Friday afternoon ramblings

It's going on 3pm, and I've just returned back home from a couple of hours of semi-serious grocery shopping ... I say "semi" because it's not like we're going to be snowed in for a couple of months or anything like that but, according to Polimom's "Winter Storm Warning" posted at 7:55 am this morning, we're due to receive our earliest recorded snowfall EVER with some deliriously 'out there' forecasters predicting as much as a 6 inch accumulation.

[Actually, I should have left the house earlier but was having way too much fun playing bridge online.]

I say 'semi' because I took a good bit of time last night to clean out my refrigerator. I threw away a lot of what once had been perfectly good food. I'm simply not eating - in a timely fashion - foods that I have already purchased. I threw away watermelon, strawberries, some cheese and a ton of Yogurt that I didn't think I could trust to eat!

[I have been a very bad girl. Not only am I not taking my daily Calcium requirements, but my regular diet leaves a whole lot to be desired. Good stuff, but not very nutritious.]

Anyway, Friday is one of our two garbage pickup days and - if I don't put it out the night before, it's missed. Boy, you can set your clocks by the garbage people, usually ... 8:30 am on the dot! Not today, however. When I left the house to go shopping a little after noon, all of the trash was still sitting there.

It couldn't have been the weather, not that early! Some folks might be out sick or perhaps a truck was down for repair. By the time I got back, tho, everything had been picked up. In fact, their truck was just leaving our complex when I pulled in to the drive.

I took my ice scraper with me to the store, just in case. Actually, it wasn't a 'real' ice scraper that I put in the car. It was a hard plastic spatula. Does the trick just as well, did you know that? It was snowing very heavily at that time. No wind, so nothing approaching blizzard conditions, but lots of snow coming down nonetheless.

The temperature was hovering right around the freezing mark and I thought, "Goldenrod, you idiot! You left the house too late!!" But, I continued onward. No icing conditions. Not yet, but I wasn't going to be traveling over any bridges, either! They're always the first to cause trouble.

Tonight, now, is going to be a different story. The temperature is expected to dip down into the mid-20's (Fahrenheit). The roads are all wet and will not even beGIN to dry out before ice starts to form. HISD (Houston Independent School District) dismissed early today. I think that's a very good idea. It takes those buses a long time to safely deliver all their charges home.

[My hope was that I could make it back home before one or two of those teenagers who had been dismissed from school early decided they wanted to try a spinout on a slick or possibly icy - even better! - road to impress their friends/girlfriends. And I did, thank goodness.]

It's going on 4pm now. I just took a look outside. It's not snowing, but it's continuing to precipitate. If the temperatures drop as predicted, there'll be **** to pay this evening and throughout the night on the roads in this area. Glad I'm not driving a taxicab, I'll tell you that !

Have decided that this will be a four blanket night. Doesn't that sound just delicious? And speaking of delicious, I want to assure all of you that - as I was shopping and placing foodstuffs in my cart - I paid particular attention to questions such as: How long will that last? Am I really going to eat that?

This would have been a good time to put some chili together, wouldn't it? Three things wrong with that idea, however. 1) I'm absolutely positive that I don't have all the ingredients on hand. 2) I decided I'd already wasted enough time playing bridge online to further delay my getting out of here by finding the recipe, checking to see which ingredients I had and which I didn't, adding to my list, etc. 3) Once you put it all together, it's a several hour slow cooker thingamajig (but a good thingamajig!), so it's really a morning 'do'.

That's it from here for a Friday afternoon, folks. Hope you're doing ok and are looking forward to your weekend. Stay warm!