Happy Valentine's Day II and MORE!

Happy Valentine's Day again! Don't worry I didn't eat more than one chocolate bar, although I did have a number of marshmallows, some angel food cake, chocolate-covered strawberries, whipped cream-covered strawberries, and ice cream.

Ahem.

Speaking of Valentine's Day, what better day is there in the year to play through a book of old "classic" American love songs? Some of them are really quite funny. It seems that sentimentality was pretty popular back in the nineteenth century. Some of my favorites are "I Love You Truly" (the very same song that was sung by Bert and Ernie in "It's a Wonderful Life"), "Just A-Wearyin' For You", "Down By the Old Mill Stream", "In My Merry Oldsmobile" (yes, the book is old), and "Gypsy Love Song." They're all so...so old-fashioned! And funny! Maybe some time I'll try recording a couple of them, but it's too late to do it tonight.

On to other, more modern, less soupy, and probably more interesting subjects. ADBLOCK! I love Adblock. If you have never experienced it, you don't know what you're missing! It's an add-on for the browser Mozzarella Firefox (as it has been recently dubbed by a member of our family who previously called it "Maxamilla Foxfire" but broke that habit), and it lets you right-click on any picture on the web and Adblock it. BOOM! No more ads from THAT website! It's so much fun ("Feeeeel the power!" "Whoa, I feel it!"), and there are hardly ever ads on the websites I visit anymore, at least after I've been blocking things for a while. Life is good again!

My final subject:

The Inaccuracy and Fickleness of Weather Forecasting

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Recently the weather forecasts have been all over the place. First we were going to get a huge huge huge snowstorm. "At LEAST twelve inches, probably even TWO FEET!" cried the meteorologists. But they soon changed their minds: Weather.com declared yesterday that we would get two inches before the precipitation turned into sleet or rain. Fortunately, they were wrong. Then this morning it was "eight inches, or maybe more. Some sleet around noon." Good thing they inserted that little disclaimer: they needed it. We have at least a foot. Oh, and the sleet didn't show up until 2:30, and it lasted about thirty seconds.

The meteorological community managed to keep from being totally wrong with the morning forecast, but they just couldn't stop while they were ahead. "The snow will taper off throughout the evening. It won't end until midnight, but we will get only one to two inches between 4PM and then." They may be right about the midnight part - the snow is coming down quite softly now - but it still is falling pretty steadily, and there is less than half an hour left before February 15th arrives - oh, wait, they just changed it to "light snow until 2AM, with some freezing drizzle." (Maybe it will end at midnight after all!) At any rate, I'm pretty sure we've had more than two inches since four.

I don't want to bash the weather-people; I'm sure they're all very nice, and I assume they do their best to get it right. But as Mrs. Banks would say (or sing), "Although we adore them individually, we agree that as a group they're rather stupid..." :)

Here's how our property looked like around 3:30 or 4:00 this afternoon: