I write this sitting in the kitchen sink

(This post was written a little before three o'clock.)

This is strange snow. It's the first real storm of the winter, for which I am thankful, but it's peculiarly out of practice—the slightest shift in the temperature swings snow around to rain, hail to sleet, with less warning than a hawk or a handsaw. In the two hours I spent shoveling, everything from Christmas tinsel flakes to stinging seed-beads of ice to what felt like bucketsful of freezing water fell on me, occasionally within the same fifteen minutes. (And then we had a blackout, which was cold. Fortunately the power just flickered back on, because as much as I love fires, the lack of hot water is not my favorite. I had enough of that in my old apartment.) I started this post with the heavy, swirling, stuck-together flurries that pile up into drifts and snowmen. Now it's thin, dryly sifting slants that hiss on the panes. Oh, never mind, it thickened again. At this point, I wouldn't be surprised at snow locusts.

I should post about all the films I've seen recently, like Powell and Pressburger's The Tales of Hoffmann (1951), which was phantasmagorically weird and which I loved, or the books I'm in the middle of, like Patrick Leigh Fermor's Between the Woods and the Water (1986) and Ian R. MacLeod's The Light Ages (2003), or even about the onion soup that my mother and I are making from scratch. It's Valentine's Day. She makes cards for everyone in our family out of red construction paper and white and pink foil. I had a cherry cordial chocolate for breakfast, which was a definite improvement on the ways I usually wake up. But I have to shovel the driveway again, and in any case there's no internet because it never came back with the lights and the heat. I'll fix that later. The snow is still strange.