Tidbits on a high note and a low note.

1. It's snowing! For the second time in two days, tiny white flakes graceful angel feathers perform their mesmerising dance outside our windows.  They're not sticking, and they only fall  in spurts, but they mark the first snowfall of the season. "Oh, look at the snow," Boogaloo says. The news last night spent a full five minutes covering everything from people's personal reactions to the possibility of icy conditions on the morrow.  They showed pictures of snow-covered roads and parkinglot accumulation that barely reached half an inch.  And then they poked fun at themselves by pointing out that according to the mediorologist's scale, what we have here is only a "trace" of snow, technically no snow at all.  Much ado about nothing you might say.  Only in Oregon.  Still, we hope the mountains are getting a share of this. We've been short on moisture this year.

2.  Hypothesis rejected:  We had a hypothesis that the Broncos could not lose if Seth wore his lucky jersey.  Well, Seth wore his lucky jersey yesterday, and I wore one of Seth's other Broncos shirts.  The Broncos still lost pretty spectacularly.  Their season ended last night in a painful defeat to the New England Patriots, 45-10.  Oh, ouch.  Congratulations to the Patriots who played some flawless football and took no prisoners.  We turned the game off halfway through the third quarter, and I said a prayer this morning for all the disappointed Broncos fans, all the satisfied Tebow-haters, and all the people who said they were going back to church if the Broncos won.  . 

Still, I have officially crossed over into Bronco fandom.  I went to amazon.com and put a Broncos sweatshirt on my wishlist. After all, fandom is like love.  A true fan isn't put off by losses and does not alter when it alteration finds (sorry Shakespeare).  I mean, look at the Raiders.  Look at their fans (normal ones excluded, Alan).  There is no greater committment. And in the family I now live in, well, one has to have an allegiance of some kind.  So, good bye, nominal Seahawks allegiance.  Hello, fledgeling Broncos committment.

3. A Word of Wisdom from G.K. Chesterton for all readers of supernatural fiction:
I was reading the comments on a Twilight article a couple of weeks ago (I know, I know), and I noticed one from a woman lamenting that a Christian nation should be so caught up in a movie about vampires.  Well, she was obviously unfamiliar with the material, but I thought about her question anyway for a while.  And then I read this passage in an essay by 20th Century apologist and captain of imagination, G.K. Chesterton, and thought it applied, especially to me:

    I can fancy in such a stormy twilight some such smell of death and fear. . . . I could sit here and write some very creditable creepy tale. . . .Only, you see, this mood is all bosh.  I do not believe it in the least. . . . For there is nothing so delightful as a nightmare, when you know it is a nightmare.

     That is the essential.  That is the stern condition laid upon all artists touching this luxury of fear.  The terror must be fundamentally frivolous.  Sanity may play with insanity, but insanity must not be allowed to play with sanity.  Let such poets . . . by all means, be free to imagine what outrageous deities and violent landscapes they like.  By all means let them wander freely amid their opium pinnacles and perspectives.  But these huge gods, these high cities, are toys; they must never for an instant be allowed to be anything else. . . . [They] must be his dolls, not his idols.  His central sanctitites, his true possessions, should be Christian and simple.  (Chesterton, "The Nightmare," from The Essential G.K. Chesterton Collection, Kindle ed.)

 All in all, I don't think Chesterton would have had a problem with the Twilight franchise in itself.  He liked fairytales in which the hero finds himself in a strange world and makes good in it.  At the same time, a little warning against idolatry never hurt anyone, and applies to any captivating series. 
4.  I finally get a picture of me on my blog (see above), and Boogaloo took it.  I had to jump in front of the lens, but she pushed the right button.  Clever girl.