I can't shovel the driveway with this heavy crust of ice because of my faulty back. We have that house, right now...the one in the neighborhood of lovely homes that is the single blight with the unshoveled driveway, ruining the symmetry of suburbia. But seriously, at least half of my neighbors have plow attatchments on their tractors and not one of them noticed our driveway needed to be shoveled and just went ahead and did it? In our old neighborhood, if someone's driveway needed shoveled, Dukeor any of the other neighbors would just go ahead and do it. If you can, why not? It saves someone else the bother of doing it. Yeesh. I mean, the driveways here are obscenely long, so it's not like I would expect anyone else to shovel it by hand, save for us, but if you're so bored that you're plowing the street with your tractor, help a sista out. That's all I'm saying.

On the other hand, I have these fantastic female friends who have offered to pack up their kids and come over to help me shovel. And they all know what a monstrosity our driveway is. When I got the first phone call, I almost started to cry with the sheer generosity of it. The e-mail from another friend just about did me in. Who has friends like that? Friends that in the midst of their own day and their own chores stop and think about you and wonder how you're faring and if there's any way they can make life easier for you. So so amazing. What a blessing. Straight out of a movie.

Mort saw his first icicle yesterday. He was so excited. It's the small moments like that that stop me in my tracks. We cleared off the swing set and slid down the slide into a pile of snow, we threw snowballs at the icicles to knock them down, we went sledding and ran through the ice-crusted yard. There are rabbit tracks frozen across our porch.