Щи и каша жизнь наша!

For those of you who can't read Cyrillic, that's "shchi i kasha zhizn nasha" - or "soup and porridge is our life". My obsession with blini has been replaced as of late by equally obsessive cravings for rice kasha. I can't explain it. All it really is is rice cooked for a long time in lots of milk and butter, but it's just so damn good. I tried making it myself, but like with the experimentation in blini-making, I just can't recreate the taste that the little old ladies create in the various Russian kitchens throughout town. Maybe I need a few decades worth of accumulated grease to make it taste right. But as the saying goes (well, sort of), my life is now being controlled by bowls of kasha. Mmmmmm.
On another note, I love snow. As if you all hadn't noticed already. I keep thinking that I will eventually get sick of all the cold white stuff floating around, but just the opposite is happening. With each snow fall, I become more and more in love with it. There's just something about waking up in the morning to a fresh blanket of snow, and being the first one outside to make tracks in it. It's like starting from scratch each day. The effects of non-existent emissions-controls aren't nearly as noticeable. The city has taken on a completely different personality. I feel like a little kid (and have been told a number of times that I act like one) when I go out of my way to go traipse through a fresh patch on my way somewhere. It's so much fun. I have to get as much in as I can before I go back to the land of snowlessness.
Okay, enough of my musings. I have to go find the Fed-ex office because the incompetent fools can't find my address on the map to deliver my package to me. Grrrr.