Snow Cream!

When I was a kid, one of the treats we had occasionally was snow cream: ice cream made from snow, canned milk, sugar, and vanilla extract. Simple but delicious. I haven't had any in several years, but Livia got a big bowl of snow a while ago and mixed up some snow cream. Wonderful stuff! And we have some left over to go in the freezer, too. (After eating a great big bowl of it, I sure am chilled, though.)

Storm of the Century

Of course, the century's pretty young yet.

Yesterday the weather forecast said we might get an inch or two of snow. Right now we have nine inches on the ground and it's still falling. To many of you, that's not much. But this is the second deepest snow I've seen in my lifetime. Yeah, it's pretty, but I still don't like it.

Snow

I'm sure a lot of you have already seen snow this season, but not us. Not until this morning, when big flakes were coming down hard and heavy for a while, covering cars and turning the ground white. December 2 is pretty early for that around here. It's not cold enough to stick on the road, thank goodness, and while I'm not a huge fan of winter weather in general, I have to admit that some snow on the ground and in the trees looks pretty. I'm not longing for it like Bing and his buddies in this clip, though.

Everybody Talks About the Weather . . .

. . . and I'm no exception. We've lived here for almost 29 years, and in all that time I've never seen the road in front of our house flooded -- until today. I had to run some errands this evening. It had already rained a lot the past few days, leaving the ground saturated, but while I was out I got delayed and a new downpour moved in, so that by the time I headed for home I didn't know if I'd be able to get there or not. Obviously I did, but as I told Livia later, if it hadn't been raining so hard and I could have see where I was going, I might have thought twice about driving through some of the places I drove through. I'm only half-joking, too. But I know the roads around here really well, having driven them for so long, and I was able to get through all right. I would have been a little more comfortable in a big pickup, though, rather than a midsize car. Anyway, the rain is supposed to be coming to an end later tonight and we'll dry out this weekend.

The Guards -- Ken Bruen

I didn’t take to Ken Bruen’s fiction when I first tried to read it. I think it took me some time to warm up to his very distinctive style. But once I did, I found myself enjoying his books quite a bit.

In fact, I’ve just gone back and read THE GUARDS, the first book in his Jack Taylor series, which I’d started before and didn’t finish. This time through, I liked it quite a bit. The rhythm of the prose is remarkable, and Bruen has a way of capturing a character with only a few words. True, there’s not much plot, and what there is kind of sprawls around (like real life). But I doubt if many people read Bruen’s novels for the plots, anyway.

I’m coming at these Jack Taylor books out of order, which bothers the obsessive-compulsive in me. The first one I finished was actually the fourth in the series, THE DRAMATIST. But I also have copies of the second and third, THE KILLING OF THE TINKERS and THE MAGDALEN MARTYRS, so at least I can read them in the proper order and then try to keep up with the series from now on.

In other news, I’ve been pushing hard on the writing the past few days and finished up a book yesterday, always a good thing. So I’ll be starting a new one today, also a good thing. Yesterday we had worst dust storm I’ve seen around here in probably thirty years or more. It looked like half of West Texas was blowing past outside. The strong wind (gusts of 60+ mph) also did some minor damage to our roof, so it looks like I’ll be up there hammering on new shingles sometime this week.