I have never skied in my life. In fact, people in my family joke that black people no do ski (yes, I said, “no do.”) “Black folks don’t like to volunteer to freeze their asses off,” one of them said to me recently.

But I did volunteer and me and the hubster decided to spend the $345,908 it costs to ski for a day since we finally have enough doe from slowly blood letting and donating blood for money. It took us 10 years to save up enough, and dammit! The roads are CLOSED!!! There will be no skiing, at least today, which was the day we were supposed to do it. There may be slight hope that the roads may be cleared by tomorrow, but it all still very tentative, and the California Transportation Agency (aka the cabal/mafioso dubbed CALTRANS) enjoys withholding information because, I believe, they relish in the power of our unknowing. They taunt us with, “maybe we’ll have the rock mess picked up, maybe we won’t. You’ll just have to check our site and call our crappy automated phone number EVERY HOUR ON THE HOUR.”

But the good news is, the kids, for the first time in their lives, saw actual snow coming from the sky last night:

Chloe, with ski gloves that make her hands look like The Hulk's infant.

Zach in his impersonation of, "The Man With Half a Face"

Kayla, likes the snow, but she's like, "My hair! My hair!!!"

And we did use some of our blood-letting money to fork up $50 to decorate a honest-to-goodness gingerbread house, but we were a little afraid the children might need to have their stomachs pumped from sugar overdoses:

But the end result was a MASTERPIECE:

And after all that, Mike and I have managed to smile, even with low platelets:

And then there was dinner, when Kayla and my best friend decided to compete to see who was prettier:

I am contemplating locking my daughter in the closet until college…after she finishes cotillion.