I watched the snow fall from my cozy spot on the couch (with cats draped about feet and shoulders), and thought "This won't be so bad. It's big fluffy snow. Piece of cake." My, but I was wrong. At some point, there as rain, and then there was a deep freeze, all of which added up to a rather daunting crust of ice on the sidewalk. Sigh. Wendy had gotten us an ice-chipper thing, like a flat, sharp spade, and it worked very well. Our sidewalk is the clearest of all our neighbors. So yes, I rock, and yes, I'll still probably break something on the way to the bus in the morning.

I went a little crazy with the geek cheez-whiz today. One, my friend Jane has been posting from Vienna, Austria, where she is working at a medical conference. One of the things she mentioned in her Austria ratings was The sheep-counting channel. Austrian cable program in which fleece-clad ballet dancers leap-frog placidly over each other to trance music. On at 4 a.m. Amused but disbelieving -- she is suffering from some wicked-ass jet-lag -- I contacted an Austrian expert, Miguel of Feral Living. I IM'd him (I don't know the etiquette, but his IM is up there...) and he could neither confirm nor deny, as he doesn't have a TV. But I got to talk with him for a while, which was just so cool, because I read his blog every day. And he liked my ice dancing posts. How cool is that?

Yes, I am a blog groupie.

Also, in what is probably a very bad move, I finally gave in to the Dark Side that is E-Bay today. I won a Palm m500, if by "won" you mean "received the privilege of paying for it." Still, it's a refurbished version, so it's cheaper than I would get in the store, and I've been thinking about it for a while, but I have the horrible feeling that this is the sort of slippery slope I shouldn't go down. My experience with live auctions and silent auctions for charity has been a bit scary.

For a while I worked with a children's theater company called Runamuck Productions, and one year we did a fundraising auction. The most kick-ass auction item was a day cooking in the kitchen at Charlie Trotters, which is probably the most expensive, exclusive and famous restaurant in the city of Chicago. I figured this would be a good thing to get for my mom. Tragically, heath, the auctioneer, knew this, and knew of my, shall we say, competitive tendencies. He made sure the bidding went crazy, increased my bids by $50 a pop ("$300!" "I hear $350! Thank you, Sarah." "Wha -- I said $300, you bastard!" But I let it stand.) and generally made my life miserable. I "won," and mom very much enjoyed the day (at least she damn well better have...) but I ended up contributing fully half of the funds we got from that auction. Sigh.