The Blog Break Break

This is what my week started out looking like. For those of you in Canada, you may be laughing that something this benign would completely shut down a city, but for those of us in the south, 20 inches of snow is a lot of snow.

Just ask the 15 inch tall dog.

Had I any sort of foresight, I would have at least gone out a couple times during the storm to clear away a path in front of the house for the poor puppy to pee. You should have seen the look on his face when we opened the door in the morning and shoved him out to empty his bladder and he disappeared. When his head popped above the snow, he gave us those "you've got to be kidding me" eyes.

There were not enough plow trucks in all of Virginia to get rid of that snow fast enough to get everything moving again. And to make it worse, because they couldn't plow it fast enough, the snow near the bottom melted a tad, then refroze when the sun went down, leaving large, tectonic-like plates of two-inch ice.  Like so:

(and why is that photo not centered?? I have no idea. Blogger says it's centered, but clearly they are deluded. I'm convinced there are blogger gremlins... but I digress...)

That's a heck of an ice chunk my husband's holding, eh? We chipped off dozens of these from our driveway in order for our 14 guests for Christmas to not have to slip and slide their way up the 300 foot driveway.  We're so hospitable that way.

Here is Scout looking at us like, "You'll clear the driveway so someone can drive a car up it but not so your dearest pup can pee??"

Yeah. It took a while, but he learned to love it. Just in time for the 10 degree below freezing weather to settle in. So now I stand around seeing how big a cloud I can blow with my breath while he sniffs every flake and climbs every drift.

But life isn't all snow and dog during this blog break. There was Christmas. And lots of family. And some ice skating. And some breathless waiting as people read my book for the first time. I tell you, it's scary sending it out into the world. You have to know, as an author, not everyone will love your book. It's just the subjectiveness of the business. I know this. But when family and close friends with high hopes and expectations buy it, I can't help but really hope at least they like it. 

And so far, unless everyone is lying, the feedback has been amazing. And to top it off with a huge cherry, I've had a few fantastic 5-star reviews on Amazon - and not one of them is related to me!  :)

So while I've not been blogging, I have been cooking turkeys and ham, doing dishes endlessly, chipping ice plates and shoveling snow, housebreaking a puppy and keeping him from chewing everything in the house and digesting his weight worth of kleenexes, mailing out autographed books, calling tow-trucks to pull the truck from the mud, cleaning bathrooms and floors that are constantly being tracked through with snow, entertaining children, running the dryer 24 hours a day to keep everyone stocked in gloves, hats, scarves, snowpants and coats.

And today – reading. In front of a fire. In a quiet house. With the puppy asleep at my feet.

Bliss.