Mid-Afternoon Yesterday

Chicago will be digging out for a while, but yesterday around noon, the storm was completely gone.

Snowmaggedon

Our little house. . . Can't wait to get rid of those two crazy trees. . .

and L.P. looooooooooovees this weather. I let him out of the yard and he super geeked out on getting to run in places he doesn't usually get to go off leash. Pretty fun.

Snowtorious B.I.G.

Yesterday, all Chicagoans--maybe during their early commutes home--seemed to be competing to come up with the best name of the impending blizzard. The title of this post was my favorite, but others included: snowgasm, snowpocalypse, snO.M.G, Blizzaster, "Snow you di'int!", snowverkill, snowmaggedon, Snobel Prize. . . you get the picture.

Chicagoans usually laugh in the face of snow. We don't take it very seriously. . . we scoff at southern towns that screech to a halt and make mad stampedes on the Piggly Wiggly for a dusting of a few inches. We're hardy folks up here and are offended by the notion of taking snow days.

But this time is different. This is a bona fide blizzard. Impossible to measure the snowfall because it blew around in 60 mph winds last night, so that in some spots, the snow is 2" deep, but the drift right next to that is 4 feet tall. Everything is closed today as far as I can tell--schools, colleges, businesses. It's a mess out there.

2 PM on Tuesday--no blizzard in sight yet, but I was still sent home early from work. That was maybe the oddest thing about yesterday. . . a town that usually mocks snow and weather, took the blizzard really seriously and cleared out of the city before the heaviest snow had even started. The folks who got stuck on Lake Shore Drive later in the evening were either idiots or had terrible bosses who made them stay later than they should have.

Took a while for the blizzard to ramp up. Tiny snow filled the air, but the most impressive thing was the wind and the lightning/thundersnow. Accumulation was slow. Before going to bed, after 8 hours of blizzard, L.P. was only up to his knees in the snow.

by morning, though, it was clear that the blizzard had continued its work overnight.

for folks unfamiliar with my house. . . this snow covered bush is about 4.5 feet tall. The snow is adding another 12" to its height, which means the snow drift around it is about 4 feet high. Dan has to shovel that some time today.

and it's still snowing as of 9:30 AM.

This final picture just to give you a sense of the kind of wind involved in this blizzard. This is a picture of snow lodged in the southwest corner of our front porch. Snow rarely even gets on the floor of the porch, much less lodged into the most protected ceiling corner. But how do you measure snowfall if some decent portion of it is stuck to walls and windows and doors?

The Cold Isn't Joking Around

The last few days, the temps in Chicago haven't gotten much above 10 with wind chills of about -25 degrees. Ridiculous.

Needless to say that when you get up at the crack of dawn to go to work and see this. . .


it's hard not to crawl right back into bed and snuggle up in down comforters with a big cup of tea, a good book and warm wiggling dog.


The one upside is that some things do become more beautiful. . . like the window of our usually pretty non-descript back door.

I would like to take the remaining cold days of the year off from work to stay home and make things and watch the snow fall from the safety of my toasty warm house.

Happy New Year

the customary New Years brunch in the Stewart/Phillips household.
homemade danish puff pastry, eggs, sausage, orange juice, tea or coffee.

I love New Years. My husband and I are both patently bad at the partying part of New Year's Eve, but I love the fresh feeling of a new year. It's a time to begin again. To cuddle into the couch and look through the last year's worth of magazines to figure out what needs to be kept and what needs to be recycled. To make plans and dream about what the new year will bring.

And this year, I have decided to give up on resolutions and have traded them in for a list of projects that I hope to complete in 2011. I'm not likely to change any of my entrenched bad behavior, but I do like to check tasks off lists. So I'm hoping that I really will re-paint the dining room and swap out a few light fixtures in the house and come up with a fabric design and finally use the beautiful felt I've had in storage for two years in 2011.

I've already cleaned my office and kept it clean for a whole week. So, I think there's hope.

Happy New Year!

Snowy Day

So, obviously, nothing at all to compare to my friends on the East Coast. President Obama has had to wade through far more snow to get to work than us folks in Chicago. But I have fourteen inches of snow in my backyard.

On Wednesday morning, we were awakened at 4 AM by an earthquake--so we're one up on the president in that regard. Luckily, it was a mild earthquake--somewhere in the 3.8 to 4.0 scale--so there's no way to prove its having happened in pictures.

Trying not to Hang Around the House

Sometimes, the most difficult thing to convince ourselves of in Chicago, in the midst of January (or February. . . or even March), is that our lives could be improved by leaving the house. With high temps of 14 degrees and evening windchill factors of -20 and giant piles of snow that get grayer and grosser by the day, convincing friends or husbands or ourselves that anything outside our front doors could have much in the way to recommend itself gets tougher and tougher the deeper into winter we get.

But good stuff is out there, and the layers of clothes you need to put on to get to those things with minimal pain is worth it.

For example, Friday night, we went to go see our buddy Amber in her 80's/90's/aught's cover band, the Xylenes at McDunna's. And they rocked and the room was warm and dark and the windows were all steamed up and swirling into icy patterns all adding up to a very specific homey feel in a non-home space that I think only happens in coffee houses and bars at night during winter at latitude 41 degrees North and above.


This is not Amber. This is the cool accordionist for the Xylenes whose accordion may be one of the most beautiful I've ever seen. But behind and to the right of the Accordioniest? Amber's hand on the neck of her bass. She plays bass. . . so she's super cool and never shows up in pictures.

And we followed good music with cheap burritos across the street--a habit I think no one in Chicago is too proud or fancy to take part in.

And then, Saturday, we took the fabulous Jill Huntsberger (still in the thick of outfitting her new swanky pad) on a field trip to Ikea and then Mitsuwa (Asian Grocery/cool Asian stuff place/tasty Asian food court awesomeness).

Mitsuwa is worth the cold and the drive. A cavalcade of:

Gorgeous foods that you either photograph intheir pretty rows,

or that gets held up and shown off to you by your husband

or your friend

exclaming "how cute" or "how delicious" or "how weird is this?"

or whose packaging you can't believe in all of its unbearadorableness. . .

Heaven must (oh please oh please oh please) be a little bit like this place, except everything's free and I would instantly know what it was all for without having to look it up in a dictionary of Asian condiments.

But seriously, this is their "Help Wanted" sign. Even that's cute!

Had we stayed at home, we would have seen none of this. . . plus, Dan and I wouldn't be eating homemade Chicken Laksa tonight. . . Lemongrass doesn't grow out of the couch cushions, after all.

In a weekend or two, expect pictures of Dan and I and LP braving a walk at the Indiana Dunes next to the frozen lake. That takes preparation and serious girding in the loin region. But we're doing that, too! BBRrrrrrrrrr!

Butternut Squash Soup

Last night, I

decided not to fight against the cold weather anymore. We're still in the thick of winter and there's nothing I can do about it.

And I have had a Butternut squash in the pantry since the last farmer's market in late September of last year. Ah, the wonder of root vegetables and gourds.

So, I cut that bad boy up and then made a pretty fabulous creamy squash soup without using a recipe. Lots of ginger and paprika. . . some bacon (because seriously? if you start with bacon, you can't go wrong after that). And partnered with a yummy mixed greens, blue cheese, vinagrettey salad. . . that just might have included candied walnuts.

It tasted like winter food and it was yummy and waking to snow this morning was a little less sad.