I was afraid this was going to happen

Matt Benney says the thing about blogging is that when you have things to blog about, you're too busy to do it, and when you have time to blog, there's nothing to blog about. True, true. But I prefer to think of it more like this:

Silence

By Billy Collins

There is the sudden silence of the crowd
above a motionless player on the field,
and the silence of the orchid.

The silence of the falling vase
before it strikes the floor,
the silence of the belt when it is not striking the child.

The stillness of the cup and the water in it.
the silence of the moon
and the quiet of the day far from the roar of the sun.

The silence when I hold you to my chest,
the silence of the window above us,
and the silence when you rise and turn away.

And there is the silence of this morning
which I have broken with my pen,
a silence that had piled up all night

like snow falling in the darkness of the house-
the silence before I wrote a word
and the poorer silence now.

Brook Green in the snow

My mate Matt made a really rather lovely little video about our neighbourhood green in the snow the other day.

A woman in Germany

Is having a bit of a rough time, and needs to know she's not alone.

What's a little snow?

So London has been smacked by a record snowfall. This is unusual. As unusual, say, as palm trees growing in Canada. It's rarity has been documents by the hundreds or even thousands of blog posts, Facebook pictures and status updates, and my favourites, Twitter posts.

Naturally, the storm has brought one of the world's great metropolis' to a standstill. At 3 pm, the Tube is still, for the most part, shut down, and virtually the entire bus network has been suspended all day. Our office closed, as did many others for want of employees who could make it into work.

It is, by any standard, a proper Minnesota snowstorm. But unlike, say, Minneapolis, London understandably just isn't equipped to handle this amount of snow. Minneapolis alone has a fleet of 400-odd snowplows, and would have had the roads plowed in time for rush hour this morning.

I personally enjoyed the snow very much. It brought back to me one of the things I miss about Minneapolis--the natural beauty of winter. And this time, I didn't have to endure two months of unbearable freezing cold to enjoy it.

Late in the afternoon, it occured to me that I would need to shovel my staircase so it wouldn't freeze (thanks Pops, for the knowledge). Like, perhaps, the rest of London, I lacked the one thing I needed to deal with the snow. So I used my dustpan: