Did you ever wish your alarm clock would just stop? It's bleeping and bleeping and bleeping…and you have the great urge to whack it or knock it across the room with a great thud and watch it shatter into a zillion tiny bleeping alarm clock pieces like the broken mirror from the fairytale of H C Andersen, "Snow Queen" that float away into the world as blurry snow?

Well, it's snowing again in Prague. The Legion Bridge is dreadfully icy and slippery with ice shards floating below in the Vltava like thousands of bits of broken mirror; the sky is white from the wretched flurries, my nose is red from the months of running like a maple syrup tap and my fingers are black from the cold like frozen elderberries. Did I say that it is snowing again in Prague? Well, if I didn't, let me tell you, it's snowing again in Prague. The high was a -4 C and the low was a miserable low of -8 C, but my fingers are telling me that they miscalculated by about a minus twenty degrees because they got stuck to the icy metal casing of the lens and complained to me that the weatherman can't read the digits accurately.

And what am I doing here in the cold? Well, it so happens that the bleeping croaking telephone woke me up at 8 am with the noise of some bird in the rushes on the Labe with an incessant croak-croaking that doesn't sound anything like a frog. I know it's a bird, but I haven't a clue what kind of bird because it was hidden in the ruarshes while I was shooting the dragonflies in the dull warmth of an August summer day in a little village called Jirina near Celakovice and just in case you don't know the difference between cold and warm or frog and snow, let me introduce you to the crazy birds that woke me up at eight this morning and brought me out in the midst of Prague winter chill.

Let me remind you, it's snowing in Prague and frogs don't like snow.

And why am I here? Because the voice at the end of the phone told me that Mr Subrt was hosting cooks from MasterChef over at the Amade Restaurant across from Lavka on the Smetanova nabrezi today and expected me to come over.

And of course I was confused and thanked the voice for waking me up for the earth-shattering announcement, because I went to bed at 6:30am.

Let me tell you, the hedgehog or groundhog, whoever it was over there in Pauxetawny or Hoosierville or sunny San Diego was dead wrong. It's snowing in Prague and thanks for the false alarm regarding the spring. Somebody tell Punxsutawney Phil in Pennsylvania to go back to bed and let me sleep Thank goodness I've got frogs on my phone to remind me of warmer times because the dragonflies don't sing.
baixaki