Snow and other infirmities

happy snow day.

being that i have less that 24 hours before i'm supposed to leave Boston for the ATL gift market (with wee mcclure in tow), and i have about 18" of snow outside and i'm done packing (for the most part), i thought i would take the time to update our little, neglected blog. and b/c i'm working on my second pot of coffee today and it's this or more snow shoveling b/c whoa have i got energy. oh, and Ash is working from home, with, i might add, just his long johns on. oww oww!

i've been so busy getting everything ready for this show that i haven't really had the time i want to think thoughts on any particular subject beyond reacting like a caveman-uh huh, ugga, wha...? though i started taking time to "think" over the holidays a little more. i've been reading donald miller's "a million miles in a thousand years" and it's been good for me to reflect on the story i'm currently living. what's more, it's good for me to think bigger than my life for a change. especially around this time of year, when i find myself hating life in new england and all this stupid cold (did i mention we are have snow of epic proportions today?), and needing, no, LONGING for change. where do i want to be at the end of the year, personally...even literally? much more than that, where in the bigger story does my story make sense? i'm just asking right now, hoping to see answers flesh themselves out in the days and weeks to come. there are specifics i hope that will happen...very literal and exacting, but the key on that, i guess, is hope. more on that later.

for now, here is a paraphrased selection from a chapter in the aforementioned book: "We get robbed of the glory of life b/c we aren't capable of remembering how we got here....we wake slowly to the world around us...we could easily believe life isn't staggering....at that moment, I felt the way I hope God feels when he writes the world, sitting over planets and placing tiny people in tiny wombs. If I have a hope, it's that God sat over the dark nothing and wrote you and me, specifically, into the story, and put us in it with the sunset and snowrainstorm as though to say, Enjoy your place in my story. The beauty of it means you matter, and you can create within it even as i have created you..."

for now, i'm excited at the prospect of leaving my teething child with her grandmother for a few days, selling some goods, and having an adventure with the amazing Steph (and hopefully forcing helping her deal with some of her learned food aversions - fourth paragraph down).

i thought you might enjoy a few pictures from our snowy morning. these pics are deceivingly "fun" and "beautiful" if you really know what the 6+ month winter is like in Boston, but alas, we have no actual pictures of hell, now do we...?

and as EV would say: "Haddle do!"