Another snow day. No school today. It's easier to look outside and take a picture than show the inside of the house, which is enormous mess! Wet boots, mittens, coats, scarves, etc. Our next door neighbor, a teacher who also got the day off, invited the neighborhood kids over for a pancake lunch. Quiet prevails, for the time being. I took my other photos off this site (and now I can't get them back on). I'm thinking of transferring this blog to TypePad so I can link to a photo album. I tried to upload my RadioLand logs to TypePad. TypePad suggested using RadioLand's "export" feature. A disaster! Nothing came over. I simply am not good enough at coding (in fact, I'm terrible at it) to get much done on my own. I like the people at Salon blogs, but technically I need something easier and a format that takes more graphics.

While I've been e-mailing the help desk at TypePad, I've been trying to reach a neurologist. My GP insists that I do something preventative for my migraines. I take zomig for the headaches when they come, which stops them, but now I have to see a neurologist. I'm thinking of trying botox, which is approved for migraine treatment. It sounds too good to be true, to have no headaches and look younger (well, a little younger) at the same time. Karen bought up some excellent points about conventional versus alternative medicine in her post. Unfortunately, in terms of preventing the headaches, neither kind of medicine has worked for me so far!

I hadn't intended to keep this ominous looking photograph of the backyard up, but I can't seem to delete it, so stay it will. I can't stop playing around with the layer modes in Photoshop. The actual photo of the backyard and the long-outgrown swingset seemed so boring, so everyday, so much like my life that I tried to change it. But maybe the boring and everyday is where the true mystery of life resides.

We're supposed to have a snowfall this weekend here in New Jersey. Whenever there's even a hint of snow, everyone responds by shopping. The supermarkets are jammed, as is the local Barnes and Noble where, (by sheer conincidence) I happened to be browsing around this morning. Everyone needs that last minute book or DVD in case they're snowed in. I guess this is what it means to live in a "culture of consumption." But if it makes us feel better, is it really all that bad?

I woke up this morning with an excruciating migraine, which has left me completely depleted. My only solace was the fact that TCM was running Barbara Stanwyck movies all afternoon. The film on TV in the photo above is a 1950 film called To Please A Lady. Clark Gable plays a race car driver named Mike Brannan who Stanwyck, as Regina "Reggie" Forbes, (a crusading journalist) believes was responsible for a rival driver's death. Do I have to tell you the rest?

This film reflects America's return to domesticity after WWII. Both daredevil Mike, and spunky career girl Reggie have to give up their independent ways and settle down to humdrum married life. Adolphe Menjou, pictured here, is Reggie's crusty, father-figure editor. Both Stanwyck and Gable look past their prime and frumpy in this film. There's no real chemistry between them and they wander through its scenes as if they'd wandered into a postwar future where they're not quite sure they belong. Menjou, as this photo shows, remains his dapper pre-war self.