The trees look very male-pattern-balding with their crowns just twigs and still all bushy with leaves around the bottom. Bald men with hairy bottoms! It was a very mild week and then a snowstorm came.

SNOW!!! The children exclaimed Saturday morning and quickly put on their snow pants and boots and hats and mitts and then froze their tushes off because it’s unseasonably cold. Usually we get snow as a precursor to rain, so it’s wet and mucky and goes away (unless it doesn’t, hey climate change). This time it basically froze right when it hit the ground so there is powdery snow that doesn’t form a snowball but instead goes poof like an icy dandelion.

All the sidewalks are ice, which is annoying. I can’t run (very long) on ice so my run today was canceled. I’ve been running less since the half marathon anyway but I still need it for my mental health so I’m desperately trying to keep up three runs a week.

Plus I woke up feeling still tired. And I’m freezing. So I’m grumpy.

The sun is out. The sky is blue and the snow sits on the trees like frosting and we’re all healthy. My grumpiness stems entirely from there being an obstacle between me and what I want.

Despite there being no fresh snow today, the early-rising, highly excitable Eli still wanted to go outside and play in yesterday’s snow at 7 am so I had to say, it is -8C and there is nothing to play with. It’s like playing in a gravel pit. It’s like playing in the middle of a skating rink with no skates on. It’s like playing in a walk-in freezer with hunks of last year’s snowballs that you insisted on freezing in ziploc bags.

(Truth: just as I typed this, Eli came in from playing outside, carrying a small snowball. “This is for the freezer,” he said. “I’m going to label it so we don’t think it’s pie crust.” After trying to write on a snowball with a felt pen [hello metaphor] he found a small plastic bag to put the snowball in and now we have 2014 snow in our freezer hooray)

Well, can you make waffles for breakfast, said Eli.
No, I said.
Why not?
I don’t want to.

Arlo came downstairs.

Eli said, I asked if she’d make waffles but she said no. She’s too… [he almost said lazy and then called back a conversation we had a couple weeks ago where I explained that actually that’s an insult] she doesn’t want to.

Nope, I agreed. Don’t feel like it.

Oh, said Arlo.

I ended up making pancakes, later, after I’d had some coffee. Because kids gotta eat. While I was making the pancakes the internet radio station, called Back to the 80s, played a Front 242 song called Welcome to Paradise. It goes like this: HEY POOR. HEY POOR. YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE POOR ANYMORE. JESUS IS HERE. It’s about televangelists. I have never heard a Front 242 song on any radio, let alone an 80s throwback station that usually plays Belinda Carlisle and Falco and the Bangles.

So delighted was I that I left the radio station on for the rest of the day. A few minutes ago, it played Don’t Worry Be Happy by Bobby McFerrin, a song I have managed to tune out for most of my life. It was on the Cocktail soundtrack and I loved Cocktail and its soundtrack but that track was not my favourite. Today I actually paid attention to it.

“Put a smile on that face!” he says. “It will soon pass, whatever it is!” he says.

Wow did I ever want to go to Bobby McFerrin’s house and punch him in the nose. But I don’t really want to go out. Instead I am feeling retroactively very sorry for the people who had personal crises the year that song came out. (I? Was fourteen, and while that was sort of a personal crisis, I’m talking more about the real kind where if you endured it while also having to hear Don’t Worry Be Happy on the radio four thousand times a day it’d make you want to hide your head in a walk in freezer full of snowballs.)

I was going to say it’s awful and annoying like Happy by Pharrell, but then I realized that at least Pharrell is giving us the OPTION to clap along if we want to. We don’t have to. He’s talking about how HE’S happy. He totally has the right to his own happiness just like we have the right to our own sadness.

Here we find two different approaches to cheering up the world at large. Diminishing their feelings by telling them to buck up l’il camper vs. giving them a happy model to follow/clap along with or not.

Maybe I’ll clap along tomorrow. When it’s December.