Woke up and went straight out to shovel the walks. I was done before anyone else on the block even started. I wanted to get the jump on Victoria because she puts an interesting spin on the meaning of the verb "to help". She did join me eventually and we made the biggest snowman I have ever put together. Taller than I am. We went back inside and watched Meet the Press and I made a bad hat out of horrible yarn. Then Brian took Victoria sledding and I took the babysitter shopping with me at Costco.

She said she wanted a grill and that they had what she needed. They did not and she got lost. It took us at least half an hour to find each other again. On the way home we stopped at the fabric store, which had a lot more interesting stuff and the advantage of being hard to get lost in. Unfortunately, we arrived twenty minutes before they were closing for the day. I dropped her off at her house and she made me come in with her and take about ten pounds of food home. Her daughter was home. She said, "You'll probably hear about this on the news--Dick Cheney shot somebody while they were hunting." "Scalia?" Ho ho ho. There has been a regular flow of accidental/oddball shooting incidents in the news lately.

Brian didn't have time to eat because he was leaving to watch a basketball game. Victoria didn't want anything but a roti and a single stratum of banana pudding. Brian made this last night and it was quite a production. I'd never had it before but apparently it's the the default dessert along his regular barbecue route in North Carolina. There's a layer of cookies, a layer of bananas, a layer of pudding, and a layer of meringue, with plenty of sugar throughout. It's very sweet and heavy. Victoria just picks out the bananas and leaves the rest.

Then we played board games (Victoria, a bear, and I) but Victoria moved the pieces for everyone because I was packing books and the bear is inanimate. I got an elliptical machine last week in an attempt to keep exercising without going to the YMCA every day. (When Brian came home at the end of the week, Victoria took him upstairs to see the new thing. They came back down and I asked what he thought. "He said it's ridiculous," said my faithful reporter.) I ran on that while Victoria watched Oliver and Company but she wasn't interested in watching to the end. We played the drum game for a while. It's a good thing she doesn't mind losing, because she's very bad at the drum game. Then she suggested that we do the PM Yoga tape and why not? So we (Victoria, the same bear, and I) bungled our way through PM Yoga and then I read more Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle stories than any person should have to in one night and she was THIS close to being asleep when Brian came home loudly, so now they're reading Great Big Schoolhouse and I am just about to do some laundry.