Ice Cold

It is freezing here. I know Chicago and many other parts of the U.S. have it much worse right now (check out the pictures on the Chicago Trib website, holy crap that is bad and scary), but here in Austin we are NOT emotionally or physically equipped to handle 18 degree days. Thank goodness it's not supposed to rain or snow any time soon because the whole city kind of loses its mind when there's any amount of frozen water on the ground.

(baby Landon in a light Chicago snow)

Our power went off around 5:30 this morning and by 7 a.m. our house was noticeably cooler. The wind has been really bad (and really LOUD) and that was not helping the freezing temperatures. We called daycare and learned that they had power, so we dressed the kids by flashlight and dropped them off early. I was trying to play up the flashlight adventure to a skeptical Landon, but he was not buying it. He thought the flashlights were cool, but he kept saying things like, "but mommy, if we turn on the big light it's even BRIGHTER!" and "maybe we can turn on the big lights too?!" He'd say this while nodding his head, like that would help convince me to quit it with the puny flashlight shenanigans and turn on the GD lights so he could find his spider man underwear! I mean GOD. Luckily, both kids were in their bright, warm daycare by 7:30 a.m. and I got to monopolize our two working flashlights to try to get ready for work. The mix of bluish LED flashlight on my left with the dim, wide yellow flashlight on my right made for some great makeup lighting.

Our house didn't get power again until 4:00 pm. Much of the state is experiencing rolling black-outs, but we just had a solid black out. For the first time, JP didn't think the working from home thing was such a great deal.

There's ice and snow in Dallas and two very important packages I've been obsessively tracking have been stuck there for 2 days. One of them may or may not be the most beautiful pair of shoes in the whole world, for which a reader, to whom I am forever grateful, sent me a $50 discount code, so I jumped off the cliff and just ordered them already as a birthday/Valentine's Day/I didn't take any unpaid maternity leave present, and I'm so glad I did because 24 hours later they were out of my size and now I desperately want them ON MY FEET but they appear to be very stuck in Mesquite, Texas. Boo to you freezing weather, boo to you.

(our first big snow in Chicago, I was a little excited about the novelty;
this snow didn't keep me from beautiful shoes)

Also, thank you for all your skincare recommendations. I've made a chart by type, number of times recommended, fervor of recommendation, and price, and I look forward to trying some of them out! And an all-caps, heartfelt THANK YOU for the excellent, insightful, and honest comments on the last post about law school. I know a lot of you put time into those responses and I think that with your commentary, that post has been morphed into a truly great repository of advice for anyone thinking about law school. Go internets.

Boo ice.