Did lose power for several hours the first day it snowed a lot, but it's been OK since then (people who lost power longer than I did sometimes also had their water pipes frozen).
I managed to shovel some snow to clear the steps to the front porch, but then it snowed some more. :-0
Normally, I have my partner do the shoveling, but he and his parents went to Florida to visit his younger brother and his wife's home in Boca Raton. My partner got stuck in Charlotte for a night because his plane sat on the Columbus airport for two hours after he boarded.
I told him and his parents not to go, because, before they actually went down to Florida, it came out that they were NOT invited to his sister-in-law/their daughter-in-law's parents' home. Naturally, _that_ caused much turmoil, especially in his mother's mind. She was UPSET. But they went anyhow.
I blame capitalism, which domesticated Christmas and made it a family affair (cf. <http://montages.blogspot.com/2004/12/class-struggle-at-christmas.html>), liable to cause angst and anxiety.
My partner's sister, her husband, and I were glad that we didn't join them on the Florida trip, and we congratulated ourselves for our good judgment over ham, green beans, and yam.
Then, my partner's sister's husband and I went to see The Aviator, which didn't tell us much about Howard Hughes, except the difficulty of making an airline business profitable, nor what Katharine Hepburn and Ava Gardner saw in Hughes. The climax of the film is Owen Brewster's Senate hearing investigating Hughes' wartime contracts, to get Hughes to merge TWA's international operations with Pan Am's -- the battle between the anticommunist Maine Republican defending monopoly and the anticommunist Texas Republican championing competition. Before the film gets there, it has Hughes criticize Hepburn's FDR-loving rich liberal family (who say to Hughes, "We don't care about money here," to which he retorts, "That's because you have it") and invents a tabloid photographer who is set on publishing compromising photographs that show Hepburn and Spencer Tracy together until Hughes asks him, "You ever go to a Communist Party meeting?" That sums up the film's range of politics. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * "Proud of Britain": <http://www.proudofbritain.net/ > and <http://www.proud-of-britain.org.uk/>