Snow Day...No Way!

Some news...I got a response back from the agent who requested the first three chapters of Seeking Blue. They're going to pass. I guess I'm now officially a member of an exclusive club of authors. I now have something in common with no-names as Ernest Hemingway, Stephen King, John Steinbeck and anyone else who's ever submitted a query or part of a manuscript to a literary agent.

I feel better now.

The backyard

More importantly, yesterday was a snow day for my daughters' school. We got, I don't know, something in the area of 12-15 inches total over the past few days, and the roads were slushy and icy and generally tough to navigate. Even Tanya—who is from New Hampshire and no stranger to being blanketed in snow for months at a time, and a proponent of the "tough-it-out" generation of Northeasterners who believe school goes on unless we're under nuclear attack—said, "I think this might have been a good call. The roads are pretty bad. I would hate for a bus to skid off the road or something."
 

Ella...huh?

We've gone mad! Weekdays are for school, snow or not! These kids need to learn something, dammit! This is America! We're tough, resilient, resolute...we don't back down from terrorists, let alone snow! Are we going to let a little (okay, a lot) snooooow get in the way of an education for our most precious resource?

Sophia...aaahhh!

(Deep breath.)

I love my kids, and I enjoy spending full days with them...mostly in the summer, when bike riding and swimming and hiking under the hot, mood-elevating sunshine are mutually pleasurable activities, and we're not cooped up indoors. I've been battling a sinus infection so rolling around in the accumulating snow didn't seem like a good idea. And it was cold. And frankly, we're so over the winter.

Snow feet

Anyway, I took Ella and Sophia to the gym, made up some kind of cross-fit course where each of us got to pick three different exercises, and did three separate circuits. It was actually fun, and I broke a sweat. Then I played hoops for about 45 minutes, we picked up Sophia's friend Erin, came home, had lunch, and the girls screamed in the basement for about two hours while I did some writing and Tanya read a book. After Erin left, the girls and I played Wii baseball, boxing (I knocked out Sophia with a wicked left hook. She cried.) and guitar hero. While Tanya made dinner, the girls helped me shovel our driveway...well, they helped our neighbor, Erica, a bit more.

All in all, a pretty good day. Snow or not.  I "stand" corrected.

Standing Corrected