More snow, and bistro

3340621121_0a6322af85_oWords cannot express the emotions I felt, after a weekend in the 50s, I awoke this morning to see big fat flakes of snow coming down. I keep thinking that I’m used to it, but at heart I’m still a Virginia boy; snow is a rare treat at the beginning of winter and a stupefying chore at the end. I can tell my town is reeling a little bit too; our street wasn’t plowed, a fact I didn’t fully appreciate until I began the descent down the steep hill leading down to Mass Ave. The hill was completely covered in snow turning rapidly to ice, and I had to really jam on the brakes at the top of the hill to keep it a controlled descent.

We’re supposed to get four inches today. Sigh. I guess what they say about March is true.

March has been an insanely busy month for me already, so I was relieved to get a rare night out this weekend. We went back to Petit Robert, which I see I haven’t plugged yet on this blog. If there were ever a perfect combination of Parisian elegance and comfort food, it’s this place. Lisa had beef bourguignon. I started with a plate of mussels, then moved on to calf’s liver with onions and bacon. Let me tell you: it’s moments like these that made Proust a household name. I was instantly five or six and eating liver at my mother’s table, back in the days before cholesterol counting removed it from our diet. It was spectacularly earthy and tender, and I had to make myself stop before I devoured the whole thing; it’s deceptively easy eating, until the last few bites when you suddenly realize how rich it really is.

Now: snow. Sigh. Ah well, I have memories.

Snow days

3128568302_4154995dfa_oWinter sure came in with a roar. I didn’t go to the office on Friday–we had pushed a new release of our software late Thursday night, and I knew that the storms this weekend were going to snarl up traffic Friday afternoon. So I used the snowblower on the driveway Saturday morning–we had about ten or eleven inches from Friday’s snow–and drove into Boston on Saturday for back-to-back Boston Pops holiday concerts.

It wasn’t too bad, since we were in Symphony Hall all day long, and while there was light snow falling all day there wasn’t more than an additional inch of accumulation. The streets were slushy but negotiable. And Symphony Hall looks nice with snow accenting its features.

Then came Sunday. It was already snowing when I got up at 6 with our dogs, and it just kept coming down all day long. By the time it stopped, sometime between 6 and 9 pm, we had gotten another ten inches of snow on top of the ten or eleven that were already there. It was pretty, but pretty deadly too. I got so winded the third time I went out to shovel, in about 15° weather, that I started coughing uncontrollably and had to stop shoveling. Fortunately Lisa was able to clear the rest of the driveway–there had only been two additional inches since the last time I used the snowblower.

And today it’s hard and bright and crisp and a balmy 23° F. Welcome to winter in New England. The days may be shorter but they feel a lot wider, as Charlie Brown once said.