Icy Roads and Mardi Gras

Last night we all retired early so that we could arise early and get on the road for the girls' swim meet in Minot.  Warmups started at 10:00 A.M. Central time, which is 9:00 for us.  It's usually a good three-hour drive to Minot, so leaving at 6:00 A.M. would have gotten us there under normal driving conditions.  However, after a few days of above-freezing temperatures, things turned very cold very quickly last night, and I knew we'd want extra time so that we could drive slowly as needed.  I figured a 5:00 A.M. departure would be good, so I got up at 4:00 to check the road report.  The state transportation department's Web site offered a travel map on which all the state's highways were marked with red: no travel advised.  Ugh!

Suzanna's 12th Birthday!

Our oldest child is now 12 years old. Suzanna has been looking forward to this day for a long time, not only for the usual reasons (e.g., looking forward to the individual attention, to receiving gifts, to getting to choose the meals for the day, etc.) but for three others particularly tied to being 12 years of age:

1. A 12-year-old child, according to current vehicle safety regulations, may sit in the front passenger seat of a car. (Did you know that children younger than that ought to sit in the back seat? Susan and I have enforced that with our kids, so Suzanna has been eager for the "privilege" of sitting in the front.)
2. A 12-year-old child can be certified and hired as a babysitter, a job that Suzanna has been eager to hire herself out to do. (The American Red Cross provides babysitter training to children as young as 11. Susan and I thought it was 12 and have had Suzanna wait until now. Oops!) By the way, Suzanna got two phone calls today asking her to babysit tomorrow night . . . jobs she would have accepted happily had we not already planned to be out of town ourselves.
3. A 12-year-old child, in our household, can get her ears pierced.

Here are highlights from Suzanna's birthday:

One of Suzanna's gifts was a digital camera, with which she was thoroughly delighted. She quickly figured out many of its special features (e.g., taking photos in sepia or black-and-white modes) and snapped photos throughout the day no matter where we were or what we were doing. (Note in this photo the length of Suzanna's hair so that you may make a comparison to her hair in upcoming photos.)

These are our friends the Donners: Chad, Ethan, Audrey, and Sullivan. Audrey and Susan were great friends during their high school years. The Donners now live in TX but are in the area visiting family for Christmas, and they dropped Ethan off at our house for a play date in the morning and then met us for dinner at Taco John's (Suzanna's choice) around noon.

Our entire family had haircut appointments this afternoon: about 4.5 hours of hair cutting before we were all shorn! Before heading to the salon, we posed for this family pic in Taco John's.

Here is Suzanna with her new hairdo and her newly pierced ears! 12 years old?! Sheesh! What a beauty.

Here are Hillary and Abigail with their new hairdos. The stylist curled their hair for them, too--snazzy!

Here is Susan with her new hairdo. The stylist straightened Susan's hair for her.

Here I am with my new hairdo. Whatevs. Suzanna's ear piercing happened after our hair cuts, after which we went out for supper at Sanford's Grub and Pub, which serves a birthday celebrant a special treat for dessert: a gigantic chocolate chip cookie heaped with three enormous scoops of vanilla ice cream, one covered in strawberry sauce, another in caramel sauce, and the third in chocolate sauce, with the whole shebang topped with (canned) whipped cream and a maraschino cherry.

After supper, we went home and played games to give ourselves time to digest the sundae from Sanford's before . . . eating Suzanna's birthday cake! She requested a brownie cake, which Susan made on a round baking stone and frosted using my mom's wonderful chocolate frosting recipe. Sinfully irresistible.

Look how excited Suzanna is to be 12 years old! And to own her own digital camera! And to have pierced ears! And to have a family who loves her as much as we do!

Out Like a Lion

Last night Susan made a delicious supper of schnitzel, spaetzle with dill, and rotkohl. My recent turns in the kitchen for Scandinavian Saturday must have stirred up in her the urge to cook some German food, and it was great! While we ate, the snow fell; and later as we slept, the wind picked up as the snow fell; and this morning, as the snow fell, we heard media announcements that area schools (including the university) were, once again, closed due to severe winter weather . . . in the spring. Unbelievable.

This afternoon, as the snow fell, Susan and I went out to start clearing away snow (she with shovel, I with snowblower) so that we will be able to exit our house tomorrow. Have I mentioned that the snow continued to fall throughout all our snow removal efforts? At the same time, the temperature was so mild that the snow touching the concrete of the driveway and sidewalks and the pavement of the street was melting even though buried beneath many feet of snow above it. This made for nice weather in which to play in the snow, which our daughters and the neighborhood kids did, tunneling through the drifts and creating pathways and building snow homes, etc.

Unfortunately, it made the task of snow removal more difficult. The slushy snow clogged up the snowblower, requiring me to stop regularly to use a screwdriver to chisel the ice buildup out of the chute. The wet snow was too heavy to throw very far, so I couldn't direct it exactly where I wanted it and ended up resnowblowing previously snowblown snow from various sections of the driveway--and once-snowblown snow is more compacted and harder to resnowblow than virgin snow. Also, anywhere that anyone stepped in the snow--to turn around a snowblower, to maneuver a shovel, or to bound across the yard to play with friends--turned into icy snow that was all the more difficult to blow once I got there with the snowblower.

Oh, and the snowblower broke. Well, a bolt broke from the right side of the shaft for the impeller, causing it to stop turning. I had to hunt for another bolt and nut the right size--and found one in my collection of leftovers from over the years, thank goodness! By the time I got the snowblower up and running again, our neighbor across the street came over with his snowblower and asked if I would mind if he started at the far end of the driveway to help me clear it off, meeting me in the middle. I did not mind! We made good progress in good time.

When we had finished, I thanked him and told him that I owed him some fuel, a meal, some beer, etc. He said, "Nah, that's what neighbors are for." I said, "Well, welcome to the neighborhood!"

School Canceled on Account of Beautiful Weather

The weather forecast predicted a snowstorm for today, so I awoke at 4:30 A.M. to allow myself time to grade a set of quizzes and still have time to snowblow the driveway before needing to get ready for work, drive the girls to school, and make it to my 8:30 A.M. class. I was outside at 6:00 A.M. to discover a lot of snow but an otherwise calm and temperate morning. It was so warm that the bottom layer of snow was slushy, making it heavy and occasionally plugging up the chute through which the snow is thrown. There was a waist-high drift from the front door to the northwest corner of the driveway, so I started there. Two neighbors across the street were out with their snowblowers, too, clearing the concrete of the wet snow before future cold weather could turn it to ice. It was a beautiful morning, and I made good progress.

Then the announcements started coming on the radio, and Susan popped out of the house to relay them to me. School was canceled in several area towns. Makes sense--with so many rural students bussed in to town and so many rural roads inaccessible after a storm, it's common to delay the start of school or even cancel it in those towns on days like today. They're at the mercy of snow plow availability. The majority of Dickinson schools' students, though, live in town, so no need to cancel school here.

Except that was Susan's next announcement. No school for her or the girls! Again (remember?) administrators canceled school on a perfectly beautiful day! After keeping it in session on far worse days--you know, days on which it was actually storming! I don't get it. On the plus side, that enabled all of them to bundle up and come out with shovels to do "cleanup" work, catching the strips of snow left behind by the snowblower and enjoying the lovely morning themselves.

Are you understanding that we had beautiful weather this morning? Is that fact registering with you? Well, it didn't register with DSU administrators who canceled all classes and activities at the university for today! Yep, that was Susan's last major announcement for me; she popped out of the house with a sheet of paper on which she had written in marker "DSU CLOSED" (knowing that I could read better than hear over the noise of the snowblower). As rare as a winter school closing is (or used to be) in ND, a university closing is rarer still. When I was an undergraduate student at UND, the only time it was shut down for winter weather was once when the governor commanded it. And that was because of temperatures around 40 degrees below zero. And the shutdown didn't even happen until late in the day so that I had already been to all my classes that day anyway. So today, with temperatures high enough to melt snow and visibility as far as any day in the summer, we needed to shut down our university? It boggles my mind.

We finished clearing our driveway and sidewalk of snow, and then I--can you guess?--yes, went to work. The snowplows hadn't been out yet (and still haven't), but I just stayed in the ruts of previous drivers (yes, plenty of people were out and about in the beautiful weather that had caused schools and universities to close for the day), drove to my office, and adjusted course schedules to figure out how, in future class sessions, to make up for this lost instructional day. Aargh.

Bright side: Susan felt a "snow day" urge to bake and used some Amish friendship bread starter to bake apple coffee cake, butterscotch bread, and lemon poppy seed bread. Tasty. It would have been an especial treat had the warmth of the freshly baked bread stood in contrast to the cold storminess of the weather. As it was, it was like eating hot food on a summer day. Here's hoping for actual cold temperatures, high winds, and reduced visibility tomorrow so that administrators will leave school in session, and we can get back to normal.

A Burst of Sun

Look what's growing on the west side of our house amidst the moss roses:

This spring, BP was offering free packets of sunflower seeds at its gas stations as part of a pro-environmental yet self-promotional campaign (the tie-in? its logo is a geometric representation of a sunflower).

So I picked up a packet, went home, and planted the complimentary sunflower seeds. Two plants popped up, and one just began to blossom over the past few days. It's the first sunflower that our daughters have seen up close (whereas I grew up with entire fields of sunflowers on surrounding farms in northwestern ND).

P.S. Those of you dragging your feet to put in an offer on the for-sale house across the street from ours are now out of luck. Today a "sold" sign went up in the yard, and our daughters immediately registered their wishes: "I hope they [the new homeowners] have a fourth-grader/third-grader/first-grader." We'll have to wait and see.