So, it snew! That happened. I live, and am back at work trying to catch up with half the staff still stuck on cul-de-sacs. We only got about 20 inches but apparently people just up the road got 36. It was a fun five days of snowed-in-ness, during which I shut the laptop in case of power outage and then just... didn't get around to opening it again even after the rist of power outage was over.

This sounds super virtuous, but tbh my laptop is so cranky these days that it is not a pleasure to use it. Also I spent most of that time listening to podcasts on my phone while playing solitaire, so it actually wasn't virtuous at all.

The podcast I was listening to is Rex Factor, recommended by sister, which is reviewing and rating all the Kings and Queens of England and Scotland. So far I have made it from Alfred the Great to Mary Tudor. And earned 85 stars in the solitaire app.

So far, the podcast is mostly making me think - other than 'wow, I don't remember nearly as much British political history as I thought' and 'this is actually a really good way to do history' - is just how much power women always had. Like, you read 'feminist history' things that talk about shifts in womens' rights over time, or that pick out individual powerful women, but what you get going through right in order like this is that there was almost always a woman running things. Like, there's occasional gaps, like some of the Saxon kings who outlived their mothers and grandmothers and then deliberately didn't marry, or the last decade of Henry the 8th's reign after Queen Katherine was too old to lead his armies for him anymore. But what the versions that pick out the powerful women make it easy to miss is that they weren't actually... exceptional? Like, I'm pretty sure up to the point where I am, there were about as many Queens of England who led armies to battle as there were Kings of England. (Well, maybe fewer numerically because they've tended to live longer, but as much time in power, anyway.)

Anyway, also it's got me thinking that I need to study up some dynastic history that isn't British because that's really the only ones I've ever studied. And the podcast listening has woken up the princesses who live in my head, who need at least some history influence other than British, since they live in what is basically Doggerland. (Every little girl had princesses they made up and have whole dynastic histories for, right? Mine are eight sisters: one of them becomes an architect, two become ruling queens, one becomes a sorceress-saint, one becomes a knight, one becomes a scholar, one becomes a banker, and one never amounts to anything much. Only one of 'em marries a prince; he marries her because she promises to win his war for him if she gets to run the country afterward and he's like, eh, better her than me.)

...anyway, of course that means I've gotten NOTHING ELSE done except some snow shoveling and some fingerloop, so that's fun.

I want to do a whole long rant about how they're pushing really hard to clear the roads at the expense of pedestrian access, and if previous patterns hold, there will still be five-foot piles of snow on all the wheelchair access ramps come Easter, but you can probably take that as read.