Ice Trap

No School Today

With temperatures outside in the 20s, this snow is not likely to melt much today. So today, Tuesday, is a snow day for us. What will I do with it? I don't know, but right now it feels pretty luxurious. I think I will go upstairs, pour myself another cup of coffee and pop a Trader Joe's blueberry waffle into the toaster.

Bamboo in Snow

The bamboo made a lovely sound as the wind brushed across it's snow laden leaves. I am glad I took this picture last night because this morning there is no snow on the leaves.

Snow Gal

So, after the game I was irked at myself for sitting in front of the TV for 3 hours while all this beautiful snow was blanketing the ground outside. Chris thinks I am a little nutty about snow and I suppose he is right. There are probably not many middle aged women who love to make snowmen (unless it's with their grandkids). But there I was, from 8:30 till nearly 10:00 at night, making this snow gal. It used up nearly every flake of the snow in our upper yard.

More Snow

Well, Seattle schools were open on Monday so off to work we trudged. Then, if you were watching Monday night football (as I was) you could see the white stuff coming down again with more vigor. Being as the Seahawks were playing the Packers it seemed quite ironic to see snow on Qwest Field. It looked more like Green Bay than it did Seattle. For those of you who wonder, whenever the Hawks play the Packers I am a Packer fan so you know that the final score kind of stung although the game was really pretty fun to watch up until the last 7 minutes. I took this photo of our deck rail at half time.

Snow!

OK, it may be bit hard to see in this picture but it did start snowing at 3:30 in our neighborhood and that means there is potential for a snow day tomorrow. Yippee!

Thanksgiving

This year Thanksgiving was at our house and we were joined by our friends the Kornowskes and my teaching partner, Sharon. We stuffed ourselves and then introduced Sharon to a short version of the dominoe game Mexican Train.
Friday morning at 7:30am I braved the crowds
and did a little shopping at Southcenter. It is SO luxurious to have a 4 day weekend, especially one that starts with a feast. The leftovers can carry us almost all the way to Monday.

Mole

Now I've heard people say that they had mice in their house and we even had rats in the attic of a former residence. But a mole? A couple weeks ago I went into my laundry room to toss the clothes from the wash machine into the dryer and much to my shock the dark fuzzy blob on the floor that I thought was a fallen sock, MOVED! That's no sock I shouted, it's a MOLE!
I scampered out of there pretty darn quickly and let Chris do the capturing. After this photo he released the little guy into our neighbors' yard.

We are not at all sure how the mole got into the laundry room although we speculate that he crawled in on a day when the weather was warmer and we kept the downstairs door open as we did yard work.

Lake Michigan

Chicago View from Navy Pier

Navy Pier

See that big black building? It's luxury condos.

Ferris Wheel

Our Monday flight back to Seattle wasn't until early afternoon so I had time to take a brisk walk down to Navy Pier. Aside from a few dog walkers and joggers the place was pretty well deserted. It was really kind of spooky because carnival music was broadcasting out to the open air like it was a festive day in mid summer.

Yes, this is still at McDonalds. They have this Corvette and Elvis Presley memorabilia in a glassed in display room that is in the parking lot.

Lounging at McDonalds