How to Spend a Snowy Weekend by Way of Food, by Gwen

Saturday afternoon: Welcome three friends from New York to your house. Go to cute local bakery and pick up eight cupcakes of various flavors.

Saturday night: Cook vegetarian chili, homemade cornbread, and a big salad. Watch it start to snow.

Later Saturday night: Walk home from a really really bad movie, exclaiming, "hey! it's really starting to snow." Demand tea and cookies.

First thing Sunday morning: Wake up. Exclaim: "wow, it's still snowing! yeah." Eat cupcakes, breakfast of champions.

Sunday afternoon: Now in veritable blizzard; walk to Safeway to buy more food. Comment on how 17th Street (normally a major DC four-lane road) truly resembles mid-19th century painting, complete with hooded figures in black huddled against the wind and absolutely no cars. Slide down middle of street. Have inordinate amount of fun by way of sliding down middle of street. Rent videos. Drop videos in snow due to excessive intentional sliding down middle of street. Buy a lot of food.

Sunday evening: Cook lasagna, bread, roasted garlic, more salad. Attempt to locate car. Laugh.

Sunday night: Attempt to locate car again. Do not laugh quite as sincerely as before. Try to shovel car out preliminarily using a small plastic trash can. Give up. Return to house for popcorn and hot chocolate with peppermint schnapps. Resume laughing. Play Clue knockoff with friends. Knit. Watch videos. Have more hot chocolate. And more schapps. And a little more, thank you.

Monday morning: Shovel friends' car, for real, with gigantic heavy metal shovel some kindly neighbor left for public consumption due to stupid citified losers like self who do not own one. Be continually amazed at depth of snow. Exclaim repeatedly about depth and impressiveness of snow. Hire two unresponsive 12-year-old boys to help shovel. Then hire them to do other car. Watch, defeated, as gigantic snowplow pushes back gigantic pile of snow onto car once again. Go inside. Eat buttermilk pancakes made from scratch. Forget about stupid car.

Monday afternoon: Say goodbye to friends, who manage to get car safely out of space. Say goodbye to other friend, who makes it safely to Union Station. Eat leftovers. Make plans to catch ride to work Tuesday. Pretend car doesn't exist until next July.