It's snowing hard here--several inches accumulated and more to come. I just got off the phone with my older son, who was supposed to come home from college today and now isn't, which makes the rest of us sad but relieved. Parents do not like to imagine their sons sleeping in the Boston bus station or trapped on the Piscataqua River Bridge in an overturned, ice-coated bus. We prefer to imagine them chortling to episodes of Jersey Shore and drinking grocery-store egg nog from the carton as they kill time in their dorm room.

I'll get back to finishing my chocolate pepper cookies today. They're all baked but now require a chocolate drizzle, which didn't happen yesterday because some male member of my family ate all of the semisweet baking chocolate and then put the empty box back on the shelf, which you'd think he/they would know by now absolutely guarantees that I'm going to screech and flail.

In other events: I have to prod my younger son through his paper on A Tale of Two Cities and piano practicing and laundry sorting, etcetera. I have to deal with a non-draining washing machine. And I have to shovel a lot of snow.

On the bright side, nothing beats driving around at night with a sixteen-year-old boy, both of you admiring the "reindeer farm" Christmas-light setup across the river, both of you singing songs from Rent at the top of your lungs.