It started snowing last night and we sat in our cozy living room with the fat white flakes drifting past in the dark, lit up from inside the house by the lamp near the window.  It was an idyllic setting.

This morning at 5:30 my cellphone started ringing next to the bed.  I automatically assume any call prior to 7:00 a.m. is an announcement of the death of a loved one, but it turned out that the school was making its automated calls to announce that classes had been cancelled due to the snow.  I got up and staggered to the bathroom, and PC went to the bathroom after I did.  While he was in there, I checked in on Rabbit, who had slid to the foot of her bed and kicked off her covers.

The wind was howling outside the house, and I dragged her back up to the pillow and tucked her in.  While I did that, PC’s phone started going off, and it was HIS turn to receive an automated call from the school.  His ringtone is a sound clip from an old episode of Monte Python, with John Cleese screaming “Don’t stand there gawping! Haven’t you seen the hand of God before?!”  Needless to say, it was a jarring wakeup in the dark house eerily lit with the peachy twilight of snow over streetlamps outside the window blinds.

So yes, there was no school today.  The wind was blowing 25 mph and there was at least five inches of snow, and dangerous windchill.  Rabbit slept until after 8:30 and then she and PC went outside to shovel the driveway and sidewalk.  I stayed indoors and made a few phone calls and watched several episodes of the first season of The West Wing on Netflix (I loved that show and aside from some of the technology, it still shows well for me).

We had quiche for lunch, filled with cheese and bacon and onions.  In the afternoon, Rabbit cleaned her room and PC took apart the entertainment center’s jumble of electronic components, as we are getting ready to mail back our DirecTV equipment in a few days.  Since we are jettisoning cable, we invested in a PlayStation 3 with a Blu-Ray player and Netflix streaming, all of which cost the equivalent of two and a half months of cable.  We thought it was a good trade.

Then, yesterday, PC shocked the daylights out of me by presenting me with an iPad.  My laptop at the office is almost six years old, running Windows Vista, and hopelessly useless to lug along to client meetings.  This iPad is so portable I can take it on appointments, set it up in my office, print from it to my home printer, and have installed numerous educational apps for Rabbit.  I’ll likely bring home the old laptop and install it in a corner of my home office for her to use for simple word processing and online activities.

Finally, Rabbit got a wonderful surprise today in the mail:  a family member had upgraded to a larger-capacity iPod and sent Rabbit their iPod Nano, which we filled with as much music as we could locate on our chaotic and disorganized iTunes.  I lost a lot of music some time back after a hard drive crash but am working on restoring it from my old iPod.

Rabbit spent the afternoon listening to Adele and the Beatles and Led Zeppelin and Stevie Ray Vaughan on her new iPod – she was singing “Rolling in the Deep” to PC earlier today.

Finally, I went to the grocery store as it was Hubbard’s Cupboards around here.  But first, on a hunch, I stopped at our local Dollar Tree store.  My collection of everyday dishware has chipped, broken or been lost to the point that out of a setting for 12, I was left with one bowl, four salad plates, and five coffee cups, only one of which was not chipped.

I found Royal Norfolk brand white porcelain dishes, open stock, for $1 per piece.  I got eight salad plates, eight bowls and eight coffee cups.  I may go back another time for plates, but I still have several white plates.

I got groceries and went home, and we didn’t eat dinner until almost 7:30 p.m.  After dinner, Rabbit and PC read more from The Hobbit and then she retired to bed with her iPod; I settled in with a word puzzle on the iPad, and PC went outside to have a pipe before coming back in to play football on the PS3.  We’re wired, man, and not on coffee.