precipitation…

I hit snooze this morning. like, 4 times.

I’ve been doing that an awful lot lately, and I’m not sure I like it. in effort to wake myself up more thoroughly, I put my alarm clock somewhere in the room other than my nightstand — on the bureau or in the far corner of the room, for example. this is great theoretically, except that I tend to pick up the clock, hit snooze, then carry it to my nightstand, where I will continue to hit snooze until I’m ready to get up.

this really defeats the entire purpose of setting my alarm at all, since the whole point is that in order to do what I want to do to prepare for the day without being rushed, I need to get up AT 7 (or 6, on 8-o’clock-class-days), not 7:04 or 7:08 or, as it was the other day; 7:28. I don’t know what other strategy I can implement to actually force myself to get up on time, except maybe to go to bed earlier so that I’ll be getting adequate amounts of sleep so that I won’t want to sleep in. as much. I know that if I set my alarm earlier, I’ll just hit snooze with the knowledge of the fact that I don’t actually HAVE to be up until a bit after 7… this has to stop.

at any rate, when I did force myself out from under the wonderfully warm covers this morning, for some reason my eyes were drawn to the window. and all I saw was white.

have I ever mentioned that I love snow? some of my fondest childhood memories are of the year when it snowed three feet in two days — that’s Beckley for you. when I was little my brother and sister and I spent a ton of time outdoors in winter. our back yard was like a sledder’s nirvana; a giant hill with plenty of dips (one in particular) that would send you flying. half of the kids in the neighborhood would come on weekends and snow days to sled, and we would always race to finish our schoolwork so we could go outside. I was such a tiny kid at the time (we moved when I was eight) that when I went down and hit that particular dip I’d get a good 6 inches of air, usually coming up off the sled. I had a Little Mermaid sled with a rope handle on the front, and I would hold onto that thing with all my might. possibly my best sledding memories ever are when Bethany, a girl who lived down the road that Hannah and I used to play with all the time, would come over to sled. we would all three pile in the sled, pull our toboggans down over our eyes, and go down — sometimes backwards.

okay, that wasn’t supposed to be so long. anyway, I love snow. it makes me sad nearly every winter that snow doesn’t stick in the Chemical Valley — in any case, it’s rare.

and it didn’t really stick all that much today. though there’s still a little on the ground, it warmed up this afternoon and rained, washing some of it away. but that first moment of looking outside and seeing all that snow, and the sky white because of it, made me so happy. I love snow.

“I get to be Rita Onnie-Connie!”

my sister and I used to watch The Lawrence Welk Show.

we were kind of obsessed, actually; it would come on PBS on Saturday nights at 8, and we watched religiously. we were fascinated by the way Lawrence Welk popped his cheek to sound like a champagne bottle in the opening song, amused by the oboe player who would shut his eyes and raise his eyebrows during his solo. we loved the tap dance routines; we thought Jo Ann Castle was awesome — kind of strange, but awesome. on occasion we pretended to be The Lennon Sisters, or we would sing duets and pretend that we were on the show.

keep in mind that we had expansive imaginations. we could pretend almost anything, and we did… including but not limited to being lost at sea (a blanket canopy over our bunk beds was the ship, our carpet was the sea, linkin logs– as sausage –were our food, our stuffed animals were our companions).

but usually when we played that we were on the show, we wanted to be soloists — and there were basically two girls to choose from. one was Norma Zimmer, an older but still pleasant soprano, also known as The Champagne Lady. (I’m not really sure why that was her title, it just was.) but the one we really wanted to be? Rita Onnie-Connie. she was slender, sultry, hispanic. she had long and, at a later date, Farrah Fawcett-ish hair, which I was too young to recognize as passe. and, of course, she wore pretty clothes.

when Hannah and I would play, as soon as the idea of Lawrence Welk was agreed upon we would try to beat each other to blurting out “I get to be Rita Onnie-Connie!” she was, you know, everything we wanted to be… Rita.

or so I thought. as I was reminiscing about this this morning, remembering how I used to sing into my hairbrush and imagine myself with feathered hair, I began to wonder if Rita Onnie-Connie was on YouTube. how funny would it be to take a little stroll down memory lane? then came the realization that I didn’t really know how to spell her name — sure, we had always pronounced it ‘Onnie-Connie,’ but it’s not like that could possibly be the way it was spelled. so I did what I do when I know google won’t work: wiki. on the Lawrence Welk Show wikipedia page I quickly scanned the list of performers for ‘Rita.’ there wasn’t one. I began to actually read the list and before long I found “Anacani, singer (1973-1982).”

so I did some searching. her name? Anacani Maria Consuelo y Castillo Lopez Cantor Montoya. I thought, “well, maybe her name was so long they left off the sur-names and started calling her Maria Anacani.” Maria, Rita, easily confused in the mind of a 5-year-old, right? thanks to YouTube, I know that I’m wrong. for the most part, they just called her Anacani. I was beginning to wonder how on earth I ever got ‘Rita’ fixed in my mind as her first name, and then I discovered the reason: Lawrence Welk himself.

[just the first twenty seconds are sufficient to understand why, if you don't want to subject yourself to further viewing; or you could keep going and see the heights to which I aspired.]

seniorita Anacani. I guess I was 5, too busy dancing to pay attention, and so unfamiliar with Spanish that I didn’t realize what he was saying.

and after that long and deeply revealing entry, I’m off to bed… with the credits song for the Lawrence Welk Show rolling in my head.