Mother Nature Hates Me

On Wednesday, Darling Daughter and I spotted the first flowers of spring, *2* snow-drops (little, white, bell-shaped flowers that are the harbingers of spring here and in Sweden) in someone's yard. Thursday, it turned cold and dark. Today, Saturday, we woke to a heavy snowfall. It is still too warm, relatively speaking, for it to stick, so everything was slushy when I ran down to the store around noon. Since we are now guaranteed to neither starve nor freeze to death (yay! tile oven!), I do not plan to move from the house for the rest of the weekend.

[Added about 4 pm—Mother Nature is now taunting me; we're getting alternating clear skies/sunshine and dark gray clouds, but no more snow. Hooray! The snow from this morning has melted off most of the roofs around us. Double hooray!]

I suspect Lovely Husband of a plot to push me over the edge. It is subtle and insidious. This morning he repeatedly said, in a delighted voice: "Look at all the snow!" "It's steadily snowing!" "I love snow!" See the simplicity, the evil?

***

As an aspiring writer, I feel it is my duty to propagate new words as I come across them. In that spirit, here is a bit of new vocabulary (with attributions) for you to enjoy and use:

fantacular (4-year-old niece) – fantastic plus spectacular, I think
stupitude (me) – state of being stupid
a sphincto-cranial event (via John Scalzi) – an instance of head-in-ass syndrome

***

I had a very unproductive week, school-wise. I'm only halfway through my primary source for my paper, and I haven't even begun my analysis. I got a lot of housework and Internet surfing done, though, which I guess you could say is the mental equivalent of staring and drooling.

I admit that one reason I haven't finished reading for my paper is that I have been reading for pleasure. My first choice would be fantasy, but since I've read all my books (1) and the pickin's are slim in English at the library (I'm too cheap to go out and buy books), I have only read one Terry Pratchett novel in that genre. So I turned instead to Jane Austen. I have a copy of Pride and Prejudice at home, so I started by rereading that. Then I read Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park.

I have to say that P&P is still my favorite work by JA, followed now by MP. S&S? Not so much liking there. It was hard to understand, and therefore empathize with, the characters in the first half of the book. I may give it another try before I have to return it. There's still Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion to read, so the order of favorites may still change.

(1) "La chair est triste, hélas! et j'ai lu tous les livres" ["Alas, the flesh is weary, and I have read all the books"]-- Stéphane Mallarmé