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Swollen eyes, streaming nose, temples pulsing, racked with so many explosive sneezes that a series of muscles I didn't even know I had, somewhere around my lower ribs, are desperately sore. So grateful that I have a job I can call in sick to. All over the world there are people sicker than I am doing dangerous difficult work. Not a chance of calling into work and whining about their colds and the state of the roads. You want the job, you go to work. I have been so uncannily fortunate, all my life. It makes me uneasy, from time to time. I think: I must have been awfully good in my last lives, to accumulate so much good karma, and I don't think I can be keeping up the pace in this one.

The snow Tonio sent down here from Canada is iced over and dusted with another coat of powder. (Nothing like having a nasty cold to make a snowy landscape look uninviting.) If I were one of the photoblooggers I'd have taken a picture of our back porch: the stark skeleton of last year's clematis making a black net against the white snow, and the old dark iron of a shovel half-covered by a drift. We almost never get snow here. Not like this. Once every seven years, maybe.