myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume breathes a life of gathering gloom

Tonight I left the house for the second time in the nine days (third time if you count the time I walked out to visit my father's chickens). Only a momentous occasion could drag me out into the wilds of my hometown; in this case, it was the opportunity to have dinner with Katie, who was in town for one day only and so lured me out into the treacherous conditions. It snowed most of the evening, after some truly strange weather; I don't know that I've ever seen a day before in which we had thunderstorms in the morning, a winter weather advisory and a flash flood watch in the afternoon, and snow in the evening.

But Katie was, as always, totally worth it. My family met up with her, her husband, and her father at one of the only restaurants in town, and it was surprisingly packed given how bad the weather was. So we had a good, albeit brief, time catching up with each other. She gave me a lovely picture frame for Christmas, but this was a tease because I'm still waiting to see the photos from her wedding two years ago and hoped that the frame contained one of the photos. I was still appreciative, of course -- and I'm hoping to visit her in Dallas sometime in the next couple of months, so perhaps I'll be able to raid her apartment and find a photo myself.

The rest of the day was fairly uneventful. My brother and I watched a travel show on public television and decided that we should put together a travel show -- either we will do one in which we do reenactments of various historical events in different destinations and play all the characters ourselves, or we will do one in which we pretend to go to various dangerous vacation destinations and hope that no one will be able to call us out on the fact that it was actually filmed in the US. Actually, I think we watched that today -- the days are kind of starting to blend together. But I know that the four of us spent the afternoon playing a couple of ill-fated games of canasta, since we only have three days left before I go back to California :( I'm not ready to leave and I'm not ready to go back to work, but it will be nice to be someplace that doesn't dump ice on you at any given opportunity.

I spent some more quality time with my journal tonight; I'm madly brainstorming Madeleine and Ferguson's story, and right now my ideas are totally outlandish. We'll see if I keep the outlandishness -- but right now I need to go to bed so that I can replenish my 'well of creativity'. Goodnight!