Sooooooo the plan for today was to leave San Jose around 9AM and arrive at our friend's place in Lake Tahoe around noon for a couple of days of snowboarding and fireplace-lounging and such. But if you follow me on IG stories or Snapchat, you know that 9PM (mmhmm, a solid TWELVE HOURS after we commenced this little adventure) found us not just "still on the road"...but quite literally still. On the road. Like not moving at all. And then we did that for two hours while we waited for the snow to clear enough for us to go through the pass.

(Obviously this ended up being the best part of the entire day, because we specialize in travel disasters and have, over the years, learned how to make traffic jams into awesome dance parties.)

But back to the semi-stranded-in-a-snowstorm thing: I had thought I had left disastrous, gnome-killing, angel-summoning weather behind me in New York, but this thing that's currently hitting California - which is, so you're aware, called a bombogenesis (really, and yes that is now officially my favorite word ever) is giving the East Coast a run for its money. Right this very moment, for example, my backyard fence is located in my pool. There is a greenish, shredded, cloth-like substance carpeting my driveway that I think used to be our patio umbrella, but I can't be certain. And let's not forget the many, many hours we spent tonight staring up at 200-foot-tall snowdrifts barely clinging to the sides of mountains, and replaying select scenes from Alive in our heads.

Sunday evening, when we finally emerged from confinement.

On Friday night, Kendrick and I dropped our children off with a handful of angels - a.k.a. our son's martial arts teachers, who were holding a "pizza and movie night" for all the kids (siblings welcome) so the parents could go out on their own for a couple of hours. We immediately booked it over to Outback Steakhouse, because I officially have reached the point in my life where I want to go to the place that lets me eat steak the exact way I want to eat it and where nobody cares if I'm wearing a sweatshirt that says Ugh Fine on it and where you can order a single dessert that contains slices of cheesecake, carrot cake, and something called "The Chocolate Thunder From Down Under" (you know, so we can have "just a taste" of each).

We had one of the more lovely and romantic nights we've had in awhile, actually. And then, around 9PM, while I was puttering around waiting for Kendrick to arrive back home after having picked up the kids, it ended.

“A Persian Cat living in the sky” is an equally plausible explanation.

Every so often, when trying to explain something to my children, I am struck by the degree to which the world of technology has outpaced my ability to sound like an adult who knows things. Even TV is beyond me. "See, people stand in front of a camera, and then their pictures and voices go onto a...sort of like a piece of tape? And then that goes into a...like, a TV station, and they...tell the picture to go into...space. And then it comes onto your TV. Get it?"

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking to my friend Stephen, and complaining about the fact that every time I have to do anything on my phone I have to first delete everything I possibly can (apps, any and all photos that I'm at least relatively unemotional about, etc). And he said, "Have you put them on the Cloud?"

When the power goes out on the East Coast, everybody rolls their eyes and gets Chinese takeout and goes out to a bar or to bed. When the power goes out on the West Coast, there is widespread panic and people floating down streets in duck rafts. Having been suddenly detached from social media and television and PerezHilton.com, Los Angelenos sit paralyzed in the center of their darkened living room floors, asking themselves life's greatest question:

...What do I do now?

Last night, as you know if you follow me on Snapchat or IG stories, our power went out, along with the power of...ohhhhh....everybody in LA, apparently.