Someone asked me how much snow it takes to shut down northeastern Alabama. On January 23, the Great Alabama Snowfall of 2003, the answer was, this much. (What you hear in the background are my snow-blasé Yankee friends laughing their heads off.) Yes, this is the snowfall that provoked the messy detour to Atlanta that became the entry The McDonald's at 51a.

Hey, but this snowfall had big pointy teeth! Really! Grr!

(You aren't scared, are you? Oh, well. I had to try.)The photo's a bit misleading. While there wasn't much snow to speak of, many places saw freezing rain fall before the snow did, thus blanketing the roads with first black ice, then just enough snow to hide the ice. Bad mojo there.

For approximately five minutes, the cats were horrified. They spent the rest of the morning being mightily unimpressed. (Snow, yawn, seen that - excuse me; I'm overdue for my ten a.m. grooming session...)

The cats had the right of it; as my mother would say, they took the unusual cold (below-zero windchills! single-digit temperatures! in Alabama!) as an excuse to choose up sides and take a nap. Mind you, these are cats; they're highly trained and skilled professionals.

You shouldn't expect to be able to do this sort of thing at home. (I don't know about the rest of you, but I think my back would splinter into tiny shards if I tried that pose.)

It was tempting to join them, but oh, I had coding to do. I teased them a bit and both of them woke up. Tenzing opted for garden-variety cuteness, but Edmund was more proactive and tried to eat the camera before it ate him.

I left them alone, hoping they'd go back to sleep. True, I love them dearly, but they are some of the worst coding distractions I've ever known. Edmund always seems to need belly scritchies in a bad, desperate way when I'm in the middle of debugging, or Tenzing feels the need to chase my mouse pointer on-screen.

Snow day or not, I think they'll just be happy when I finally bring Quarto to version 1.0. It means I'll spend less time staring at this annoying beige box (and playing annoyingly loud music while I code) and much more time doing what I'm supposed to do - provide endless, worshipful adoration.

** This entry has been this week's blatant excuse for dumping photos off my digital camera. Please dispose of snacks, drinks, and any other waste material as you exit the theatre, and please cross your fingers and hope that the forthcoming vacation photos will be far more interesting. **