I'm so jealous of all of you in New York and Boston who got piles and piles of snow this weekend. During the entire five years I lived in New York we never once had one of those big, shut-the-entire-city-down storms. I first visited NYC in 1996, a day or two after a giant snowstorm. Then while I lived there I got to see a few storms that left a few inches and reminded me of how gorgeous the city could be when you could walk unimpeded down the center of 7th Ave. But there was never a huge snowstorm, until, of course, the winter of 2002, 6 months after I had left the city for Champaign-Urbana. Yesterday, while the East Coast was blanketed in fluffy cold, we got a powdered sugar-style dusting, and it still made me say to the Aussie that this was the only way winter should be. Maybe it was growing up in Texas where we never got much of anything snow-wise, but to this day it makes me happy like few other things during these long winter months.

I'm not envying you today, as the shovelling and the melting and the grey slush starts, though.

In other news, I've spent the morning watching a little ongoing drama at my apartment building. When I came home last night the car that has the space to the left of me (and who's been driving me nuts for months with their inability to park at the same angle eveyone else does, thereby making it harder to fit everyone's cars in the lot) was parked in the spot to the right of me, instead of the spot they pay for. This morning I woke up around 7:30 to cursing and honking from the occupied spot's actual owner who now had nowehere but the street to park his car. I think boys worry less about being confrontational, because, where I might have put a note on the usuper's car and fumed about it until he moved it, the guy who's spot was taken promptly called the towing company and I woke up again around 8 to the sound of a tow truck idling outside my window and the offending neighbor's car disappearing to the impound lot. The rightful owner of the space is now parked in it, but as far as I can tell hasn't left a note, so I wonder if the guy whose car was towed will realize what happened, or if he'll just freak out and think someone stole his car. Maybe when he gets it back he'll learn to park the right way like everyone else. Yeah, I know. I think it's time for me to stop living in housing with undergrads, because it's making me feel like their mom. "Now sonny, maybe that'll learn you to think about how your decisions affect others!"