Happy Valentines

Normally Valentine's Day is not my favorite holiday--even as a married woman, when I no longer have to dread the ignomy of being single on a couples' holiday, I still find it a fairly silly, mostly pointless holiday. But today has been rather nice. As you may know, most of the mid-West and New England is being hit by a fairly major storm system--and central PA is no exception. A recent estimate that I saw said that approximately 10 inches of snow has fallen in the last day and a half. It started snowing early yesterday morning and hasn't stopped yet (and isn't predicted to stop until tonight). As a result, we got the first official snow day of the season! All of the area schools have closed, and even Penn State, which tends to be hardier than those educational facilities served by school bus routes, closed until 5 pm today (the library is expected to open then). This didn't affect Dan at all, since he can still trudge through the snow to lab, but I got to spend all day with Andrew instead of going in to the writing center.

I'm not sure Andrew knows what to make of all this snow. I tried to take him out, just to get a break from the monotony of being stuck indoors (we're not going anywhere soon--there's nearly two feet of snow behind our car, courtesy of the snow plow). I bundled him up in a snow suit, replete with boot, hats, and mittens, to the point where he could hardly stand up. (In fact, when he first had the suit on it overset his balance completely--he lay on the carpet for a few minutes before he could even roll over!). Then, because we don't have a sled (I could kick myself for not buying the 75% off sled I saw a few weeks ago at Target--but I didn't think I'd get a chance to use it this winter!), I had to use a little ingenuity for our walk. I threaded two belts together through the slats in a rectangular laundry basket, and presto! It worked pretty well, except for a tendency to upset anytime Andrew tried to move. He only fell over twice, but the snow in his face definitely did not endear the experience to him! At any rate, we got outside. And we made snow angels. Well, more accurately, I made a snow angel with Andrew, who couldn't figure out what in the heck I was doing, but the movement made him laugh.

And last night was a bonus: because of the inclement weather, Dan didn't go down to Huntington for the mutual activity; instead, he stayed with me! Not, of course, that we did much--after working in separate rooms for a while (me on a class presentation, Dan on some papers), we finished watching a rather odd, but entertaining movie called The Young Visiters (misspelling deliberate), a late Victorian period-piece that was originally written--seriously--by a precocious nine-year-old girl in the late nineteenth-century. This BBC production stars, among others, Hugh Laurie, Jim Broadbent, and Bill Nighy (better known as "Davy Jones" although you won't, of course, recognize him as such!).

Below, you can see Andrew pulling his "sled."


Andrew, in the spider-man chair he got for Valentine's Day. It makes a perfect armchair for the budding intellectual.