Today is the first snow and ice storm of the winter! Schools are closed, thankfully, since I dread driving on icy roads. To make it worse, I live atop a mountain which gets considerably more snow and ice than surrounding communities, so there are times we have several inches of frozen precipitation while the rest of the county is virtually spring-like. Not this time though.

I can actually use this day off to catch up on work, both schoolwork and estate chores. I spent a few minutes this morning making pea soup in the crockpot (using a delicious ham bone left over from Sunday’s dinner) and I’ll make pizza dough in the bread machine this afternoon. I guess the only downside of this day is at some point Andy and I will be outside shoveling (or snow-blowing if the ice is not too bad) our huge driveway. My poor back... ☺

Currently listening: Time Traveler, the Moody Blues’ boxed set. Their brand of soaring progressive rock was one of the musical highlights of the last 60's through mid-80s, and it is still worth listening to.

Currently reading: The February issue of Locus Magazine is their annual year-in-review issue, and their critics are mostly in agreement that 2006 was not a banner year for novels but an exceptional year for single-author collections. My reading of Stephen Baxter’s Resplendent and Alastair Reynolds’ Galactic North put me in agreement with that latter opinion, although I still hope to read Jeffrey Ford’s The Empire of Ice Cream, which is pretty much their consensus choice for the best collection of the year. Considering how much I loved such Ford stories as “The Empire of Ice Cream” and “The Cosmology of the Wider World”, that should definitely be a collection worth reading.