Sledding

Just a fun Sunday with my friend M and her five year-old son J (his first time sledding!) This is what numerous inches of snow allows, so I have to say that sometimes it's nice to live in a snowy area!

He thought this was the hill; it's just a giant pile of snow removed from the parking lot!

This sheriff's car was buried next to it, which I found pretty amusing

M and J

J's first run; he had a bit of a crash but it didn't stop him from wanting to go again!




Just a cold, snowy Sunday



This is one of the only places in the United States that has this sort of toboggan run

Snow

There's no other title for it. I warned Ouiser several times this was coming, and here it is. Everyone has their images of snow; it was even a (terrible) song in White Christmas. We think of the perfect looking pine trees, softly falling in the night, and often it does look like that. Snow can be beautiful. It can also be gray and hard as a rock, but that's mostly from highway travel. I much prefer the former to the latter.

When you live where I live, you get used to some form of snow arriving possibly as early as Halloween and as late as May, one year. Probably April. So yeah, we're pretty used to snow here in WNY. It has many forms: wet, powdery, heavy, slushy, sticky, pretty, and thick, to name a few. One becomes quite the connoisseur, uttering statements such as:

"This is great for snowball making! Packs well and doesn't stick to my mittens too much!"

"Yay, the light kind--makes shoveling easy!" (We have ergonomically correct shovels. Makes it easier for the back, you know.)

"Ugh, wet and heavy--better move the car from under the tree [so when the snow snaps the branches, they will not damage your car, which actually happened to me because the snow weighed 12lbs per square foot]."

I tend to measure snow in terms of whether or not Penny can run through it, or if it's deep/messy enough that I have to wear boots instead of nice shoes. That reminds me of another typical WNY conversation on New Year's Eve day at the shoe store:

"I need to find awesome boots that I can wear in the slush. Do you have those?"
"Oh, yeah, they're leather AND waterproof. And they have this cute design on them."
"Screw it; I'll just get the fleece-lined galoshes that look like cowboy boots."

Snow is my life; I walk in it, play in it, drive in it. I will have you warm weather weenies know that we've gotten anywhere from 2-4 inches of snow every day this past week and never once did anyone think of closing the schools...for which every student and teacher was incredibly grateful. Or not. Truly, it didn't even occur to anyone that anything might close. My city goes through anywhere from 40,000 to 50,000 TONS of salt every year for winter. One of our first acts when we bought our house was to secure a plow guy, whom we love dearly.

The best part, though, is the skiing, snowmobiling, and sledding, which DH and I did last year. There's a great run near our house and we were the only ones there without children. Didn't stop us from making serious runs--and let me tell you, it's quite the workout slogging the sled back up the hill when you're dressed like Randy from A Christmas Story. It is also still fun to throw yourself in a pile and make a snow angel, even if you are over 30.

And then there's the serious side: We had to buy a roof rake, a 25 foot long metal rake with a large scraping blade that helps get snow off the roof. You never realize these contraptions even exist until the dining room begins to leak, as it did last year. Those icicles are not just for covering with food coloring and eating, people!

So here are a few of my better pictures, taken yesterday. Enjoy and stay warm. And slow the hell down when you're driving, turn into a skid, and pump your brakes. Thank you.

We forgot to take in the lawn chairs. Whoops.

Just to give you perspective on how much we have

Deer tracks through our yard

I think the best part is either walking as it falls silently around me, catching the light no matter the time of day, with the covered hush of sound that only winter can bring; or sitting inside on a snowy night as the wind howls, with warm cozy clothes on, a fire in the fireplace, comfort food, and people I love. You just can't get that at any other time of year, which is why I still love the snow, no matter the mess it makes. I guess that's why I live here.

Now that we're shoveled out....

Whew! Finished the papers, for now. Now I think I have about a week break before the next slew come in. Next year I will be a lot better about scheduling these things….

So I said I’d give the update! Well, I can’t believe I haven’t before now, considering we’ve had so much time off due to weather and holidays. We were out AGAIN on Wednesday due to snow! Truly, the driving was awful—it took me ten minutes to get off our little street, which they never plow. Thursday morning the only reason I got out at all was because our neighbor across the street saw I was having trouble, backed up his car, and he and his two young boys pushed me out. What a good-Samaritan act! I have to get them some cookies or something; they really didn’t need to help me. It renews my faith in humanity in a world filled with contested Anna Nicole Smith wills and shaved rehab-bound pop star heads.

Well the wedding dress fit fine—so well that they don’t even have to shorten it; just bustle it. Guys, that just means that during the reception it’s pulled up a little in the back so it doesn’t drag the ground, subjecting me to dirt and ill-placed high heels of guests. Other minor millinery adjustments in the back must be made, but nothing major. So that’s out of the way, and my wonderful mom stuffed all the envelopes! And peeps, you don’t mind if there’s a bar code across the bottom, do you? The post offices don’t have time, they say, to hand cancel all of them (they really do have to do each invitation by hand to not have that code), so forgive me for being gauche.

The wine shower, oh, the wine shower. If anyone you know is getting married or having a birthday, I highly suggest one. Guests were asked to bring wine or “wine accoutrements” and boy, did they. We have a fully stocked wine rack, a gorgeous bottle of Möet, good tequila, good bourbon, one of those rabbit things (vacuum sealer), wine glasses, and a joke bottle of Wild Irish Rose. The last sits on our mantel with its fellow bottle of Courvoisier and a package of Kools, which I received those last year when working in the public schools. They’re the shiz-nit, yo. But anyway, the shower was such fun—this whole getting presents thing is a great gig, I have to say, and we have wonderfully generous friends. My one friend H. and her husband M. (the ones who had the surprise wedding) gave us a bottle of wine for each day of the week with an appropriate, Weight Watcher friendly recipe attached. Who could ask for more? We also had a fairly disparate group who came together and found topics of conversation, which I always find pleasing. Yay new friends!

My next objective is to find fun sites to share with you all like Ouiser does. How do you find these fun places? You must share your secret.

P.S. My Valentine’s Day (last one with my maiden name!) was spent in front of a fire with Norah Jones on the stereo and take-out sushi. Can you top that? I felt it was perfect. I think we might have to make that the tradition—until we have kids and feel a desperate need to get out of the house.

The weather outside IS frightful!

(Picture from the Buffalo News) Well! I get a chance to add an entry because we don’t have school today! Why, you ask? It probably has something to do with getting 2-3 feet of snow in the southern areas of Buffalo, a good six inches in the metro area, and sub-zero wind chill. I scraped off my car last night just in case I had work today and it was FREEZING. We’re talking bitter, bitter cold where hypothermia begins in about five minutes, no exaggeration. I think the best part was realizing yesterday afternoon that our heat was out AGAIN. Fortunately our landlady’s was not, so we camped out in her guest room last night. The heating company tried to give her some rigmarole about low gas pressure on the street, but I just don’t see how it would affect only our apartment. This morning when DF went in to get something, the thermostat registered a balmy 50 degrees. For some reason our heat only conks out on the coldest days possible. It has some twisted sense of humor, I suppose.

Fortunately this gives me a little more time to plan lesson and get some reading done for school—and I kindly e-mailed my students, telling them they were still responsible for turning their papers in (they can post them to our school website) and we’d still have our quiz tomorrow. I know, I’m such a queen. But seriously, they all check their e-mail twenty times a day, so I don’t see many of them claiming the “I never checked it” defense. And, these are pretty conscientious girls, on the whole; I have to give them credit. I just hope they don’t get frostbite trying to ski or snowboard. That’s where the common sense of a teenager sometimes becomes an oxymoron. I plan to stay indoors as much as possible, cozy in my fleece pants and wool sweater!

Feather nester, you are soooooo glad you’re not in Plattsburgh today…. One article even says “Plow drivers are saying it's so cold that the salt isn't working on the roads.” (http://www.wivb.com/Global/story.asp?S=6037543). That's cold, folks. But we love it! Love it! Maybe because we're too cold to realize just how freezing it is??

On a lighter note, I did get shoes for my wedding dress and DF and I chose wedding bands last week. That was actually pretty fun. :-)