It has been a helluva a week or two here in Candyland, Illinois. As you can see, the snow and ice(ing) are just clinging to the eaves. That shiny silver stuff on the ground is actually black ice, so watch it Erlene the mail carrier! Salt is not to be found this time of year and it just about eats away all of the gumdrops anywho. Also,in preparation for this shite weather we’ve had to seal up the place pretty tight, so windows and doors have been spackled over with extra batter, and as you can probably tell, there’s no satellite or power cables on the roof anymore due to high winds. Yep, we lost a number of shingles too…probably because the roofers we hired were very half-assed about the job to begin with. Seemed like all they wanted to do at the time was watch Spongebob. Heck, we don’t even have gutters anymore thanks to that large goblin who nibbles on our house and home at 2am every night. So watch out for falling icicles when you visit to bring us our stockings full of cheer, Santa!

Seriously though, it is cold in the Midwest. The winds are blowing sideways and powdery snow is beginning to drift. Good friends lost power and heat for part of the day. The trees were swaying ominously. I was starting to picture a holiday of blackouts and huddling under quilts nibbling on cold drygoods. It really has been 2 weeks of awful stuff happening in Chitown for us, which I will spare you the details of because friends have already been blessed with lengthy diatribes from me on it and the rest of you can consider yourselves busy enough this time of year.

At first, the power outage seemed like a huge domino at what I hoped was the end of a chain of falling dominoes. Then I visited Summer’s new updated blog and got her perspective on all of the weather issues and it really woke me up to how your perception of things really matters more than the things themselves a lot of time. Sure, I knew all of that intellectually, but to actually KNOW it is priceless. Boy, did I need a little rattling out of the previous perception, so thanks Summer and mother nature!