As I was walking down my crowded middle school hallway today I felt an arm go around my shoulders and heard a voice saying, “Hi Sarah.” I glanced to my left into the eyes of a suddenly shocked and very embarrassed 8th grade boy. Okay, his look of horror put a little cloud over the fact that he had mistaken me for a girl his age, but I’ll still take the incident as a complement.
Here it is Sunday afternoon and I am not feeling at all rested and relaxed and ready for a new week. Perhaps that is because I just spent the last three hours on an OM email, Star Island registration, and helping Caitlin with snacks and cleanup for her OM group. Fortunately the OM (Odyssey of the Mind) competition is next Saturday. These last few weeks of OM are tough. I had my group over for three hours yesterday and we’ll practice twice this week. Hopefully Caitlin will only try to have her one regular practice this week because fitting in a second will be tough.
The Star Island registration stuff will slow down about March 14 which is the date all the applications postmarked by the 10th come in. Until then it will be a lot of data entry. However, the numbers are looking very promising this year and we should fill the conference and not spend a lot of time convincing people to come like we did last year.
And then there is the job. I had planned to read The Pearl this weekend because I’ll be teaching it in a couple of weeks and wanted plenty of time to think about it. Maybe tonight.
I’ve snuck on to Annie’s blog to post this video of young Calvin after the recent snow… further antics can be found at Calvin dot com
- Bobby
This last storm was classified as blizzard, but it only gave us an additional six inches of snow which was on the very low end for our area. Uncle Bobby got almost another two feet. However, the wind gusts made it look really impressive as occasionally we couldn’t see the end of our driveway.
The snow is shrinking quickly – the front of our yard is down to eight inches! But the rest has much more. One place still has 19 although that was in the sun all day and looks like another low point to me.
We’ve been keeping an eye on our holly tree. As you can see it has been up and down lately.
Sunday morning.
Later Sunday.
Monday morning.
Monday noon.
Tuesday.
Wednesday morning.
Wednesday afternoon.
Thursday morning.
Thursday afternoon.
We have the power! It came back on just in time for the Super Bowl. And just before we left to watch it with the Pooles. While we had a bigger TV they had heat and chili. It was nice to come back to a warm house.
Most neighborhood streets have a single lane plowed and packed snow with a few patches of pavement. Fort Hunt and Route 1 were mainly slush - driving was slow but manageable. Even so, I think the federal government was correct in shutting down for today.
Sunday, 2:45 – Still no power. Even though Caitlin says, “Let there be light!”
We have fled the house to Panera for lunch, the internet, and an outlet to charge our phones. I’ve been writing posts that haven’t gone out so I’ll post them all now.
Sunday, 9:40 am – Still no power. Thankfully we have large southern facing windows so our living is relatively warm. It makes for a good spot for us all to sit and read. Unfortunately we have no newspapers, but Scotty has the Economist, Caitlin the second of the Percy Jackson books that John and I read last summer, John is reading from and quoting “A Wrinkle in Time,” and I’ve got yet another Anne Perry mystery.
Sleeping was fine – cold doesn’t stand a chance against two down comforters and a husband. The house was at 49 degrees when I came downstairs, but our living room is a toasty 64 degrees now.
Uncle Bobby called. Since he has power he can looked online at the Dominion website and informed us that the map said we should have power by noon.
Saturday, 7:30 pm – We miss electricity! The house is down to 61 degrees although by boiling water on the our gas stove I’ve warmed the kitchen up to a toasty 64 degrees. We’ve got lots of candles lit, Caitlin’s ipod playing on speaker, and books and sudoko.
Earlier we played John’s game of Dominion that Uncle Bobby gave him for Christmas. He just killed us. We finally fled outside to shovel the snow. There were times I felt like Sisyphus as there always seemed to be more to shovel, but we got his car completely cleared and the driveway open. The snow had actually stopped by the time we were done. The plow came by an hour or so later, but it shouldn’t be too bad to shovel out what it threw into our driveway and we’ll head out tomorrow.
Final total – 22 inches!
Saturday, 11:20 pm - Okay, I’m ready for this to be over. The power has just gone out. Again. Foolishly we didn’t crank up the heat this morning so the house is currently at 66 degrees and now dropping.
When I started shoveling about 9:30 we were up to 13 inches. I think we’ve had two since then because there was a lot on the sidewalk before Scotty cleared it for the second time.
This tree may not make it. Scotty cleared much of the snow from it, but it still is pretty bent.
Lucky LOVES the snow, but hates the camera which is why she isn’t looking too happy here. She romped around with John and her almost 15 year old bones will probably be sore for the rest of the day.
Lots to shovel out. We’ve got some guys going by with snow blowers so at least our sidewalks are in pretty good shape. A contractor came through with a snow plow sometime last night so at least a single lane has been plowed. That may be all we see for a long time.
The storm got decidedly less fun when the power went out about 9:30 last night. So we rounded up the flashlights, handed out one per person, and went to bed. About 4:30 this morning I realized Socks had come to sleep with us which is unusual these days. Then I heard the heat going and realized the power was back on and Socks wasn’t sleeping with us to be social, but rather thought it was time to eat because he hadn’t gotten his late night feeding.
Lucky, Coo, and I went outside. The temperature is still at 32 degrees and I could hear water dripping. It is still snowing very hard, but in very fine flakes that don’t accumulate quickly. The cars are buried and the holly tree by the house is so bent over it may not survive the storm. But according to the radar we are at the tail end of it.
Saturday, 5:00 am snow totals – lawn 9 inches, car 11. Scotty shoveled last night so I didn’t measure the driveway.