Enough with lion already!

On Friday, I was zombie-sitting in a school full of frantic teachers. The news was grim about the impending winter storm and these teachers were getting themselves all wound up. Ho-humm, I thought. Act like you've never seen snow before! While pondering why all my students smelled like pee, it occurred to me that we might not have any sour cream for dinner. A call home confirmed that we had half a container "that looked suspicious". A quick stop to the grocery on the way home from school was in order.


At the grocery store, it looked like the day before Thanksgiving. Tons of people crammed the aisles with their carts piled to overflowing. Man, I thought, what's up with this? Sensing their panic, I also stocked up on some supplies to get us through the entire next day. I bought:

• a bottle of wine



• 2 packages of Reese's peanut butter eggs



• a tube of cinnamon rolls
  


• a bag of barbecue chips



• a 2 liter of Pepsi
  


• a head of lettuce
  


• sour cream (Yay! I remembered!)
  
  

Bring on the blizzard!

And the snow did come. It started snowing and it didn't stop for the next 30 hours. (I wish that were an exaggeration!) Everything was cancelled, including the Mall Lock-in, which were planning on attending. The Lock-in is only postponed until next weekend. This is excellent timing since the Girl is feeling a tad bit under the weather. Staying up in a mall for an entire night would not have been a responsible thing to do with her coughing like a maniac, so I'm okay with the postponement. But check out the optimism of the other girls in my troop: Not one, not two, but three of my girls ignored messages sent to them and called me to ask to make sure the Lock-in was still on and WHEN WAS I PICKING THEM UP! Got to love those girls!

There was an unofficial driving ban in effect yesterday, but that didn't matter to us since it would have been plum impossible to get off our street anyway. Our street is the third to last plowed in this city. Look it up, I'm sure it's typed on a memo somewhere. After they plow our street, then they go the Man's parent's street. Finally, the last street in the city to get plowed would be my parent's. That's the order it happens. But in truth, none of us will ever see a plow even once for an entire winter because they won't get to the bottom of that list until April.

Here's some die hard souls stuck in front of my house. It was a big team effort to get them free. All I could think was, what could be so damn important that you HAD to go out in this weather and why did you choose my street to drive on?

What did we do on our big one day of being snowed in? We went through books, lots and lots of books. All of the kid's books live in the Boy's closet since he has the perfect space for them. Most of the books in their library are way too young for them, but they are all favorites that we can't part with. Those bookshelves have been a complete wreck for some time now, so with monumental effort we took everything out of the closet. We sorted though all the books spending lots of time stopping to read. When I talked to Grammy on the phone and told her what we were doing, she said it was like finding old friends. That's exactly what it was. We made a fair sized pile of books to say good-bye to. (Desiree, more books coming your way!) We sorted the rest into fiction and non-fiction. We toyed with the idea of alphabetizing by author, but it was getting late and no one was actually down with that idea. Organizing the non-fiction into the Dewey Decimal System also went down in flames. Bummer.

While all that book love was going on, we also trudged through tons of laundry, ate junk food, watched three episodes of Farscape and wasted huge chunks of time playing with Google Earth. Have you ever played with Google Earth? Giant fun. Giant. I'll say no more. That will have to be an entire post on its own.

So today is all about digging out. The sun is shining, the sky is blue, icicles are dripping. The air rings with the music of scrapping shovels and snow blowers. Our neighbor did our front sidewalk yesterday with his snow blower, while the snow was still falling like mad. What a guy! This after he WALKED to the gas station and back to get gas to run the snow blower. I'm making him some cookies!

We're all dug out now and I've moved the van into the sun, so now it's time for fun. Here's the boy deciding to jump off the porch. He does stuff like this. So do I at times, but not when a camera is around. It was a good jump, he got out in the yard a long way.

I have a more pictures I could post, but this is long enough. I need to get the grocery store anyway. I'll probably have the place to myself!