snow! hurrah!

finally! we are getting snow today. beautiful, thick white piles in my lawn. best part? it’s a holiday and i don’t have to leave the house if i don’t want to. poor mr. happy stuff… his job doesn’t take this day off.

i think i’ll bake some more homemade bread. i made a very successful loaf on saturday using a barefoot contessa recipe. i’ll make more today and show you all a picture of it.

i also this weekend was asked to judge some high school short stories. a friend of mine teaches creative writing classes and she and another teacher are trying something new where they have the kids submit stories to be judged by outside “experts” (not sure if i really qualify as an expert, but i do have lots of opinions and some creative writing experience and loooootts of reading experience so…. maybe i am an expert!). i was up until 12:30 last night and got through about half the stack. there were a few rather bad ones, but i think i was able to find some element of value in each story. there was an impressive array of variety in the stories. since i don’t know the students, it was hard to judge whether the stories were from their own lives or not (which made it tricky sometimes…. if a straight-laced student writes a story about being a drug dealer is it more creative than a drug dealer who writes a story about being a drug dealer? is it inherently better or worse?). one of the stories featured a swimmer, one a skater, one a gang member, one had strong (very strong) anime/manga overtones… i was pleased that only one story borrowed blatantly from pop culture (an episode of spongebob) which irritated me, but then i reminded myself that someone has to write those terrible serialized picture books that the marketing gurus put out. and, as plotlines go, it wasn’t any worse than normal spongebob stories! other than an unfortunate number of stories cashing in on the shock value of death, rape, blood, murder, etc, (not really surprising. or even all that different than professional stories and films of today) there truly was a nice wide variety of stories. i finished reading them this morning and picked my three favorite. i hope i’m not giving any secrets away if i tell you that one of the top three was one in which two brothers are waiting for the bus and torturing slugs and worms on a rainy day when the older brother punches the younger one in the arm, then convinces him that the slugs had punched him with the logic that “that’s why they’re called slugs, because they slug you!” maybe i only find that hilarious because i’m an older sibling myself. anyway, it was a nice flashback to the drama known as high school.

now to bake some bread.