During the day yesterday there was a freezing rain which made many roads slick. It took 90 minutes for us to get home from school because Route 10 was closed due to downed power lines, so everybody had to merge onto Route 46 (which we took because of fear that Route 80 might be dangerous with so many trucks and speeding drivers on an icy road). Meanwhile, A.H. was driving four hours to New Hampshire for a weekend of snowboarding. I hope she had no trouble getting there!

This is Super-Bowl weekend, and nothing else seems to matter in the public consciousness. I don’t normally watched the four-hour extravaganza since I have little interest in actually watching sports (except as an excuse to read magazines or grade papers), although this year the game is a bit more interesting since the Giants are playing and Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers are the halftime show.

After an entire month I have not bought a single science fiction book yet this year, although I do have two books on order, Gardner Dozois’ Galactic Empires from SFBC and C.L. Moore’s Northwest Smith from Amazon.com. I read two books in January, so as along as my reading pace stays ahead of my buying pace, I should be able to cut down the 124 books I have waiting to be read.

The presidential primary season is moving into “Super-Tuesday” when both races should simplify considerably. Right now there are only two serious candidates remaining in each party, John McCain and Mitt Romney for the Republicans, and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Democrats. While there is a serious anti-Bush backlash in this country which should favor the Democratic candidate in November, the fact that the two Democratic leading candidates are a black and a woman might mean we will have another Republican president next year. That is the problem with the primary system in which devout party members nominate the presidential candidates, while the majority of voters do not belong to either party.