Cabin Fever

I don't know how people who live in cold climates get along. One week of this snowdiculousness and I'm ready to climb the walls! It doesn't help that I still have a cast on my arm that needs to stay dry, and doesn't make shoveling easy.

Of course, people who live in cold climates have the resources available to deal with this much snow, and most likely would have had their road plowed by now. Or they would have just gotten into their 4 wheel drive vehicle and gone out. Not the case in Maryland.

So we've played Scrabble and Bananagrams and video games. We've emailed and facebooked and tweeted, taken pictures, payed bills, cooked cooked cooked, and laundry laundry laundry. The house is vacuumed and dusted (to an extent), but somehow, the kids' rooms remain a mess. Daniel had a cold and high blood sugar readings, but that subsided after a few days. Nora and Dominic take turns either playing nicely or screaming at each other loud enough to be heard by their cousin in California. We're all antsy.

I do have something to show for a house-bound week -- a couple of excellent gluten free recipes. Roll-out cookies and brownies. They are seriously the best gluten free brownies ever. They are so good, I think I might have to market them. And as fearful as I am of taking great leaps, that's saying something. I have no idea how to follow that path, but am encouraged to take the first steps.

After my road is plowed, that is. Until then, we will eat all the brownies ourselves.

Snowmageddon

The storm has been dubbed Snowmageddon, for threatening multiple feet and its windy, blizzardy nature. But no worries. Snowmageddon all you want! There's chicken stew already made, sitting in the fridge. The diabetes supplies are all stocked up, and I even fought my way through the grocery store yesterday for some and delicious Florida strawberries (but actually to pick up some washing machine soap). Matt's home, too -- yay!! He picked up some red wine just before the heavy snow started falling. The neighbors are already checking in for play dates & get togethers. Life is good.

The powers that be let us off at noon today, but there were so few kids in the class that it was an easy day. Maybe we'll even be off on Monday, my busy day, for a complete bonus.

In Maryland we don't get the February break that school systems in New England get, and it always seems like a looooooong stretch from winter break to spring. Hard to stay focused, short days making for short tempers, and it feels like the school year has gone on for 10 months already. As my friend Leah says, every February she says she's quitting. (I'm sure the students have the same sentiment!)

But this year mother nature has given us a reprieve. Break out the board games and pour the cocoa (or the wine). Thank you, snow. I really needed you.

A few lines from Billy Collins' "Shoveling Snow with Buddha"

But here we are, working our way down the driveway,
one shovelful at a time.
We toss the light powder into the clear air.
We feel the cold mist on our faces.
And with every heave we disappear
and become lost to each other
in these sudden clouds of our own making,
these fountain-bursts of snow.

This is so much better than a sermon in church,
I say out loud, but Buddha keeps on shoveling.
This is the true religion, the religion of snow,
and sunlight and winter geese barking in the sky,
I say, but he is too busy to hear me.

He has thrown himself into shoveling snow
as if it were the purpose of existence,
as if the sign of a perfect life were a clear driveway
you could back the car down easily
and drive off into the vanities of the world
with a broken heater fan and a song on the radio.

cooooookie

Last year's gluten-free roll-out sugar cookies were, well... okay. Not fabulous. I found a recipe that made me happy because it rolled out so easily, yay! But the taste wasn't great. They were made with oil rather than butter, and I blame the oil.

I looked around on the internet for gf roll out cookie recipes, and found a few that looked good. I always look to Gluten Free Gobsmacked, Gluten Free Girl, Living Without Magazine, and a few others. GF Girl and Living Without had a similar recipe, so I gave one or the other of them a try. I can't remember which is which now. The dough is sitting in the fridge right now. It seems a bit too loose to roll out, though. *sigh*

The gluten-filled cookie baking has also started. The pistachio biscotti are cooling on the rack right now, and the dough for the gluten roll out cookies is also cooling. It is quite firm, and will roll out very well. I'll also be making almond biscotti, date balls (we call them Christmas crack, they are so addictive!), and perhaps some gingerbread, if there is time. I also found out that the Italian pignoli cookies, which are soooo yummy, are gluten free! Almond paste, sugar, confectioner's sugar, egg whites, pine nuts. I'd like to make those, too. Like most GF cookies, I think the shelf life is pretty short for these. I wonder if they freeze well...

The roads were clear enough today to get out of the house, and the snow plow cleared our road last night, so I was able to get out to the store. I stopped at Trader Joe's to pick up pistachios and pine nuts, flour and other goodies. They were cooking a baked bread pudding made out of their panettone bread. They added milk, eggs, cinnamon, sugar, vanilla... oh, it was yummy! They were also walking around handing out samples of their fruit filled chocolate truffles. I tried the pomegranite. MMMM.

Then, of course, I had to go to the "regular" grocery store to pick up supplies that were not available at Trader Joes -- gushers, which are Daniel's sugar of choice when his blood sugar goes low, cream cheese, and some spices. And in a few minutes I will go to YET ANOTHER grocery store -- the organic place -- where I can get more xanthan gum and some GF supplies. Wow, it would be so nice to have one store that sold all that stuff!

Okay, time to get the boots back on...

In a few minutes I have to go to the

Contingency Plans

Yesterday it snowed. It also sleeted and rained, sometimes separately, sometimes together! I work at a small private school, and we were inundated with phone calls from our parents, asking if we were closing early. Often we like to take cues from the county public schools. We kept checking their web site to see what they would do. Nothing. Nothing.

This week in the public high schools, the kids were taking mid terms. This is a county that usually closes schools when a snowflake is spotted in the far western corner of the boundary; however, I think they were gritting their teeth yesterday, waiting out the weather because they did NOT want to mess with the mid term schedule. We decided at our school to cancel after school activities and asked parents to pick up all children at the end of the school day so that our after care providers could shut down and make their way home.

Parents started trickling in after lunch to get their kids. I heard stories of accidents, slipping and sliding, trucks turning sideways... I was a little nervous, thinking about my kids on the school buses. I work part time, and get out of work just as Daniel is getting out of school. He's not allowed to use us cell phone during the school day, so after I got out I called Daniel to find out if he was already on his way. I was thinking that I'd rather pick him up this time... but he was on the bus with his friends and they were just starting off. So I headed off to my daughter's middle school & my youngest son's elementary school to get them. The weather kept changing. I drove through bands of snow, sleet, and rain. While waiting in the pick-up line at the elementary school, the precipitation changed back to all snow for a while. The flakes were enormous and heavy. It looked like ostrich feathers were falling from the sky.

When Nora and Dominic returned from sledding, later, they were completely soaked.

The heavy precipitation caused a power outage last night. Daniel had 2 friends over celebrating the end of mid terms. I had just gotten one in a long line of leftover dishes cooked in the microwave when the lights went out. AGH!

Luckily I can still light the gas on the stove when the power is out, so leftovers took a little longer to cook, but not much. We ate by candlelight. After his friends left, Daniel and I played Scrabble. I started wondering how long the outage would go, and thought about generators and whether we should get one. We've thought about getting one on and off for a few years. There have been a few times when we have lost power for a few hours, and once for most of a day. Back then we didn't have medicines to deal with.

How long does the insulin keep in the refrigerator once the power goes out? I know the insulin pens can be stored unrefrigerated, but that's usually after they are opened. What if the power goes out and the temp in the refrigerator slowly goes up? I started thinking about all kinds of natural disasters, and what it must be like to live in a place that is prone to earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, etc., and have diabetes.

I am going to call the companies and find out what they say, and go from there. I think we need to have a back up medicool kit, or something like that at least, just in case. A contingency plan.

Just snow...

It was pretty outside today. On my drive home from work the precipitation switched from snow to sleet to rain and back again. Sometimes all three fell at the same time.

The snowflakes were as large as teacups. They clumped together heavily on the branches, like a bad mascara job.

But with snow, it looks good!

First Real Snow

The first real snow of the season makes me feel like a kid again. There's something magical about the whirls of white, the frosted outline of bare branches.

I scraped up as much as I could of the 1 inch layer that was on the ground this morning for Dominic to make snowballs. We had about 20 minutes to play before the school bus came. More magic: the speed at which your child can eat breakfast when he wants to go out in the snow vs. the speed at which he eats breakfast on a normal school day.

I drove to work carefully.
The magic of the morning faded as I worked my way into traffic.

I think the change in weather came by a bit earlier than expected, and many of the streets were not clear yet. On the way I saw this truck flipped over; we all had to slow down as the police helped the tow truck driver maneuver into place.

The focus on diabetes365 this week is "maintenance." All I could think of this morning was maintaining a safe speed. In traffic, and in dealing with a chronic disease, this message is apropos. With diabetes there are unexpected turns in the road. There are days of smooth sailing, and days when you crash. No matter what, you can't take your eyes off the road or your hands off the wheel when steering through life with this disease, because it never lets up, it never takes a break, it never allows you to pull to the side of the road and sleep.

Roll, baby, roll.