French Toast Alert Has Expired

It snowed on Thursday. And life has been busy ever since.

In St. Louis, the night before it's supposed to snow, it is tradition to rush in a panic to the supermarket and buy all the milk, bread, and eggs you can fit in your cart. Hence, French Toast Alert. It's so sad, really. One time in my lifetime we've been snowed in longer than a day, back in January '82. Once. And yes, there are heroic stories of folks taking children's sleds to the grocery stores for their neighbors during that snow. There was also, winter of '06 or early '07, an ice storm that knocked power out for several days for some people I know. But seriously, St. Louisans, it makes us look like fools, as if we can't survive one or two days without fresh milk, bread, eggs.

I had milk, bread, and eggs. So on Thursday morning, when we awoke to a nice little dusting, the first snow of the season, I made French Toast.
That's a pumpkin seed cranberry bread. And my last few bites after the girls made a mess of the table on their way to school. We had school, which was good, but Jake didn't make it to work. He turned around after about a mile on the black-ice covered highway and worked from home. It snowed throughout the day. Cold enough that Billy wasn't so thrilled about even walking in it dressed in boots and snowpants and coat and hat and mittens. So I brought snow inside.
Friday was cold. I was having friends over for dinner: the other mary, Maloki, Rob, and Janet. A little into the afternoon, the other mary called me to tell me she was sick and didn't want to expose my kids. Having just gotten Daisy through a double ear infection that made her vomit 15 times in 24 hours, I thanked her. Maloki (pronounced Malachi, and it isn't his real name but has been a nickname since college because he resembles Malachi from Children of the Corn. I've never seen the movie. Mal has red hair and dresses in black), anyway, Maloki doesn't have a car so I was putting on my coat to go pick him up when Ann called.

Ann was in New York at Vogue Knitting Live and had gone to PurlSoho, a store we drool over online. This is the only part of the trip that made me jealous--I mean, trips are fun, but going to PurlSoho was the only part that got to me. I thought she was calling to tell me all about it. And I thought, "Seriously, Ann? Can't the taunting wait?" and picked up the phone.

No.

Ann and I go to coffee every Wednesday with Joan, and oftentimes Emily and Traci join us. We've been going to coffee together, well, I joined them 6 years ago. We knit, solve the world's problems, talk about our kids, you know, adult venting to keep the pressure off. Ann wasn't calling to brag. Ann was calling because Joan had a stroke. Joan's husband had called her in a panic, looking for a place for his teenaged son to stay while he followed the ambulance to the hospital. In New York, Ann wasn't going to be able to do that. So Ann called me, had me call him, and in short order, we had a shy worried teenager joining us for dinner.

Joan is 50. The doctors say she'll make a good recovery--in a year's time--but on Friday night we didn't have any idea. Her son spent most of the evening sitting on our steps in the front hall. Many gestures were made towards him, but he was too much a teenaged boy in a strange place worried about his mother and his future to join us.

Saturday dawned with a girl scout field trip looming. High of 35, heading over to the Chain of Rocks Bridge to see the eagles wintering there. Lightest eagle year yet, since it's been so warm, but we saw some of the local nesting pairs, walked a long way, talked to some Lewis and Clark folks in costume, with a boat and guns and whatnot, and got to touch frozen dead songbirds (this, of course, was the little girls' favorite part of the trip. Daisy picking up the blue jay and asking, "why is his head floppy?" and the department of conservation woman responding, "well, he's starting to thaw out a bit").

Then Sunday Daisy had a reaction to something in church and I brought her home before the Gospel reading--she was puffy and reacting to something at Christmas Eve mass, too, so I wonder about the cleaning supplies. We'll keep trying. I took her out of the pew, down the aisle, and out into the fresh air--she was fine before we got to the car. We still went home.

Yesterday, MLK Day, it was 66 degrees. I cleaned out the rest of the debris from the garden. I finished the treehouse. I dug up a bunch of tigerlily day lilies for their tubers--we're eating them as part of dinner tonight (they are weeds in my back lot and I thin them every few years. Now we eat them, too). Cleaned house, did laundry, helped Daisy ride her bike, worked out (I am faithful to every other day now, since the new year), drank coffee, made chili for supper.

Then this morning, 2:30 a.m., I woke up to thunder. January thunder after a 66 degree day makes me nervous with good reason out here in the midwest. I lay there awake, unable to go back to sleep. I was rewarded soon after with the tornado siren. We live a half block from the fire station, which has a siren. And after Joplin's tornado last year, I don't play around. My girls sleep under the eaves. So Jake went upstairs to wake them. I carried Billy down to the living room and turned on the TV. False alarm, literally, although it was bad to the south of us and the city sirens go off if the county ones do these days. We sat in the living room for about 15 minutes before putting the girls to bed in the guest room and falling back into bed ourselves. I thought I'd been lying there about 20 minutes when the hail started. But no--it was almost 2 hours later and I hadn't really been to sleep. I hate weather at night. During the day, it's so much easier to gauge when to hunker down in the basement. At night things are magnified and distorted.

So 6:30 came early, let me tell you. Jake took the girls to school on his way to work and Billy got up at 8:30. I had a look at his finger, which has some sort of injury that has led to a big red bump between his fingernail bed and the knuckle. It needs looking at. So that's my morning. Hoping for a less eventful week.