Okay, it was only my name, not my picture, and it was for the sledding excursion the fella and I took last Sunday, (they just said we went sledding--I guess it was news 'cause we're grown ups...) but we were in the paper...
The picture is of the jump on the hill to the west (the jump is to the west, not the hill--we were on the same hill) of where we were sledding. This is a big lo-o-oooong (as in wide, not tall) hill, so there was room for lots of people to sled. And we did NOT go over the jump (which you would know if you read my Snow Bunny post).
Anyway, I'm sitting here in my office with the two big windows, with the little space heater running and my new dry socks on, because I ventured forth into "Texas in the Snow Land" to go get mail from the post office, and it was slushy out there!
Fortunately, all the cars that passed me (and there were enough to constitute a rural Texas rush hour--meaning two cars sitting at an intersection, only one of which has a stop sign, and the one without the stop sign is waving for the other one to go through--honest! This happens to me all the time--anyway, there were lots of cars on the street) were kind and considerate enough not to splash me with the slush. Which I appreciated, since just walking splashed up plenty of slush. I got my socks wet, and my pants. Some of it was 'cause it was splashy, and some of it was 'cause it was deep! Over the tops of my tennies deep.
And the parking slots in front of the post office are just Pure-D Ice! The parking area is on the north side of the building, so (like my patio) the ice from the ice storm didn't melt off before the snow from the snow storm hit. Only people have to go to the post office to pick up their mail, because if you live in town, they don't bring the mail to you. You have to go to the post office. (This is why I only have a P.O. Box for my snail mail.) And all those cars parking there packed down all the snow on top of the ice, and turned it into ice, and the sun can't get to it to melt anything, so I had a really slippery time getting up to the part they salted. But I got my newspaper and saw my name in the paper.
Okay, mini-rant here. There was a "guest column" in the paper from some numbnuts who lives in Utah whining about the snow removal on Interstate 40, about how the snow plows were pitiful and nobody salted the road and he slid off the highway three times, and when he got to the New Mexico state line, everything was perfect. He wanted to know if the snow was just too much for Texas. (Failing to observe, of course, that the snow storm that dumped all the snow in the Texas panhandle skirted New Mexico and didn't dump much, if any, snow over there.) My answer:
Well DUH!! OF COURSE IT WAS!!!
This is TEXAS. We don't have mountains here in the northern part of the state, like New Mexico does. We don't get much snow. We do get some, which is why there actually snow plow blades to fit on the fronts of the pickups. Further south in Texas, you don't even get that much. And I'm sorry, I'm not going to advocate spending that much tax money for something we might need maybe every third year. Last year, we didn't get a lick of snow. That's why we had a million acres burn last spring, because we got no snow, no moisture of any kind. (Duh!)
And most of the time, when it does snow, it's usually 40 degrees (about 4.5 C) within a couple of days so everything melts off quickly. (It's above 40 here today.) So all you whiners from Minnesota or Utah--shut up! Wait a coupla days, it'll warm up, and you'll be on your way. Cause we aren't buying a bunch of stuff that's not going to get used. Deal.
Okay, end of rant.
Wrote 9 pages so far today.
Spent too much time looking in my old historical atlas, but I did discover that I can't send my hero and heroine to Bucharest when they run from the mountains. It's way the heck and gone the wrong direction, and over on the Ottoman side of the mountains. So they're going to Temesvar first, before they hit Budapest.
In 1863 (or 1864, depending on how old I decide my heroine is), the Carpathian mountains were part of the Grand Principality of Transylvania, which was in turn part of the Austrian Empire. I knew the bit about the empire, but didn't know it had a fancy name...
Spent a lot of time working out new stuff about how the magic works before I got started, too, but that paid off. It all came out in the story.
I'll shut up now.
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