4 posts tagged “weather”

Things on Tuesday 6-30-09

Jun 30, 2009
9 comments

My poor blog, it's become so neglected. I promise one of these days I'll actually have something worthwhile to say. In the meantime, I'll try to scrape together a TonT.

Loathe:

Being tired all the time.
Watching my poor boy and his friends get crushed in three baseball games over the weekend. This was his second (and last) tournament of the season. We got to the point where we were just hoping for them to make some plays because there was no hope for them winning.
Having to hear my little boy say, "I stink at baseball!" and try hard to fight back tears even though he was around his friends. :( (For the record, he doesn't stink. He has some things he needs to work on, but I maintain that he's got potential to be a solid player, even if he never becomes a star.)
Knowing that Joey's team that's been practicing for 5 weeks on a team we paid $60 for him to be on got crushed by a team of kids mostly a year older than them, that's been together since March, whose parents paid $500 for them to be on. Seriously! In third grade!
Not losing weight like I've wanted to since we restarted South Beach a couple of weeks ago. I've lost 2 lbs. I started closer to my ideal weight this time so knew the weight loss would be less dramatic, but still I was hoping to see some better results. Oh well. Plug away, I guess.

Love:

Watching my kids when they don't know I'm watching.
Watching a project at work that I've been leading for almost a year finally come to fruition. We're working on getting everyone trained and will implement on July 21. The new process isn't perfect, but what process ever is? It's WAAY better than what we currently have. I feel such a sense of accomplishment, and I daresay I'm looking pretty good to the higher-ups! I had a great team, though...which goes a LONG way. I'm proud of them.
Cuddle Time: a ritual in our house where all 4 of us pile onto Brian's & my bed and just watch something on TV. And cuddle. :) The kids are always asking, "Can we have Cuddle Time?" I love that they want to do it, even when we have to say no.
The unpredictability and variety of midwestern weather. Last week it was pushing 100; today it's not even 70. As they say, if you don't like the weather in Minnesota, just wait a few minutes. Gorgeous weather is always nice, but I need it to change now & then. I could do without snow, though.
Even though the games were not so great, at Joey's tournament last weekend I got to meet all of the parents. It was so much fun. In particular I spent a lot of time talking to the mom of a boy that Joey has gotten to be good friends with over the last half of the school year. Now they're on the same team for both tournament and house league baseball. I like her a lot. And the really cool thing is that they're thinking of switching their son to Schaeffer Academy after he finishes elementary school, just like we plan to do with Joey! Crazy. She said she's been praying for a good friend for her son, and to think that my guy might be the answer to her prayers just about makes me want to cry. In a good way.
Holidays! Because they equal days off work!
That Brian checked out the X-Files movie from the Bookmobile today. I'm finally going to see it, Kelly!

Are you bored yet? LOL

As aforementioned, I fully plan to give this blog some attention once I actually start having coherent thoughts again. :)

It's been a while since I've experienced a good old-fashioned blizzard. I guess that's something you give up when you move into a city. I've kind of forgotten what a real snowstorm is. Today I had my memory refreshed: it's below-zero windchills, HUGE windgusts, many inches of snow, and drifts that you can't drive a minivan through.

This weekend we came down to Iowa to my parents' house for Christmas. My sister & her family didn't even make it because of the blizzard warning that was being posted. (They have a cabin rented in Tennessee for this week and were afraid that if they came up here, they wouldn't be able to make it down there.) We also knew of the blizzard warning, so had pretty much come into the weekend knowing that we may not be able to get home on Sunday.

We came down Friday night, which was surprisingly decent considering what it'd been like earlier in the day. (School had even been cancelled.) Saturday had a lot of snow coming down & blowing around. My brother Moon and his family came from Des Moines (maybe 150 miles to the SE of here) and just barely beat the weather. My other brother Stephen & his family live just a few miles from here but they brought their jammies, just in case it got bad enough that they decided not to try to go home. And it turned out to be a good idea, as they did stay overnight. It was actually kind of fun for us all to hang out. The kids were all being good and the adults weren't really being cranky either. :) We played a couple of games and watched the Cowboys get beat in the final game at Texas Stadium.

This morning church was cancelled due to the weather so we all slept in, which was nice! We continued the eating-fest from yesterday and around 2:30 we decided we should try to get home. We thought that maybe by this time the plows might have gotten out and cleared off the roads some. When we turned out from my parents' farm onto the road, they really weren't bad except for some smaller drifts and the fact that visibility was low due to blowing snow. But that's the kind of stuff that around here, you just drive in and if you don't do anything stupid you'll be fine.

We got about 10 miles from my parents' house and had driven through several drifts when we met one that our van couldn't defeat. Unfortunately, we don't have 4-wheel-drive so once we were stuck that was basically it. I think it was because of the lessened visibility that we didn't realize how big and deep this one was until we were in the middle of it. Fortunately for us, my brothers were nice enough to come & rescue us. We got back to my parents' and looked online at the road conditions. We'd been thinking about trying again and sticking to the more-traveled routes but decided to just stay put until tomorrow morning, as Rochester is under a Winter Storm Warning tonight until 6 pm and we only have a hour of daylight left. It just didn't seem wise with these cold temps and kids in the car.

Normally missing work would not be an issue for me at all - you all know that I'm not very work-oriented. However, I have pretty much zero vacation time, between being sick, having sick kids, taking time off to catch up on school, having to be home for the window installation guy, and doing my clinical chemistry rotation. Oh yeah, and there are a couple of holidays coming up too. So I hate to miss work, but I basically have no choice. I should be able to get in by noon tomorrow.

I'd be much less annoyed if I could at least watch the Vikings game, but the DirecTV in this area doesn't offer local channels, and therefore my parents rarely get regional games. Oh well. I guess I'll just hang out and maybe we can play a game later or something.

Wish us luck driving home tomorrow!

Some positive things during a week where very little made me happy.

Jul 26, 2007
10 comments

I haven't blogged much this week because for most of it I've been cranky, extremely tired, and just generally mad at the world. So right now I'm going to share a few things that have made me happy today.

1
It's finally raining. We need this moisture pretty bad. And it's in the form of a storm to boot! I love storms.

2
I took a test today and I think I did pretty well. I finally have a handle on her teaching/testing style, and just in time for the final! Good thing, because I found out that she is going to be my Micro teacher in the fall.

3
My nails are long and nicely painted with a great new color. And I found a topcoat that doesn't chip! (This is totally a girl thing.)

4
The mud/laundry room is finally done! We wanted to get it done before we left for vacation, but that didn't happen; we got to about 90%. Having company motivated us to get our lazy post-vacation butts in gear. Here are some pictures. I apologize that I couldn't get real great angles - the room is quite small so I just had to do the best I could.

Coming out of kitchen

The blue walls are the kitchen, and this used to be the back door going out into the garage. As you can see, we basically stole a corner of the garage for this project. We debated whether to leave the door in or take it out, but in the end decided that keeping the big heavy wooden door in would look bulky. Plus the door was kind of beat-up from being a back door for 30+ years. You know, I'm thinking now I might have to change the color of the kitchen walls. It was put here by the previous owners and I like it, but it doesn't jive too well with the olivey brown of the laundry room. Big job, painting it. Maybe after I'm done with school. On we go:

View from steps down from kitchen

As you can see, the room already has that lived-in look. We've been using it for quite a while. The washer, dryer, & deep freeze work amazingly well, even when there was no trim around the doors. Who knew?

Sink & cabinets

Here we have a lovely shot of the underside of the cabinets.

Washer & dryer

My new washer & dryer. The three of us are still in the honeymoon stage. And finally, below is the view out to the back patio. You can see that I still have a little touching up to do around the bottom part of the door. But then we'll be done! Yay!