It turned into a white Christmas after all, the first of its kind in the New York area in three decades. We woke up yesterday to a wet, windy day, but by 5 p.m., the rain had turned to snow and quickly began sticking. It was overwhelmingly beautiful and peaceful, and it made our decision easier: We stayed in Little Silver.

But that meant getting up at 6 a.m. today to make sure we were on the road at 7:30, in case of traffic tie-ups; but true to Mom's prediction, there were hardly any cars on the highways � which were cleared of all snow. It was like any other day on the Parkway and Turnpike, and far from the morning rush hour. Because of the smooth sailing, we were back in Cliffside in exactly one hour and turned onto our shoddily plowed street. With the snow ��and there is more of it up here than down in LS ��and the cars still parked on the street, our already narrow lane is now definitely only passable by one car at a time, so that when I saw a pickup coming toward me, I had to back up to the one cleared parking space behind me and wait for him to pass. Then, when we pulled up in front of the house, the driveway was impassable, what with the wall erected at the bottom of it by the passing plow. And a garbage truck was heading for us. So I let Casey out, turned into the neighbor's driveway on the left to let the garbage truck pass, then went to the end of the block and found a parking space.

Casey and I then spent the next hour shoveling out our half of the driveway (Cranky Old Man came out, too, and cleared his own with the help of two Hispanic men who were going door-to-door offering to shovel for people) and the sidewalks, since we figured nobody else in the house will do it. I'm not even sure they're all home this week anyway. Jo and the kids from the first floor haven't been heard from since the weekend, and who knows about the Succubus and her mom from the attic. They wouldn't do it anyway. Besides, as I told Casey, I can use it for leverage, if I need to. We were at the office a little after 9:30, but I was the fourth one here at my magazine, and there are still six top editors that nobody has heard from � very little is getting done, and it's starting to get ridiculously annoying. A few of them did put in for vacation, so they're off the hook. But those whom we expected to be here before, oh, NOON, haven't been in contact.

And I hurt. I'm sore from the shoveling, but there's also a little pain that I'm hoping is just a pulled abdominal muscle and not, oh, a hole torn in the wall of my abdomen ��otherwise known as a hernia. That would suck. Bigtime.

I'm going to try to give myself an appetite.