::freezing::

Luckily for us it's not freezing anymore right now--well, at least not the way it was.
The week of my birthday had some crazy weather. My birthday was nice and temperate, but the next day a storm blew in. My parents were flying out that afternoon, and it was truly questionable whether they were going to make it out or not. Lucky for me since Kris was flying out to see his parents that weekend they drove our car down there and parked it in long term parking. It was very nice that I didn't have to drive down and back with the boys, since it was terrible driving conditions and seemed very unsafe.
Max had a two hour delay for school and it was so darn cold I decided to just keep him home so I didn't have to take the baby out in the freezing.

Anyway, they made it luckily--though I think there was some white-knuckle driving in there.
That night it got freezing freezing cold, like well below zero, which is unusual for out here. School was cancelled the next day and we discovered that our pilot light had gone out. We have radiant floor heating and it takes a long time to cool down and a long time to warm up. By the time we realized the furnace wasn't running it was way cold in the house and it took forever and a day to warm up.
We spent a lot of time in the living room by the fire and we dressed Sand really warmly.


Max got out every toy he owned in an effort to entertain himself. He did well, but we were getting pretty tired of the still cold house by the end of the day. We braved the snow that night to go and grab a couple of burgers at a new place with FRY SAUCE!

The next day there was another two hour school delay. I ran into work after I dropped Max off and I got a automated phone call from the school district saying that all the students were warm and safe, but there was a statewide gas shortage and that they were going to close up school as soon as all classes were over. Turned out there was a true shortage and several cities in the state were completely without gas and some without power for days that week! Luckily we were fine. We did close the office friday though, in order to contribute to saving gas for cold homes. School was cancelled too.

It was just a crazy winter week. Kind of fun to have such crazy stuff going on, and lucky that we were warm, but I did feel bad for all the cold people without working heaters. Things like that make us grateful for what we have, and inspire us to make sure we have enough wood to stay warm if we happen to be left with only our fireplace for heat!

Can't wait for spring!

::i know you're wondering::

I know you're all wondering what we do around here when it's cold and gloomy outside. (Like the entire winter.) I know it's just eating away at you. So I'm going to relieve your mind and hip you to some of the stuff we've been doing.
First of all, it's dang cold here. When I was in UT it was around 40 degrees. And it was nice. The sun shone and when I went out I hardly felt like I needed a coat (some of the time.) Out here the air is wet and damp and heavy and 40 degrees is SO cold. Yesterday it was 40 and being outside for 5 minutes was painful.
So the jist of all that is, we don't spend much time outside once it gets cold. I just can't take it.

We tease Sultan (well, not me, but Max.) He loves to try to get Sul to chase him around and stuff like that. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

So we get creative.

Well, Sultan doesn't get creative. He just pretty much sits around and sleeps all day. But others come up with weird things to do.

This particular activity was extra cool because it combined creativity and teasing Sultan. At some point Max called Sul to come under the table, which he somehow did. Then he got really interested in the sucker Max was eating. It was pretty funny to watch. It entertained me at least.

Max practices guitar. Let me explain this a bit. "Practices" might be too strong a word. Max practicing equals about 10% playing the songs in his book and 90% playing the guitar as loudly and obnoxiously as is humanly possible. It also involves dropping the pick inside the guitar at least once every 10 minutes. Entertaining.

We play with friends, animate and inanimate. (Though more often it's the inanimate.)

Like these guys for example. We also take pictures of friends--sometimes group family pictures--monkeys, jungle animals, fish family.

We watch movies. Fun movies. Like this one Max got for his birthday.

It's a bunch of the old Pluto cartoons. They're pretty fun to watch. Especially if two Plutos are watching with us.

We do laundry. We clean. We cook. That's not the fun stuff though, so we won't dwell on it.

So there you go. Is your curiosity satisfied? Now if only spring will come soon we might not go crazy.......

::::

Kris and I are in Santa Fe, NM getting some business done. It's snowy out here! This is for all youse guys who think that NM is hot and full of palm trees. :)

::disgruntled drainpipe::

It's too cold and dreary, even for drainpipes.

::finished::

Check it out:

This is what I did with those cute snowflakes.
My original idea was to hang them from the ceiling of the kitchen. But I needed tons and tons to do that, because I would've wanted them thick. And the ceiling in our house is a bit low, so I was afraid Kris would be banging his head on them all the time.
And there was this perfect overhang at the window that was just begging for some fun.

So there they hang. Those two you see that look yellow aren't really that yellow. They're just kind of off white. When I realized how they looked compared to the other yarns I didn't make any more of those.

I think they're really fun. They make the winter seem just a little more festive. And you can't really tell, but most of them are made with yarn that has a little bit of a sparkle to it.
I like their silhouettes:

I got the pattern from here. They look really hard and complicated, but they're really very simple. And they're fast too, once you make one or two. I cranked out like 8 the other night when we were watching a (dumb) movie. And it's easy to improvise with them too. I came up with two other patterns based on the original that I really liked.
So try them. It's fun!!

In other news Kris has been tying a lot of fly fishing flies. He's getting good at it. He's working on flies for salt water fishies.
They're a lot bigger than the freshwater ones I'm used to seeing.
ALSO, Kris fixed my stained glass lamp. You can see it in a couple of the pictures in the beginning of this post. We got it for our wedding from some wonderful friends and I love it. One of our last moves did it in though. The post was totally broken. It wasn't of the highest quality to begin with, and four moves in four years was just too much. Anyway, Kris attempted to fix it a while back and it turned out badly--gorilla glue + fingers = bad news. But the other day he had an epiphany and fixed the dang thing with a dowel. I'm so happy to have it back! We need it out here in the winter. It's so dark and gloomy almost all of the time.
Anyway, I know my husband loves me when he solves a nearly unsolvable problem for me and doesn't give up on it.
That could light up anybody's january.

::work in progress::

::Frozen no More::

We finally made it home, yesterday at about 6PM. Finally. Yesterday was a long day. Not only did we miss our connecting flight on sunday night which meant we were rescheduled for a flight monday at noon, but they also delayed that flight two hours. It was annoying. But luckily Max was safe and sound with friends, so that made things a lot less stressful than they might've been otherwise.
We were actually happy about the delay because we got to see Lisa (Kris's cousin). It was so fun to see her. She came and picked us up and took us to breakfast. It was so nice to spend some time just chatting. Let's do it again soon Lisa!

I love this next one:

Finally when we got off the flight we went to wait for our luggage. But there it was, already sitting there waiting for us! Turned out they had sent our luggage on the 8AM flight, so it had been sitting there on the bag carousel for hours, just waiting for somebody to walk off with it. That made me mad.
After that we hurried to pick up Max, who was very glad to see us, and also rushed to pick up our red car that was in the shop getting fixed. Phew.

When we finally got home we walked into the house and were hit by a blast of arctic air when the door opened. It seemed the furnace wasn't working! The house was SO COLD. I had to run straight to school to take a test (which was not fun), so Kris called the landlord about the furnace. Unfortunately they couldn't fix it last night, so after I got home we all snuggled into our big bed and slept the night under an electric blanket next to the space heater. It was nice except for Max deciding he needed to sleep sideways and kicking me in the head all night.

Getting up was hard though. It was like camping or something. I was scared to get out of bed.
Anyway, the guy came this afternoon and fixed the furnace. Evidently a bird had flown down there and gotten rather stuck. So finally Max and I were able to come out of the bedroom where we'd been holed up next to the space heater. Starting to go crazy.
I'll tell you what though, next time your heat goes out make sure you have some peanut m&ms in the cupboard. They taste awesome frozen. Yum yum.
It was almost impossible to do anything in the house when it was that cold, it was kind of crazy. Oh well. At least we're warm now.

So I have some fun pictures from our RI trip, and some impressions, I'll get to those soon hopefully!
I'll leave you with this picture. I think it's beautiful, but it makes me cold. Isn't it just so wintry and cold looking? Brrrr.....