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My brother is taking the SATs for the first time today, so I baked these chocolate chip cookies for him as my way of saying good luck. How many other big sisters do you know that perform such acts of kindness for their younger brother?

I know he will do fine; in fact, I’m pretty sure he’ll get a higher score than I did on my SATs (his ACT scores are already higher than mine were!). Still, I wanted to do a little extra something for him as my way of wishing him luck. It was either bake him his favorite cookies or get up at the crack of dawn to wish him luck when he left to take the test. I might be an awesome big sister, but I’m not willing to forgo sleep in my pursuit of sisterly awesomeness!

I had a sudden craving for fruit when I was grocery shopping last weekend, but I never really did anything with my purchased strawberries. However, while rummaging around in my fridge, I came across the following things:

• Dark chocolate squares used in fondue cooking
• Heavy whipping cream
• The aforementioned strawberries

Of course, being the dessert-a-holic that I am, I decided to combine all these ingredients to make a yummy desert. I set about making chocolate covered strawberries using my double boiler to melt the chocolate and boy, are they delicious! They’re low-maintenance too, as I covered my plates in saran wrap before I set each chocolate dipped strawberry on it before cooling so I don’t even need to scrape the chocolate off the plates when cleaning them.

The best part, though, is that I can justify eating loads of these at once because underneath the chocolate is strawberry… and everyone knows strawberries are healthy!

This is the view that I woke up to this morning:

Those giant white splotches are clusters of snowflake that have clumped together on my window. That brown box thing in the distance? That used to look like a building. And those big green things in the middle? Yeah, they’re trees, but it’s a question of how long they’re going to remain upright before they break and collapse underneath the weight of all the heavy snow on the branches. You can compare my photo from last weekend’s Snowpocalypse/Snowmageddon to this week’s Snoverkill storm to get a better idea of just how much snow there is outside.

There is a blizzard warning in effect until 7pm tonight and the government has halted snow removal because it is simply too dangerous for the workers to continue plowing the roads. Snowmageddon/Snowpocalypse dumped almost three feet of snow and Snoverkill is due to dump at least another two feet in the area. At minimum, there is going to be four feet of snow total – and that’s not even calculating the amount of (sometimes black) ice underneath the layer of snow.

I haven’t had class all week and I definitely won’t have it tomorrow. Class on Friday is looking pretty dicey at this rate as well. While it’s been nice to have an unexpected break in the middle of February, I’m starting to get a bad case of cabin fever. I’ve been trying to occupy myself by reading, surfing the web, and watching TV (until the satellites go down because of the blizzard). But there’s only so much that can keep you occupied when you’re shut up inside with friends who are feeling just as antsy as you are…

ETA: Someone made a time lapse of last weekend’s Snowmageddon. Now, take that and multiply it by about 100 to take into account Snoverkill’s blizzard status, and you should have some idea of what it’s currently like in DC.

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