Snow Day!

We miss out on a few things by homeschooling.  Snow days being one of them, it hardly matters what the weather is doing, if the kids are working, they just keep working.  Same thing for holidays.  But yesterday, practice got cancelled and Matt got to stay home from work because of SNOW!  It was great!  We slept in until nearly 10 and then had breakfast and bundled up.  I lasted about 20 minutes and then came in to make snow cream.  All we had was chocolate almond milk, so I used that and shredded coconut to cut down on the sugar.  I forgot to tell anyone it had coconut in it, so it was dubbed chocolate chokeonut.  I guess chewy strips in your ice cream can be a little disconcerting...especially considering the MASSIVE ladybug infestation this winter.

If you don't have ladybugs, then gloat.  They are HORRIBLE.  I caulked EVERY hole in this house, including around the lights in the ceiling and I pulled down the trim and caulked next to the ceiling and put the trim back up.  I did that in EVERY room that has tongue and groove walls or ceilings-which is every room but the kitchen.  They STILL just pour in from...somewhere.  I have sealed off the vents since we are not using the central unit this winter, I have plastic on the inside and outside of nearly every window PLUS they are all caulked and most have fresh paint and/or wood from my repair spree last fall thinking I would keep the ladybugs out.  *sigh*  I can vacuum the ceiling fan and then go vacuum the window and come back and the ceiling fan has 6 more ladybugs on it.  They roost on my toothbrush, they fall into pots of food or our drinks, they die upon contact with...any surface.  There are dead lady bugs in the carpet, on every window sill, around the toilet, under EVERY light, in the stove eyes, on top of the wood stove, floating in the dog water and the toilet, crawling around on my pillows (zombie ladybugs). And I vacuum 3-4-5 times a day.  Sometimes I get up in the middle of the night and vacuum because I can SMELL them.  To say I hate them is a mass understatement.  And I can't figure out where they are coming IN from.  If we had the money, I'd screen every opening in the attic.  They smell awful, they BITE and they suck in general.

Anyway, I was talking about the snow, but like damn near everything else this winter, the ladybugs showed up.














When we got up yesterday morning, the ground was covered.  I guessed 3-4 inches from first glance.  We are trained spotters, so Matt hauled out the guidelines for measuring snow (I KNOW, I was impressed too) and we had 5 inches.  For the record, the guidelines involve placing (not shoving) a ruler into the snow until it touches the ground, then leaning over to read the depth at ground level and not looking at it from above, at an angle.  Also, you need to hold the ruler at a 90 angle from the ground, so you don't skew the results by having it tilted.  And you need to take the readings from several open locations, not around buildings because of drifts.  SO many rules.  But, we did it and reported our findings and later on the NWS website it said, "Report from trained spotters in XX, 5 inches of accumulation".  We were geeked.

Not as geeked as Chan, who, for reasons she is keeping to herself, got up and dressed in her cosplay outfit...she has yet to tell me WHO she is cosplaying...and went outside to build a Cthulhu snowman.  She used...well, she used catfood to make the face and the dogs ran over and ate its face off.  And one cat was in on it.

We smell catfood!

Defending snothulu with knitting needles!  Where'd she stash those?

*poke* 

Repairs are made while hopes remain high that some of the sticks will turn into catfood again!

She will be 2 in November.
This is all that keeps us going, the overwhelming hope that she will settle down and be a decent dog.
Only 9 months to go.
Do you SEE her crazy eyes?

Speaking of cats, I made them a tarp tent over their little nook on the porch and plugged in a small heater that I fixed so it would not fall over.  It was quite toasty in there out of the wind with a little heat added.  It's around 65 in there. When I checked before bed, there were cats nestled in the cat boxes.

Matt went in to work this morning for a couple of hours (but no one else did), he's on his way home now with pizza, after having returned our library books and picking up some drinks.  Snow Day double score!