The Winter Storm Saga.

[title type="h5"]Tuesday, January 28, 2014.[/title] God help the man who has two women in his life, both of whom have strong minds and strong claims on him. I must have been saying the right prayers, because I never had a problem with that. My mother was functionally deceased by the time Mary Ann entered my life. And Mary Ann's mother liked me, MA says, more than she liked her. My son Jude has a balancing act to perform right now. And that's all I can say here about that. Fortunately, he has a good job, as associate producer on a series of made-for-TV movies. It keeps him busy from dawn till midnight seven days a week. Mary Ann left for Los Angeles last Thursday, and if all had gone according to plan she probably would have come home today. But we are having a rare winter storm, born of the polar vortex and a moisture-laden system from the west. It brought freezing rain and sleet at temperatures far enough below freezing that all the precipitation stayed where it fell. As the day went on, one bridge after another closed. The word came out that one shouldn't drive at all except in emergencies. And, oh yeah--the airport was closed. They have no de-icing equipment, because we don't get weather like this very often. Classes were cancelled at Loyola, so Mary Leigh rescued The Boy from his dorm last night and brought him home to keep nice and warm. She also made a batch of pasta bolognese--with the reddish-brown sauce born of tomatoes and ground beef. It was astonishingly good, enough that I think even a person from Bologna would approve. From scratch, yet, starting with her marinara sauce, generously spiked with crushed red pepper. The meat was ground beef round--not the most distinctive flavor on earth, but just right for this. I'll have to watch her make it next time so as to nail down the recipe. It made being stranded at home and watching the sleet pile up almost fun. The Boy is, like me, one of the lucky guys. Both of the Marys adore him. [title type="h2"]Deep Freeze. Restaurants Return.[/title] [title type="h5"]Wednesday, January 29, 2013.[/title] The worst of the weather came through overnight. I think that The Boy--who is a member of Tulane's hockey team--could ice-skate on our deck. Icicles are growing along the eaves, frozen solid, not a drop of meltwater dripping from them. All major roads across the lake--all of which go for many miles on bridges covered by as much as a half-inch of ice--are closed. And the authorities are unanimous in saying that the surface roads are not much better. I've heard of "black ice"--areas of pavement covered with a see-through layer of slippery, not visible until you find yourself in a spin crossing them. But I've never heard of it in these parts. The temperature went below twenty last night, and that's expected again tonight. Mary Leigh's kitchen essay today was fettuccine Alfredo. Except for a layer of sauce that browned and stuck to the bottom of the pan, she created another fine plate of food for the three of us. The perfect thing for making our storm-entrapped state almost pleasant. The Boy is chuckling at us soft Southerners. He grew up in Pennsylvania and Maryland, and to him this ice storm is no big deal. The Times-Picayune has beaten me at my own game. The paper's food-writing staff phoned around to find out which restaurants would be open today, sort of like I did after the hurricane. They found that quite a few places would open for dinner tonight, with almost everybody returning to normal tomorrow. A majority of the openings were Uptown, in the French Quarter and CBD, and in Mid-City. In short, in those parts of town accessible without having to cross an overpass. I published only a brief, generalized list. But all of that well-gathered data will become worthless by the weekend. [title type="h2"]Still Icebound.[/title] [title type="h5"]Thursday, January 30, 2014.[/title] We had a scare this morning. Nobody thought to run the water overnight in the second-floor shower. When I turned it on at around seven, it sputtered instead of flowing. It took about two minutes before any appreciable water began to flow. These are symptoms of a frozen pipe. I think we caught it in the nick of time. When things began to thaw rapidly this morning (between seven and two in the afternoon, it went from 21 degrees to 52), no evidence of a pipe break showed itself. Whew. My plan was to return to the city today, but no such luck. The Causeway, I-10 Twin Span, and the I-55 all began the day with enough icing to make them dangerous. They were all open just after noon, but that's too late to be useful to me. Mary Leigh, however, made the crossing later, swapping The Boy for her mother. Who has returned, after five nights in the luxurious Langham Resort in Pasadena. "I feel I'm at home there," she says. The jokey retorts I have in my mind about that would only get me in trouble. I knew she wouldn't be hungry when she returned, snacking as she no doubt did on the plane and in the airports. Where she went through a good bit of grief--again!--in trying to get the airlines to allow her to use her buddy passes. I had the same lunch I did yesterday: a thawed-out block of vegetable soup, made a few weeks ago and frozen. Twice, I think. The vegetables were mush, as I expected. But they tasted good. And MA was pleased to see that I was depleting her stock of leftovers. She doesn't care who eats them, as long as somebody does. And I knew she would want to give a report on her investigations into the life being led by Jude and his girlfriend.