We have a white afternoon, though. The snow has started to fall yet again. It seems like a good afternoon to play with the things the kids bought for themselves, and with the dominoes I bought. Maddie (6) and I will play Draw Dominoes, while Max (3) seeks more kinetic uses for the bones.

I made Fast French Bread using Mark Bittman’s recipe. I found it in How to Cook Everything, so did Heather, a fellow blogger who was kind enough to key in the recipe, and you can find Mark’s blog at the NYT.

For something that took only flour, yeast, salt, and water – and the power I shouldn’t take for granted – the bread was great. By the way, the power was for the oven. I didn’t use a bread machine or food processor, and can’t imagine myself ever using either to make bread. The Zen of Dough is almost as important as the finished product, and the enthusiasm with which my family consumed said product.

Speaking of our own county, sweet home, Montgomery schools are closed for the whole week. That means that schools will have been closed since just after lunch on Friday 5th until Tuesday 16th: Monday is Presidents Day.

Whenever it has snowed this winter – and it’s snowed a lot – Maddie has asked: Is this a blizzard? I think that it finally was on Friday night. The snowbaby we built on Friday afternoon is still visible, but only as the bump he makes under the feet of snow that fell since.

Unlike some of the other people on our street, we didn’t lose power, or have trouble getting a car out or back in to a parking space.

Schools in Moco are closed tomorrow and Tuesday. I am tempted to grumble about the wimpishness of the school closing decisions, but given that Maddie’s school is on one of the streets that lost power, it might have had to stay closed anyway.

That said, I continue to like the county. Max and I went to one of its libraries yesterday for a storytime, and so we are even better stocked with books than usual.

Nate the Great is a favorite in our house. The publisher lists 26 Nate books. We’ve read 4 of them so far.

My favorite, and the most appropriate for today, is the one in which Nate has to follow a snowy trail in order to find his own birthday present. I love the note that Nate leaves for his mother as he embarks on the case.

I am going out
into the cold world to find
something strange. Love.

Nate doesn’t set out to write haiku, but this note trims down nicely to a haiku.

I’m posting this in a new category: Home Entertainment. We will go the Wheaton Mall today, but I can’t bring myself to categorize a trip to a mall about a mile away as DC-area wandering. Not that I feel at home in the mall, but one of the kids needs shoes, we’re almost out of milk – and we’re right out of chips!

One of the things that impresses me is the space, and the use of it. It’s not just that the museum itself is huge, but that a lot of that space is allocated to the very fine store, and very little to food service. The “cafe” is actually a small room with a counter at one end. The tables are outside, the room, where you can see the pillars, fountain, and other features of the building.

The store is so appealing that I caught myself thinking that a USB-powered vacuum cleaner was a good idea. Now I’m looking at the state of this laptop, I may have been right…

This is a good example of a bad snapshot. You have to take my word that it’s a B&Js, so the impact is lost. I leave it here as a warning to myself.

White winter in silver spring continues. Yesterday brought about two inches of snow, and school opening delayed by two hours.