gratitude – JM Randolph, accidentalstepmom

Hey.

It’s One & Done Sunday.

One picture, and five links that are worth your time.

My last remaining active addiction is sweets. Considering how many bakeries and ice cream shops and donut ice cream shops and crap there are within a three-block radius of my work, I do pretty well. I hold out most of the time. A significant improvement from ten years ago, when I used to have dessert with every meal including breakfast.

But every so often I break.

I snuck out to Donna Bell’s Bake Shop yesterday. This was after my husband and I had dinner between shows, after he had dropped me back off at my stage door and I was saying how I was going to go write or nap or some other bullshit. I knew exactly where I was going.

Donna Bell’s is cool because it’s unpredictable. It’s tiny, they have different selections every day, and sometimes they open late and close early. Sometimes you go and the cases are full and there are no customers. But it’s partly owned by some famous and unusual looking actress with whom I am unfamiliar, so sometimes you go and there are three tour busses full of folks buying them out of cupcakes.

I was hot for a peanut butter cookie-wich. I figured if I went and there was a giant line, or else if they didn’t have the cookie-wiches, then it would be a sign to me and I would leave, empty-handed.

There was no line.

I scanned the case and determined there were, in fact, no cookie-wiches. My eyes laid upon the Pumpkin Pie Bar (with cheesecake strudel). Intriguing, but not what I was after.

I turned to go.

But then The Oak Ridge Boys’ Elvira came on the music system. It’s a song that has been inexplicably stuck in my head this week and I knew it could only mean one thing: God wanted me to have that Pumpkin Pie Bar. He was speaking to me through the Oak Ridge Boys.

God has good taste.

I have the picture to prove it:

Here are your links:

Please don’t tell #5, but there’s a bacon shortage. Here are 25 things that helped cause it.

On the Importance of Saying “Thank You”- Broadside Blog.

In the 1860’s, Timothy O’Sullivan took some amazing frickin’ pictures of the American West, documenting as American government workers explored the western state. Holy crap these are cool! Check out this article in the Daily Mail.

And because it made me happy, another Daily Mail article: Cat Pirates.

This is an excellently written controversial article that came out in The Atlantic in June titled Why Women Still Can’t Have it All. It’s long. Read it. There will be a follow up post on it later.

Happy Sunday.

I may as well get it out there, because you guys are going to find out sooner or later.

The winter storm that hammered the east coast this weekend was all our fault. Perhaps the fault of my family as a whole, or it may be that the blame can be placed squarely on my shoulders.

#1 believes, and the idea is not without merit, that this was God’s way of telling us that we should have taken our Christmas lights down.

She bases this belief on the fact that the giant branch that landed five feet from her head and could have killed her instead took out the gutters, to which the lights were attached.

If you look at the vertical bar in the center of the picture, that’s the gutter. With the Christmas lights. As far as why those lights are still up, that’s another post entirely.

But it may have been me and what I wrote about Winter on Facebook.

crosses — Halloween decorations at the start of the snow

non-crosses — Halloween decorations, plus branches.

I’ll not be taunting Winter in print in the future.

I feel like we’re the luckiest people on the planet. It’s hard to show in the pictures, but we had two giant branches that just missed doing serious damage to the house, not to mention the one that didn’t land on #1.

Besides the gutters, we got our porch pierced:

And that’s it so far. That’s it!

So. Lucky.

The power’s still out. School is cancelled. I just hipped the little ones to the fact that power out days count as snow days. If we go over three snows days, they have to make it up at the end of the school year. Two down so far, and winter hasn’t even begun.

CC got a generator today, thanks to the shop that our shows rent their sound gear from. We now have heat. We got power to the freezer and the fridge before we lost anything. We have the internet back.

I Facebook-bitched about how the county hadn’t even started to clear our street yet- it’s completely blocked by one of the giant branches that didn’t land on my house- and they showed up within fifteen minutes. Never doubt the power of social media.

No school parties, no Halloween parade, and the neighborhood with the best candy and haunted houses behind us is pitch black and deadly with debris and laden branches that continue to fall. But #1 came home from an errand and said that everyone was out on main street, trick-or-treating where all the businesses have power. They went to main street and hit all the houses between here and there while it was still daylight. As soon as they finish hand washing the dinner dishes by candlelight, we’ll eat candy and make s’mores and continue telling spooky stories that may or may not involve the county’s wood chipper (whirring away in front of the house) and wayward children.

Here’s to Halloween miracles.