68: dancing boy

62: an excess of snow

So they've been pretty good at clearing the roads in town, but now there really are very few places to park--hardly any on street parking. I doubt we have the budget to actually remove the snow like most bigger towns are doing, so in keeping it off the streets we've sort of created pathways through five to ten-foot high snow piles.  It's going to be very wet around here when all this stuff starts to melt!

61: celebrating snow...and an already announced 2-hour delay for the start of school tomorrow

I did shovel a path from the other door, but it was more fun to "swim" from here over to the hot tub.

60: In like a LION!

The wind is blowing so hard I can't even open my eyes and I'm about to be buried under one of these snow drifts, but isn't playing outside so much fun!

The world is shut down around here, there's a couple feet of snow blowing around on the ground, half the roads are impassable, and another eight inches expected by Sunday night. Whao-hoo!

59: Snow Day #2 for the Week!

Everything shut down around here today!

I don't remember having so many things closed. Ever. Mission kids already didn't have school scheduled for the day, but all the Missoula schools were also closed.  The tribal offices were all closed. SKC shut down at 11:00. The UofM had a snow day for the first time in decades. The local schools cancelled all sporting events for the evening and weekend, and our boys basketball team stayed overnight in Hamilton so they wouldn't have to travel. The Mall in Missoula closed early, and the church even cancelled Skate Conference which was supposed to be this Sunday. There was so much snow in Missoula they even had an avalanche in the Rattlesnake. It slid down the mountain, took out a house, and trapped an 8-year-old who was outside and the older couple who lived in the house. All three were alive when they took them to the hospital, but it took 3 hours to find them all and gt everyone out.  Avalanches are not common around here either--at least in town. It sounds like this one came down right onto Van Buren Street. A few hours after the avalanche they diverted some of the rescuers to look for two skiers who were lost up at Snowbowl.

We did get a ton of snow, too. We measured this afternoon and it was about 17 inches. A few of those inches were left over from Monday, but in many places in the yard it's twice that deep because of drifts. It wasn't too cold in Mission, so the kids had fun playing outside and just generally not being at school.

And, It sounds like we're supposed to get yet another storm Sunday. Apparently we're really having winter this year.

58: I made him carry the basket. The frolicking is all him.

But, the snow was pretty darn perfect for frolicking.

56: perfect powder

I couldn't get over how absolutely perfect the day was: warm enough for no coat, gently falling snow, piles and piles of beautiful powder. You could see each little individual snowflake. It was so hard to go to work. I really wanted to just stay home and wander around outside.

(I may have been about an hour later than I was planning to be. . .)                                                                                                                                                                  

55: Snow Day!

Another no-school-due-to-weather day in February! I'm not quite sure why we got this day off--sort of feel like they were anticipating a storm that never really made it here? It did snow 3-4 inches and it was about 15-20 degrees– definitely winter but nothing more harsh than most other snowy days. There was a huge storm in the area, and a lot of the schools did a delayed start, but both Mission and SKC had the entire day off. We took advantage of it and played outside much of it–ever unburied the sleds and went sledding in town with some of the cousins.

51: glowing hills

When I finally make it to Thursday I'm really excited to get up in the morning and hang out with Zayda and not have to drive into work.  I always plan to use the day to get caught up on reporting and grading and email and all the work that piles up when I have to work in the middle of all sorts of other people all week. But, my house is such a disaster by that point in the week I end up doing nothing but trying to catch up there. And I'm in such a bad mood by about noon I find myself violently washing dishes already thinking about how I'm not going to have any time to sleep before work the next day.  Probably working from home is not the best set up for me right now.

At least this week I achieved a three-day streak of actually cooking dinner: lasagna, enchiladas, and white chicken chili. Israel cooked the day after when he didn't have to work. Sadly, I think that may be our real mealtime record for 2014. Something to aim to beat in March, I guess.

Schizophrenic Weather

Our weather is so crazy, over the course of less than a week we had a 70 degree change...from -30 below to over 40.

But these two pictures were taken in the same spot less than 24 hours apart. It hardly even looks like the same season!

43: slush

Piles of snow, followed by rapidly increasing temperatures, equals tons and tons of slush. The kids walked home from school and were soaked by the time they made it back to the house. I sort of doubt people without four-wheel-drive could navigate in and out of our driveway.

42: snowy drive

So this is what it looked like today as soon as I turned out of my driveway to head to work.

(And then by this afternoon I think it was like 45 degrees and sunny.)

40: Snow (the perfect kind for playing in)

So I was pretty happy the snow shovel was right beside the door, ready to shovel all this white stuff, and not buried somewhere underneath it (as was the situation with the last big snow storm). However, I was not so on top of remembering where the sleds might be located.

A kayak kind of works when you can't find the sleds, right? Kind of? (Not so much....but at least they're creative.)

If I had any idea where the garbage can lid was under all this snow I think that might work as a sled. This seasonal organization is so hard.

37: too cold for...pretty much everything

We didn't get any snow days yet, but today they called everyone at about 7:00 am saying the school basically was having a day off because it was too cold to function. The boiler wasn't working and fuel lines were frozen so they had no heat, and heat seems really important when it's -24 below. (I don't actually know what the temperature was in the morning--the day before my car said -24 when I dropped the boys off at school and I think it got colder after that.)

I stayed home with the kids because I was worried about leaving them alone when it was so cold. Or mostly worried about leaving Lex, who doesn't believe anything I say. It looked beautiful and sunny and deceivingly warm, and I didn't want him getting stuck outside somewhere. He's the one who touched the hot stove because he wouldn't believe it was still hot after we turned it off.  This was last year, not when he was tiny. He did it after I told him it was still hot and we discussed at length how long it takes things to cool off and the lights built into the stove to remind people it's still hot. And then just reached up and touched it anyway. I think the blisters swayed him to side with me on this issue from now on, but we have no experience with extreme cold. Last night after an ambulance call I couldn't feel my fingers by the time I got back from the ambulance shed--about 4 blocks away--and had trouble opening the door to the house. I didn't trust him to figure out the danger of this situation by experience.

The kids did  have fun experimenting with just how cold it really was. We turned boiling water into steam, froze bubbles, and played outside in really short spans. I tried to get work done, which was much less successful than I'd like, but expected since I was also trying to keep track of eight kids. They got the boiler in the school working by the afternoon and actually had practices and the basketball game and drove the middle school girls to Ronan to play their game. I wasn't too on board with this--really sometimes it's okay to cancel things. There are very few reasons to get people out and driving around when it's that cold and I don't really think kids' sports is one of them.

34: Snow!

Woke up to huge piles of snow everywhere! It seemed to surprise people in change of keeping snow of the roads, too, because we needed 4-wheel-drive just to get around town and people were still getting stuck in the middle of the streets when I got back into town at like 4:00pm. We haven't really had winter or any now yet this year, so I'm not minding the big piles everywhere. (Though I am thankful for our all-wheel & 4-wheel drive vehicles.)

32: Every few months I decide it would be fun if I had a nice picture of all my kids together...

and then I make a bad decision like agreeing to take the photo by a nearly frozen creek, which of course the two youngest boys are already falling into (in the background of this picture) before we've all even made it to the creek.  And now this photo here is the only one we have without someone pouting because they are soaked and freezing and wondering why I would come up with this dumb idea to take pictures of everyone all wet in the snow...because clearly that was my plan.

31: Snow! Finally!

We haven't had any real snow since the one storm we had back near the beginning of December. The kids were pretty excited to actually have snow to play in after school today. It makes traveling a little slower and more slippery, but I'm pretty glad to actually have winter, too.

28:glow

The light has been so cool lately. The color is all off in this picture . . . for some reason my camera thought it should turn on some sort of red night vision to capture it, but other than the hue, this is just as it looked. The sky was just like this--except blue--when normally it would be all dark.

24: frozen

Ninepipes

21: winter wonderland

I don't know if we'll ever have snow this winter, but at least the occasionally frosty days remind us what season it is.