Snow again.  Last Thursday's snow, while heavy, was dry.  It fell fast and left 10" where we live, but it has partially melted, and it remains quite lovely--none of the slush on the roads that usually turns snowfalls into ugly, dirty messes.  Mohamed enjoyed a four-day weekend, since Washburn was closed for two days.  Now we're in, it seems, for a second round, this time with freezing rain and blowing winds.  A real Kansas blizzard is forecast (or forecasted, as meteorologists like to say).  An aside: when new verbs enter the language, they are usually made regular, i.e., with -d or -ed endings for the past tense and past participle.  We already had 'cast,' the past forms of which are unchanged: cast, cast, cast.  Should a verb like 'broadcast' or 'forecast' keep the parallel, uninflected form or should it be made regular with the -ed ending?  The language seems up in the air at the moment.  I always thought that the name 'google' was a brilliant choice: it punned on googol for computer nerds, it echoed already existing verbs (google, ogle), and it was easily made regular, unlike 'bing.'  What's the past tense of 'bing': not binged, not bang, not banged.  Bingged?

Until last week's storm, we had a very mild winter--not quite so mild as last year, but a huge improvement on the two horrible previous winters.  Now we're paying the price.  Still, despite how mild it had been, this winter has seemed extremely long.  Christmas and New Year's seem like months and months ago.  I'm ready for spring and being able to read on the back deck and walk from the car to a restaurant without bracing for a slip and fall.

The weekend wasn't great in terms of food.  Friday night, we got a take-n-bake pizza.  I made it through one piece and was turning green at the thought of a second, when Mohamed said I should stop.  Stop I had to as even that one piece wouldn't stay down.  Saturday night, we went out and had a delicate fish and chips, which has always been fine before.  I was prematurely proud that I made it through the meal (well, half the meal, which is much as I eat these days) without an emergency.  But we all know what they say about pride, and I was up many times during the night.   Plus, I had such chills that I ended by sleeping in my hoodie--and downstairs on the couch, since I was sure I was waking Mohamed by leaping out of bed every 30 minutes.

Last night, like "a billion people all over the world," we watched the Oscars.  The ceremony would normally have been called the 85th Annual Academy Awards, but the bigwigs decided that made it sound too old, so the Oscars it was.  Seth MacFarlane, a hero of mine for "Family Guy," but a huge disappointment with "Ted," was much better as a song-and-dance man than as a comedian, a role in which he seemed uncomfortable and with definitely uneven material.  I miss the old days of the 60s and 70s when elegance was out and unpredictable political speeches were in.  Nowadays, the most "content" we get is, for example, when Ben Affleck announces that it doesn't matter if you fall down; what matters is that you get up again.  I waited three hours for that?  The musical numbers were generally fun, and some performances (Barbra Streisand, Jennifer Hudson) were knockouts; the same can't be said for Catherine Zeta-Jones' lip-synched number.  Why do women insist on wearing dresses they can't walk in?  Not just Jennifer Lawrence, who recovered nicely from her fall, but most distractingly Meryl Streep, who kept picking at the back of her dress as if it was stuck.  She finally said that she was standing on it. 

Meanwhile, I've been reading the "Best Short Stories of 2012."  I remember blogging about last year's edition and my general disappointment in the monotonous tone of so many of the stories, especially given the editor's avowed preference for stories that were humorous and stylistically unself-conscious.  This year's editor says essentially the same thing, and I'm still waiting for my first smile.  But there are some wonderful stories, though almost entirely by established and familiar author: Alice Munro again, Nathan Englander, Stephen Millhausen, George Saunders.  I want to be surprised by someone fresh and new.

That was the weekend that was.  Now it seems time to settle in for another round of snow, this time with ice and wind, so perhaps less agreeable than last week's blast.