I was sitting to the right of Geof, enjoying an Over the Rhine concert that he'd talked me into attending, when I saw my silenced phone light up. The number implied Arkansas, and I had the familiar lump of dread that always came when a number starting with 501 showed up on caller ID.

It was my mother, and thanks to the ongoing performance, I had no way of answering it before the phone would go to voice mail. I watched, and waited, and saw no new voicemail notification pop up. No message.

When the musicians took a break, I called my mother back, and Geof was the only witness to the look on my face, whose look he told me later was quite priceless. The news? My mother's engagement.

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At lunchtime, the raindrops were starting to find each other and think about congregating on windshields, and I thought about Chris, out west, half a world and a blizzard away.

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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! Read the rest »

Native, lifelong southerners don't quite know what to make of snow. Snow is, of course, that mystical white stuff that seems to fall in fourteen-foot clumps onto remote places like Buffalo, New York, and the upper peninsula of Michigan. This would be a problem, except that it's a demonstrable fact that nobody (the Abominable Snowman excepted) actually lives in the UP of Michigan.

As for the eighteen people living in Buffalo, New York: you're out of luck. Have fun digging; we'll see you in August. Say hi to the polar bears on your way out, willya?Snow is inconsistent with southerners' natural states of being. We react to it like pampered house cats—when thrown outside amidst the mess, we stand there, shell-shocked, for a few minutes, and then begin twitching our hands uncontrollably to try to shake the cold stuff off. (If you've ever seen a house cat thrown outside in the snow for the first time, you know exactly what motion I'm trying to describe.)

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A joyous season to you, reader. It's good to be home.

I woke up this morning with a maddening snippet of lyric in my head. Somewhere in the last dream I had before wakening, I heard the song phrase, "Every time you walk into the room…" Some quick googling told me that what I was hearing in my head was a snippet of the chorus from Stevie Nicks' "Rooms On Fire."

"Maybe I'm just thinking
that the rooms are all on fire
every time that you walk into the room
there is magic all around you
if I do say so myself
I have known this

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I told Jeff on the way home today that it felt like Tuesday. Most of this week vanished in a combination of sleep and fever. But I have answers now.

Jeff wasn't able to go in to work at his usual time this morning; the truck just wasn't able to make it up the ice-covered hills this morning. So he came home to me sitting in my overly-plush terry bathrobe. We talked. I mentioned that I wasn't sure if I'd be able to make it to the doctor's office because of the ice.

He offered to check my throat to see if he could see anything. In retrospect, it bothers me that neither of us thought to do this sooner. After a couple of mishaps and me nearly gagging on a soup spoon, Jeff says, essentially, "What are these white spots on the back of your throat?"

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