February 24, 2007
Saturday

It’s just after 11:00 on a Saturday evening. It’s 31°F and cloudy. The wind is out of the west southwest at 5 mph, making the air feel like 25°F.

I had to look that up rather than glance at my sidebar at the Weather Pixie who used to live there. Around 4:30 Thursday morning (I am sometimes driven out of bed early by discomfort due to the very dry air in the house), I decided that the presence of the Weather Pixie did not enhance the look and feel of my site, so I banished her. And broke the blog for the second time in a week. Evidently there is a bug in the new version of the WordPress software that causes the sidebar to disappear if you try to monkey with the code (or, perhaps, if I try to monkey with it). I grabbed another design (which itself has some incompatibilities with the new version) and spent another good deal of a Friday trying to make friends with it. That is more technical information, more meta, than I am comfortable giving, mostly because I don’t understand it. I’m a writer, not a software engineer. I want the blog to work like my car — turn the key and let’s go.

But back to the weather report. We’ve just about dug out from the last storm. The driveway is down to the black macadam and the pile of ice at the curb is down far enough so that I no longer have to use crampons and rappelling gear to retrieve the mail.

Just in time for the next wave. The snow is predicted to start tomorrow morning, change to “wintry mix” during the afternoon, and return to all snow by 10:00 tomorrow night. Accumulation: 1 to 2 inches, or 2 to 4, or 6 to 8 “in the higher elevations.”

Lynn was here today. She got her hair cut and stopped by afterward. Ron wondered why she didn’t find someone to cut her hair in Millersville or Lancaster. I explained that your stylist is something like your doctor or your therapist. You have a relationship, you can’t go to just anyone.

She was here for not quite an hour. We sat at the kitchen table and talked about her heavy academic schedule this semester, her boyfriend woes (a 3-year relationship ended in September and she’s stepped into a dating scene she has little experience of), some news of her high school friends. After she left it occurred to me that she had not been upstairs to her room. It was as if she were visiting a friend’s house instead of her own home.

And maybe she was.