Tomorrow

Weather Channel: Low pressure develops off the Mid-Atlantic coast tonight and moves rapidly northeast off the New England coast Monday. Periods of heavy snow are anticipated through the morning hours before the system tapers off to snow showers and flurries for the afternoon and evening. Snow accumulations of 6-10 inches are forecast for much of New England.

Ooh, ooh, snow day! Please?

Fire Engine Red

We bought a fire extinguisher last weekend. Actually, two: one for the apartment and one for my car. This purchase makes me feel very much like a young professional. It's the kind of boring-but- responsible thing I would never have spent thirty bucks on in college.

There's actually already been a fire at our apartment. It happened less than a week after we moved in, back in 2006. See, in my old apartment, the compartment below the (electric) oven was a storage space, so I kept cutting boards and baking pans down there. When we moved to Cambridge, we put the plastic cutting boards right where they'd always gone--in that little drawer below the (gas) oven. Or, as Cambridge Oven likes to call it, the Broiler.

This wasn't a problem at first, because our pilot light was out. When we noticed that the oven wasn't working, we called the super and had him come light it. Unfortunately, I didn't watch him do this, so I didn't realize that he'd just lit a flame in my storage space. What I did notice was that he'd left the cutting boards, placements, and everything else that had been so neatly put away sprawled on the counter. So I bundled them up, tucked them into the broiler, and shut it up tight.

When the fire alarm started blaring, I ran to the kitchen and saw dark streams of smoke pouring from the vents behind the burners. Was I cooking something? I wondered. Pizza? I don't remember cooking pizza. (Oh, the mind.)

I peeked in the oven and saw big orange flames roaring in the broiler below. A few of the cutting boards had caught fire, and there was melted plastic everywhere.

As the 911 operator struggled to understand my address (there was a lot of background noise), I donned oven mitts, grabbed the burning/melting mess, threw it in the sink, and blasted it with cold water. Then I shook a whole box of salt out on the puddle of burning plastic that remained in the drawer, and ran around the apartment opening all the windows wide. When the fire department arrived, one guy said, "Wow, you really got this place aired out!"

Afterward, my friends came over and helped me clean up. It was the first time they'd been over, and I was disappointed with the circumstances. Destroyed in the fire were a cooling rack, three Isaac Mizrahi placemats, a french bread pan that I'd given Stephen for his birthday (sob), and a beloved Silpat (double sob). But. It could have been a lot worse. I mean, an oven is as good a place as most to have a fire, right? It's made to keep hot, hot things contained.

And now I've got a fire extinguisher! Which means it will never, ever happen again.

January Thaw

Ahh. Hello, spring. Okay, I know it's not really spring. But it's so nice outside: mild and breezy. The snow is melting. I could get used to this.

I have a funny wintertime habit, picked up in college, of jealously checking the weather in other cities to see which are warmer or colder than mine. As an undergrad in Central New York, I was convinced that I lived in the coldest place ever invented. The icy wind whipping across campus on February nights took my breath away. I remember walking to a meeting one evening with my roommate and guessing what the temperature was. She thought it was 20 degrees, but it seemed much colder than that to me. Later, we checked the weather and discovered that it was 5 degrees below zero, with a wind chill of -14. Egad! And we were outside in that stuff!

I constantly searched weather.com for the temperature in northern cities, places in Washington and Maine and Alaska, hoping to discover that things could be--and were--worse elsewhere. It sounds ridiculous, but consider: a professor of mine told me that she'd once looked up the temperature at the North Pole, only to find it warmer there than in our little town in CNY.

My fallback was always Barrow, Alaska, northernmost settlement in the U.S. I could almost always count on Barrow to be colder than Hamilton. But, lo! one bitterly cold night in 2005, I turned to Barrow for comfort and found that even the inhabitants of this town, situated 30 degrees of latitude to the north, were warmer than I. I was living in the Land That Warmth Forgot.

Now that I live in a city that enjoys both proximity to the ocean and the heat island effect, I still log on to weather.com occasionally and check up on good ol' Hamilton. And, you know, CNY is almost always ten degrees colder than Boston. Vindication! I wasn't delusional. It really is crazy cold out there.

New England (or at least my corner of it) may be cold in the winter, but it's a more charming kind of cold. It's a cold that brings picturesque snow and maple sap. It's an excuse to go to LLBean and get snowshoes, to sit by a wood stove, to drink hot chocolate with Kahlua. When temperatures go below 20, it's a Big Deal and the weather people start going bonkers. Winter ends in March here, like it's supposed to. Very civilized, don't you think?

A Happy New Year

Oh, hi. Where was I.

Here's the hat my sister knit me for Christmas. She's a whiz with double-pointed needles. The pattern is from a book called Knitting Nature and I think it's modeled after a pine cone. I've worn it a million times already, on the many snowy walks I've taken in the last couple of weeks: with my brother, my sister, my parents, Stephen, Stephen's dog--pretty much anyone who was willing to bundle up and go outside with me. The weather was spectacular at Christmas: sunny days, snowy nights, some foggy afternoons. Now it's bitterly, angrily cold, so cold that the snow has changed texture and sounds dry and glassy when stepped on. But I hear that there's a thaw coming, one that will have us seeing the mid-50s by Wednesday. Can't wait for that. I've been wearing my long underwear all week, and not the usual lycra kind, but the heavy-duty fleece-lined ones.

Anyway, let's talk about Christmas trees.



Here's our little fakey-fake tree. You can't really look directly at it when it's lit; it's like looking into the sun. I love it, though. So sparkly, so irrepressible, so inappropriately dressed for daytime. Quite a contrast to the stately, subdued fir we have in the living room, all little white lights and folky ornaments and faint woodsy smell.

You probably can't see it in that picture, but there's a little line of Santa Lucia dolls parading around the trunk, like so:



Stephen and I made these from a kit before Christmas; we made a second set as a present for my mom. It was so fun in the harried days before break--heavy with homework and shopping and snow--to sit at the kitchen table and paint, sew, and otherwise assemble these. I should make more things. Last winter I tried to crochet a blanket and ended up deciding (when I was 95% done) that I didn't really like it. So now it's in a drawer, waiting for me to decide what to do with it.

Although I didn't want the holidays to end, January is making a good argument for itself right now. Over the last two weeks, I've celebrated Christmas, my birthday and New Year's Eve. They were brilliant and fun and full of food and glitter. But I've eaten a lot of cupcakes, and I feel ready now to start afresh. Clear away the scraps of wrapping paper, take the boxes from Amazon to the recycling shed. Go to the gym. (I got a membership for my birthday, and I'm very excited.) We went to Whole Foods on Thursday and bought tons of veggies. The cupboards are full, and the new year is fat with promise.

Semester's Close

I love this time of year. Last night, when I realized that the weekend was over and I had to go back to work the next day, I didn't even mind. It's quiet at the office because all of the students are either buckled down finishing the last of their finals, or quietly packing up and slipping away home. I share that feeling of relief (finally done!) now that I'm a student again, too--my final paper is all but submitted (ABS), and I had my last class this evening, just watching some PowerPoints. One of the groups that presented last week gave out free toothbrushes to everyone in the class: early Christmas present! I actually do see it that way: I like toothbrushes, and dental hygiene in general. I floss every day, brush morning and night, and sometimes after lunch. And take a multivitamin every morning. These are like religious rituals, the things I do each day to ensure good health and long life and tooth retention.

We finally got our Christmas tree this weekend. Nay, our two trees. We got a real one from the garden center down the road, and a bright silver one from--of all places--Urban Outfitters. I've looked everywhere for just the tree I want, silver or white and kind of sparse, but there was nothing at Target, nothing at the hardware store, I even tried KMart and Macy's and Michael's and some other far-flung places. And then we wandered into UO yesterday and practically tripped over just what I was looking for. I'll try to get some pictures soon.

The real tree is looking a little bare right now as it awaits its gingerbread adornment. I always do gingerbread ornaments. My parents got an artificial tree when I was little, but when I was in high school they started augmenting the big fake tree with a little real one in the kitchen, because my mom missed the nice smell. Since all of our ornaments went on Big Fake, we needed something else to put on Little Real, and I volunteered to make cookie ornaments. I usually just pick one or two shapes for all the cookies. The first year I did Hippos and Hearts. Another time we did all gingerbread men. Last year, when Stephen and I had our own tree for the first time, we made moose-shaped cookies. I think I might go back to hearts this year, for simplicity's sake. Plus, I've been doodling a lot of hearts lately. I don't know what that means, but I have to be careful about it, because you can't just sit in a meeting or class and doodle hearts all over your notebook. People would talk.

Christmas Prep

Whoops. I didn't make pickles after all. Waited too long and the dill went bad. This is what they would have looked like, though. (The picture is from August, but the red and green is festive, no?)

Instead, I made oranges full of cloves. Not for eating, for looking at and smelling--and how! Those things smell fantastic. An orange-and-clove scented breakfast table is just the thing with one's morning bowl of Rice Krispies.

That's pretty much the only decorating we've done for Christmas so far--no tree yet. I really ought to get going on that, because I want two this year, a real one and a fake one. Here's my reasoning: The real one will smell good and look nice. But I like to keep the tree up through January, and that doesn't work so well with a real tree, because it dries out after a couple of weeks and starts shedding needles and posing a fire hazard. And if you miss the two-day window during which Public Works will truck it away, you must dispose of the thing in a sneaky fashion, as we did last year by cutting it up and hiding it in garbage bags. Lots of drama and intrigue.

So the plan this year is to enjoy the real one until the pick-up deadline, then bask in the glow of the fake one for the rest of the Christmas season (which, as far as I'm concerned, ends a month after the holiday--else how could I get through the long, dark chill of January?)

But not just any fake tree will do. Just as I dislike vegetarian food that pretends to be meat (faux grill-marked Boca Burgers, I'm looking at you), I don't like fake trees that try to look real. If I'm going fake, I'm going fake all the way. Right now, I'm thinking something silver or white. I haven't found just the right one yet, but I know it's out there. The hunt is on!

Cupcake Overload

It was Stephen's birthday last week, so we have a lot of leftover cupcakes sitting around the house now. Why doesn't Betty Crocker make half-batches of cake mix? You can't help but make two dozen. I've been eating them for breakfast and for dessert, but we've still got about 10 left in the fridge. It's funny how breakfast and dessert foods are so similar--not bacon and eggs, I know, but danishes and donuts would feel just as right after dinner as they do first thing in the morning. Moreso, even. Or they should, but people would probably think it wrong to serve muffins for dessert. But what is the Muffin, after all, if not Cupcake's unadorned cousin with pretensions of nutritiousness?

Sometimes I try to imagine what visitors who have never experienced American/Western cuisine find strange about our food. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches probably seem kind of gross. (Peanuts processed into a fatty spread? Combined with gelatinous berry goo? Sandwiched between slices of bread? Yum.) And cereal with milk. ("It's like a soup, served cold. With two ingredients--milk and bits of dry cooked grains.") And hot dogs. Even we don't like to think too much about hot dogs.

Anyway, so now Stephen's a year older, and we've got all these cupcakes in the fridge. Our Fair City received a blast of frigid arctic air this weekend, but the radiators are keeping drafts at bay, and the garden center down the street is selling Christmas trees. Midnight Madness is this Thursday. Oh, and I bought pickling supplies! So I'm planning to make some homemade pickles today. Those will go nicely with the cupcakes, I'm sure.