There are bars on our windows, which seems like a bad thing to some people, but it’s pretty typical for a ground-level apartment in DC. They’re tasteful bars, slender and black, twisted into heart-like swirl shapes where they meet in the middle. I’m sitting here on the couch watching a blizzard pour down, framed by those window bars. Feeling all warm, safe, and fuzzy in the grand scheme of things — my kitchen is full of non-perishable food, so I don’t have to go anywhere I don’t want to.

Purchasing that food at Trader Joe’s last night on my way back from work was CRAZY though. I think everybody in the world (or at least Northern Virginia) had the same great idea to stock up on organic frozen pizzas and meatballs right before the storm. I had to cruise around the super-narrow parking lot forever and then once I actually parked and got in, I barely nabbed the very last of my favorite things. It will be nice to have that food when I get back from Oregon, too, so we don’t have to do a grocery run first thing.

The snow can’t decide which way it wants to fall. It all floats left sometimes, then right, then scatters every which way. It’s thick, however, and constant, and since it started around 10pm last night has deposited at least a foot of itself on the fence and yard and window frame. If our window-box herb garden had any spark of life left yesterday (Brendan stopped tending and watering them when they started dying in the colder weather), that’s been both frozen and suffocated at this point.

I wonder if I’ll make it to work on Monday. The snow is supposed to stop, and it should be sunny and marginally above freezing on both Sunday and Monday, but there is a lot on the ground that needs to get shoveled or melted. It being Christmas week, it’s totally acceptable to work from home on Monday, so I have options. I parked my car on the street and left myself extra room so I could pull straight out, rather than reverse-parallel-parking, which is hard to do in snow. My flight to Oregon is on Tuesday after work, but I have some choices there as well. If I still don’t want to drive out to Virginia at that point I can leave my car here and take the bus out. My original and first-choice plan is to park at work, which is relatively near the airport, and taxi out to Dulles, which gives me a great combination of free parking and not waiting for a bus when I come back.

I am SO excited for Christmas. I’ll be in Oregon from Tuesday to Tuesday, which is a suitably long vacation to settle in. I wasn’t able to make it back for Thanksgiving, so I’m excited to see everybody, it’s been a while. (Just so you don’t feel sorry for me, I ate perfectly good turkey legs and sweet potatoes on Thanksgiving, and the following week we drove up to New York for a huge Friendsgiving dinner with the Vassar crew.) Brendan is already gone to San Francisco for the holidays. He was here in DC alone last year, so it was important for him to get back and be with his family. I guess some people think it’s weird that we’re doing our holidays in different places, but we spend pretty much every other day of the year together. It makes sense to me that we’d each want to see our own families.

That’s all here. I need to do a massive clean-up of the apartment so it’s sparking for our post-holiday return. Nothing worse than having to scrub things after a vacation. Just wanted to let you know that I’m safe and sound in the middle of this blizzard, I still have heat and internet and food and at this point it’s more pretty than anything. It may be a different story on Monday when I have to dig my car out, but for now I’m going to munch on my granola, drink some hot cocoa, and feel all cozy inside my little snow globe of an apartment.