Today, the prediction is for a Nor-easter, one of those storms we get from time to time in New England winters. A low pressure zone tracks northeastward off Cape Cod, and the counter-clockwise circulation around it brings the wind in off the ocean, saturated with moisture, which falls as snow. It's much the same effect as Buffalo gets from the winds off Lake Erie. Or Tromsoe, Norway, with the winds off the tail end (but still warm given the latitude) of the Gulf Stream.

So there's a blizzard warning. We have something like 4" of snow (10 cm for you heathens) now, still coming down, though somewhat lazily. With a prediction of much stronger snow, up to 3" an hour, with 50 mph winds (that's a gram per cm² per hour, with winds of 22 meters/sec, or 2200 cm/sec for you cgs fanatics). A bad deal for driving in.

So my plan was to go out at 7, dig out the few feet of driveway behind the car, which would be easy since the snowplow hasn't been by yet, drive 10 miles into Boston, park God knows where since there's no parking on snowy days, or other days when cops are crotchety, in The City. Sing for the Mass (Howells Like as the Hart, a setting of that same psalm (46?) to Anglican Chant, and something else I forget), and then try somehow to get my ass (and the car) home safely. With said ass still attached to the rest of me. I packed up a blanket, a water bottle, a couple granola bars, and was planning to move the steel shovel from the car in the garage to the one in the driveway.

Phone rings, awakening my esteemed spouse, who's sleeping in cuz she has the flu. (Much better, thanks, but still not even 50%.) It's the choir director, explaining that choir has been canceled, because, while getting there would be doable, getting home could well be dangerous. Not 10 sec after I hung up, the phone rang again, this time triggered by another choirperson, wanting to know if I'd heard (yes), and what I knew about who else had heard (nothing).

So off with the coat and boots, bring in the newspaper, explain to toxicfur what's up, and here we are.

Cool video of the day is a honda commercial, in which all the car sounds are made by a choir. Go to honda.co.uk/civic and click "watch" in the upper left corner. The rehearsals are a hoot also. Available as a podcast.

At 1pm eastern time on Sundays (that's 1800 GMT; the rest of you will have to figure it out for yourselves), I host a writing chat on IRC at slashnet.org, channel #writing. Y'all come, it's fun.