MotherReader

Looking for love (books) in all the wrong places? Well, I’m sharing three picture books with love themes over at Booklights, in case you need a Valentine’s Day book and ain’t gonna find one now.

Don’t miss the amazing, incredible, ridiculously thorough countdown by Fuse#8 of the Top 100 Children’s Novels, where am I quoted as saying, “Because the joy that the girls had in choosing what to spend a nickel on outweighs most of the excitement I could imagine then or now. It made me crave a dill pickle from the barrel, for goodness’ sakes.” For which book? Go see.

We updated our Snowpocalpyse T-shirts and are digging out from our three feet of total snow. Crazy. I couldn’t help thinking of this particular picture book, so I’d thought I’d share it today:

Terrible Storm
written by Carol Otis Hurst, illustrated by S.D. Schindler
Two grandfathers have been friends since they were kids. They grew up in the same town and survived the same big storm. As they sit on the porch now in their old age, they talk about how terrible the big storm was. As it turned out, the shy man was trapped in with lots of people, while the social man was trapped alone in a barn. It was torture for both of them. Great story with lovely detailed illustrations.

It’s hard to think about blogging when you’re in the middle of a historic snow event. Snowpocalypse! Or as some might say, Snowpocalypse II: Electric Boogaloo. We had two feet in Northern Virginia and spent a lot of the weekend digging out. Schools and the government are closed today, I’m betting on school closed tomorrow, and then another storm comes in on Tuesday afternoon! Craziness.

For those who scoff at our snow totals, you have to understand that the DC Metro area is simply not equipped to handle this amount of snow. While we have no lack of clueless drivers to block the roads, what we don’t have is a good number of snow plows. In fact, in Virginia the residential neighborhoods are contracted out to guys with trucks and a plow stuck on. Not a bad solution for our general six-inch snowfalls, but useless against twenty-four inches of untouched snow, as we noticed yesterday on our own street.

Also let me express annoyance with our general area, in that the official snow totals for Washington, DC, are measured at Reagan National Airport. First of all, the airport is not in the District. It’s in Arlington, across the Potomac. Second, being on the river reduces the snow that accumulates there, so we always get a lower number than practically anywhere else. This area is already often accused of overreacting, and could at least use better supporting statistics than the 17.8 inches recorded at National Airport.

Today we’re hoping for some melting on the streets and our poor fir trees, which look rather bendy. Our white cat is avoiding us now, because she can’t help going outside — in case it’s gotten better out there — which means that we can’t help putting her in the snow, because it’s funny. (Oh c’mon, you’d do it too.) And while I avoided tackling clutter to shovel snow, I now at least need do some laundry and clear a path through the tossed-off snow clothes.

We came, we saw, we designed the T-shirt. Buy one of the many varieties of styles at CafePress.