and-aahed over. Finally...at 5:00 a.m., my now-not-drunk-but-obviously-headed-towards-a-hangover husband trudged in.  He took a brief rest, sobered up, then returned to the hospital later in the afternoon to greet the television media, eager to cover the feel-good story of the day.

The lesson?  That's easy.  Go easy on the Sambuca. Comedy = tragedy + time.  It's hilarious now, but ten years ago? Not so much.

So here's hoping both of you most excellent Soup readers enjoy a wonderful, and significantly less dramatic, entry into the next decade.

After all, this time around, what could possibly go wrong?

Be careful what you wish for...

....because you might just get 21 inches of snow the weekend before Christmas. Now normally, we would have been 100% bonkers-excited about the prospect of a historic snowstorm here, especially because it's been six years since we had any REAL snow accumulation. But it so happened that yesterday was our friends' son's Bar Mitzvah. Two years of planning and it all came down to a winter storm warning for a crippling snowfall, timed perfectly wrong for our friends.

What happened was, they held the service as planned and postponed the party (scheduled for later today). Driving was dicey, even in our 4x4. The service was sparsely attended. Five inches of snow fell while we were inside, making the drive home even more difficult.  And best of all? We got the Suburban stuck halfway up our driveway - it couldn't clear the foot-plus of snow.

Still, it's beautiful outside. It looks like mounds of powdered sugar are covering everything. The sun is shining this morning, highlighting the brilliant whiteness all around. There are some very grateful birds frequenting our bird feeder (which we'll have to refill soon). The world is mostly closed for business: Church services are canceled and I'm sure the malls will have abbreviated hours today. Still, we're venturing out to party like rock stars with our friends. Word is, the Suburban has just been dislodged from its awkward parking spot. It's on like Donkey Kong, people.

Click here for a photographic sampling of our December 19th.