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!

A Chilly Welcome

Yesterday was a snow day for all the little zombies and their keepers. Snow day! Two small words are mean so much! We found out that it was a snow day through the fancy pants new automated telephone system the school system bought. Trouble was that the voice on the announcement was Val, the same woman who calls me every morning to give me a job. So even though it was good news, being that it was her really put me off!


To celebrate an unexpected day off, I decided to do something really fun: The taxes. The kids ran around in the snow, the man shoveled and I sat right here with TurboTax putting together the return. But it was a job that needed done and I was given a day from Mother Nature to do it.

Around three o'clock I went downstairs for a cup of tea when the front doorbell rang (I should say clicked, not rang. The previous owners of our house disabled our doorbell in some weird way and we've never been inclined to fix it.) When I went to the door, this is who I found.




I've named her Blanca. Christmas of 2006 I put together snowman kits as gifts. And of course kept one set for ourselves. I can report that this is the first time we've have enough "good" snow to make a decent snowman and use the kit, a year and two months later! Blanca is sporting all the pieces of it, except in slightly the wrong order. The buttons were for the front, the coal is for the eyes. I never came up with something for the mouth for the kit. That carrot nose is made of wood. There are golf tees superglued to the coal and buttons so they stick in the snow securely. Isn't she lovely!



I think she's asking me if I want to buy some Girl Scout cookies.


After the kids rearranged her parts, I asked them to turn her around and face the street.



It's been snowing steady all day. I just checked on Blanca and she is completely covered in snow. I'll go out in a bit and shake her off. She should be looking her best when the mailman comes. I guess I should clean the steps off again as well!

Another Snow Day!

Home again, home again. Here we are. Snow day #4. Now is when you start to worry. Everyone knows that only 5 snow days are built into the school calendar. If you go more than 5 than they extend school into summer that much longer. NOBODY wants that! The girl keeps reminding us that she's only been to school 1 hour all week. Let's hope for school tomorrow. We can finally get the Valentine's parties in!

The man dug out the driveway yesterday with the much appreciated assistant of Mr. Neighbor Man and his snow blower. Today the kids and I cleared the walk from the sidewalk to the front porch. Now we can get mail. It's quite a pile out there, but it's lousy snow. Way too fluffy, it doesn't pack at all. No snowmen, no snowballs.

Today we finally got out of the house. We went to the grocery store for a few staples and the library. Books and food, that's what keeps us going. The laundry is all caught up. The girl got all her homework done. The PlayStation is begging for mercy. We watched an Indiana Jones marathon. All in all, it's been quite a couple of days.

Snow Day Valentines

To make up for having zero snow days last year, today would be our third one so far this winter. Though I guess the two days last week would be called "Extreme Cold" Days which were no fun at all. Snow days are better because you get to run around outside in foot deep snow and fall down over and over again. This would be the girl's third day off in row. She's been home with the flu for the past two days. Her snow day will mostly consist of doing make-up homework. Yucky!

On days where you are unexpectedly stuck at home, I like to take some time cleaning things up. Today, I'm cleaning up the blog, more like catching up. Two weekends ago the troop had a sleepover here at the house and we made pillows for Blessing House, which is a home that keeps kids that have been removed from their homes in an emergency situation. My girls cut fabric, used sewing machines, stuffed and hand closed about 20 pillows. My house was thread and fiberfill from one end to the other by morning.
Last weekend was the 1st birthday party for sweet Lucy. I didn't get one picture of her or her cake, but I got these shots instead. The party had an excellent balloon guy who made all kinds of amazing balloon things. This is my Calliope with little 2 year old Calliope. Both were pretty excited to meet each other. This was the first other Calliope that the little one met, but mine met another one when she was in the first grade. These two were best buddies for the whole party.
The boy had a sword and helmet made. Standing between him and his victim is Lucy's daddy, James. Right behind our knight is the clown pinata. I wish I had a better shot of what it looked like before because here's what it looked like after...


Every kid got multiple whacks at this poor thing. It kept getting knocked down and then rehung by an arm, finally by his feet like an Italian dictator. Finally it took James himself to deliver the death blow. While the kids scurried around for candy, my man grab the carcass and started using it like a puppet. Kids would come up and continue to beat on it and rip off limbs while the clown cracked jokes. Funny, yes. Disturbing, definitely!

Happy Valentine's Day!