Nasty Weather

Six inches of new snow, early morning to mid-day, and the town and county are out of money so there is no plowing. Everything is closed down. No one can get to work. I field staff calls. Tell everyone to stay home at least until afternoon, sit at the reception desk, read, answer the phone. It's payday, so Trish finally gets to the museum and walks over to the accountant's office for the payroll checks. The only people in the museum all day are Cirque staff to get their checks. Add bursar to my job description. Don't want to be away from the phone, so I walk over to Kroger and get a few things I can microwave and eat during the day. Bumper cars on the roadways. D gets in around 2 in the afternoon to get his check and says even the major county roads are awful. We have a smoke out back and watch cars sliding out of control. The reception desk is so close to the museum art library, I dip in and out all day. Pictures. "But what is a book without pictures? " asked Alice. One of a woman playing a kithera (plucked instrument, proto guitar) from Pompeii. Hiroshige wood-block prints including the lovely "Tree In Rain". Some Persian soft-porn, "Lovers" by Riza-i-Abbasi, beautiful stuff, miniatures. Decide Baroque is mostly an imitative mannered style. Discover that Durer was using water colors quite spectacularly (his "Hare" is incredibly realistic) 300 years before Winslow Homer. And I absolutely love David's (or one of his follower's) "Mlle Du Val Dogne". The light is fantastic. Pegi has a show tomorrow night, weather permiting, so after 8 tonight I walk over to Kroger again and get the makings for a large crock pot of soup. I noticed this morning that they had some Andouille sausage, so I make the largest pot possible of an Andouille, kale, chick pea thing, with chicken stock and chopped chilies. Instead of salt I add a small tin of drained and mashed anchovies. This is really the secret ingredient, if there is one, not at all fishy in the finished soup, but adds a depth of flavor that is pronounced. At home I keep a tube of anchovy paste and add it to almost everything. Sometimes I just eat it on crackers, pretend I'm having a meal. Walking back from that last trip, the roads had been partially melted by traffic, but now had re-frozen as black ice. Every step was treacherous. I'm good with this, it's so much easier than navigating a steep slope in the dark, with a head lamp and a heavy pack. They'd find my body so much sooner, in the Kroger parking lot, than on a hill, far away. Not that it matters. But I'd hate to be like that bloated dead critter on the side of the road that they don't discover until spring. Not my worst fear, but right up there. You live alone, long enough, you ring all the changes. Double round bob.