It’s snowing. Why do we live here?
Are you kidding me?
Category Archives: Weather
Sledding in what little snow we have!
The kids have a great time sledding at the church by us, but we wanted to take them somewhere new. This is at Hunt Club community center.
Tubing with the fam!
We all went tubing today at Hanson Hills!! I had never done it before but I am all about NOT having to walk up the hill!! I hadn’t been inside the building in probably 25 years…plus they’ve totally updated it…so how can it still smell exactly the same?!
Tubing was so much fun…but everyone else in Grayling had the same idea and there were too many people (IMO) so we only got three runs in! It only took about 10 minutes max to ride up and go down but they’re were so many people we were waiting 15 minutes in line. (The tow rope also broke for about 15 minutes—THANKS, MARIE!—so that didn’t help.)
Katie only went down twice—she got too freaked out that she was going to come out of the tube. I could actually understand—you really got going fast and I was initially a bit freaked out. I went down once with Owen, once with Tom, and then the last trip with Tom, Owen, Doug, and Robert!
Thanks to Gramma Jean for taking pics with my phone!!
Happy Hallo…Christmas?
Scout camping weekend
So long story short… Owen has kind of joined scouts. A few of his baseball friends (and dads) are involved and of course they talk about how fun it is and of course Owen wants to do fun things with them…so Tom and I talked and I basically told him I don’t want to be involved so if HE wants to do it with Owen, be my guest. 😄 So they went to a few meetings and then it was time for the big weekend camping trip to Starved Rock, a local State Park campground. The whole family was invited but I opted to stay home for some alone time and Tom was looking forward to taking both kids.
DAY 1
So come Friday afternoon they were all packed and ready to go! I even got Owen out of school a bit early since they had a 2.5-hour drive to get there.
I’m not sure they have enough stuff for 1.5 days (Friday night, Saturday, leaving really early Sunday). We borrowed a tent and then had to take sleeping bags, air mattresses (because how can they sleep on the ground like animals), pillows, backpacks, rain gear, etc.
Fast forward to later that evening when I asked for proof of life and got a text that they (and some friends) were at a local bar because by the time they got there and got set up the camp kitchen was closed. But as it would happen, a marine was having his retirement party so they all got invited to a free buffet!
And then later they did actually sit around a fire for a bit.
DAY 2
Tom taught the boys how to fold flags.
Getting ready to go on a hike by themselves! (The parents followed behind enough to be unseen but still keep an eye on them.) They also took pack lunches.
And then I got this from Tom about noon…and he said he was contemplating packing up and coming home.
I told him to suck it up—he wanted to go camping. 😜
So this is what things looked like later when everyone was gathered under our awning while it rained cats and dogs.
And everyone ended up back at the bar again for dinner—and to get out of the storm. I may have gotten a few THIS REALLY SUCKS texts.
DAY 3
They were up and on the road by 7 Sunday morning so they could get home in time for the last baseball playoffs game. (Our team was so awesome that they won the first game of the playoffs without the coach, two assistant coaches, and three players who were all camping!!) They pulled in shortly before 9:30 and I immediately proceeded to do laundry because everything was wet and muddy.
Tom’s overall feeling on the weekend was it totally sucked because of the bad weather but the kids had fun and he wants to do it again…though maybe in a pop-up or something bigger. The kids did have a blast and can’t wait to go again.
Baseball in the rain. Yay?
Katie’s Curriculum Night & Tornado Warning
Parents who do their kids school projects for them? UGH. Our second graders had to create a square about themselves/their family. Are you kidding me with these?! I mean she they’re GORGEOUS and amazing but c’mon.
The letter Katie left for me:
All the things she references are other projects hanging around the room:
Baseball sheet:
Her shirt (her goals):
And she wins the most organized desk over Owen:
When we all walked in it was sunny and nice. Then we were in the basement and couldn’t see because it was getting dark out. Then everyone’s phones started going off…
Then there’s nothing like being sent into the hallway to wait out a tornado warning! There’s a first time for everything!
I checked in with Tom because they had been at baseball practice and he said it had been cancelled so they were actually already at home…eating dinner in the basement. And Owen was showing Tom what to do in case of a tornado. (Interestingly he wasn’t nearly as scared as he used to be with wind issues. So that’s a bonus.)
They ended up cancelling the rest of curriculum night as we had had ended up waiting for like 30 minutes. Thankfully our teacher had been about done.
Alexa lies.
There’s no way it’s 65° out here. 😒 (Getting one last walk in before the birthday craziness of the next two days starts.)
I thought it was supposed to be summer?
Yet I am wearing my WINTER COAT and GLOVES at a baseball game tonight because it’s cold and rainy. Ugh.
Snow on April 27 is just stupid.
Here’s what I think about it (as we were leaving the restaurant after dinner with friends).
Illinois, I am DONE with you.
It was gorgeous today. But look at the forecast for tomorrow.
SERIOUSLY?!
A friend said she saw it as thought her app was wonky.
Damn Illinois weather. I’m DONE with snow.
What’s the first thing you think when you see this picture? CERTAINLY NOT THE FACT THAT IT’S MID-APRIL (just guessing). I should be used to Mother Nature’s cruel tricks having grown up in Northern Michigan (Grayling, Michigan to be exact)…but after having lived in multiple WARMER places over the past 18 years, I just can’t stand snow anymore. I’ll allow it (😂) around Christmas (because I’ve done Christmas in flip flops with the A/C on and while I like the novelty it didn’t feel like Christmas at all) but anything beyond New Year’s (okay, maaaaaybe Valentine’s Day) is pushing it. But MID-APRIL is, well, insanity.
So basically what this snow means to me is 1) I’m listening to Christmas music🎄🎶 and 2) our decision to retire somewhere with 99% less snow is now 100% certain.
Artsy exercise photo.
It’s so gorgeous out right now I figured a walk was absolutely called for. Before it snows later this week. 😖
(I randomly took about 20 photos while I was walking and this single photo was the only good one!!)
It was a wee bit windy.
THE LESSON I LEARNED TODAY
Just don’t ever shovel. EVER. I wanted to get the slush off the end of the driveway. I was out there for like five minutes. Picked up like three shovels of slush. Really hurt my back. Like can barely walk. #neveragain #ihatewinter
Oh and yes, I know the “right” way to shovel…I was just stupid and didn’t think five minutes would hurt.
Snow. Blurgh.
I certainly wasn’t expecting this when we walked out of Costco…especially considering it actually felt warm(ish) today.
It’s a bit icy.
Polar Vortex Day 2
When the entire outside is a freezer you take advantage (chocolate covered caramel corn).
You also take advantage of cool science tricks!! I’ve always wanted to do this but we’ve never been anywhere it got cold enough (I think it needs to be like a minimum of -20°). The kids weren’t nearly as excited as I was (heaven forbid we interrupt a damn Xbox game) but we did it twice because it was so cool!
Trying out an almost life-size Connect Four. It held their interest for maybe 30 minutes.
Then how about a game of GUESS WHAT’S IN THE CUP ON DAY TWO OF POLAR VORTEX SNOW DAYS AND THE KIDS ARE GETTING ON EACH OTHER’S NERVES.
If you guessed a margarita you’d be correct. If you didn’t, I don’t think you really know me.
Polar Vortex Day 1
We knew it was coming (school was even called off in advance) but it was still a shock to see it. Feels like -45°.
I stayed in bed because the kids can fend for themselves (and Tom had a late start) but eventually Katie came up to cuddle for a few minutes.
Then Tom went to work and I honestly hadn’t been planning to leave the house but we were invited down to the neighbor’s house for lunch and to just hang out…so we did. The kids had fun playing, we had a yummy lunch and birthday cake (for Enzo’s birthday), and I actually helped Stacey organize her pantry (yes, that’s fun for me!).
When we got home we turned our new heater on…and someone loved it. 🙂
And even though the furnace was working and it said it was 70° in the house I was still cold so pretty much sat under blankets next to the heater…
The polar vortex can bite me.
All of the windows in this house are horrible and leak air. We have tried covering them with the insulating plastic wrap but this is what happens. It’s useless.
So I thought I’d try this hack: bubble wrap. Not perfect by any stretch but doable. (Guess what? It didn’t work.)
And I did the same thing in the master bedroom to my window plus put a towel over the crack because the cold air was just pouring in.
The house couldn’t get past 64° with the furnace running all day (it was 61° when I got up, and it should have been 72°). Long story short—after some texts to the landlord and an HVAC guy—our problem was the furnace filters!! We had expensive 3M allergy filters and he said those were the worst thing you could use and to take it out immediately. We did, and the house heated up to 68 within two hours. Lesson learned.
Blizzard!
They were predicting a blizzard Sunday night but we didn’t believe them.
And then it started snowing thick, wet heavy snow.
And then the kids went to bed.
And then school was cancelled Sunday evening.
And then Tom got the call he had a late start.
And then the power flicked off and on about four times over an hour.
And then it went off for good about midnight. Hoo boy.
Katie woke up during one of the brief outages because the backup power supplies were beeping and we were running around trying to turn things off… So we told her there was no school and she could sleep in…and that daddy would be here in the morning.
The power was still off in the morning so Tom built a fire in the fireplace and it did a decent job of keeping the living room comfortable (70°). Unfortunately the fireplace is meant for looks and not heating so the flue doesn’t really work so the fire burns fast and hot and we went through wood like crazy (thankfully we had lots of wood from the free stuff I got this summer). We assumed that everyone was without power, but all our friends had power. Turns out, there were about 250,000 people in the greater metro area that lost power!
I hadn’t seen snow this heavy and wet in a long time—these bushes are normally chest-high and completely away from the sidewalk. This morning? About knee-high and covering most of the sidewalk!
The kids played outside most of the day with friends…moving from yard to yard and house to house. They had to dry their snow gear in front of the fire.
Katie kept trying to use things that needed electricity and wondering why they didn’t work. I cooked on the gas stove. As time wore on, we eventually brought out a cooler to put some of the refrigerator stuff in outside since it was getting warm. (It was freezing outside so the stuff would be just right in a cooler.) The freezers were okay because we hadn’t opened them.
The day wasn’t too bad while it was light out—there was lots of animal cuddling warmth—
but then once it got dark (at 4pm!) we had to go pull out all our candles!
We kept checking our power status on the website and this is the only thing we saw all day:
It was frustrating. But I was glad I was still able to use my phone and stay connected. (Using Low Power Mode and turning the Brightness way down reaaaaally conserves battery life. Plus I used one of our external battery packs.)
You know the animals are desperate for attention (or warmth) when they cuddle together on me. Usually it’s one or the other because one kicks the other one out.
At bedtime it was a chilly 52° upstairs so we got out lots of extra blankets and sent the kids to bed a little early. A friend invited us to her house the following day if the power didn’t come back on. Just as we were getting into bed under our six layers (and me in top and bottom long johns, pants, and a hoodie—complete with the hood up!) the power came back on about 9:30! So we had a mad dash throughout the house to make sure everything was turned off (somehow both of Owen’s bedroom lights were on?!) and the furnace turned on. It had been about 22 hours without power.
I don’t think we’ve ever been without power for that long…and we lived through 25 years of Michigan winters and a few hurricane systems in North Carolina. I don’t want to do it again.
The pathetic snowman
It looked a little better when it was built fresh, but I forgot to get a pic then…so we get this pathetic view.
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…
No. No no no. NOOOOOOOO!! It’s too early. I mean I really don’t ever want it (maybe two weeks around Christmas and New Year) but 11/9 is way too early.
That said, the kids were EXCITED. Owen woke me up to tell me and when I woke up Katie and told her, she literally jumped out of bed and ran to the window.
If you need me, I’ll be bundled up under blankets on the couch with the dog.
Guess what’s happening right now?
The upside? I can now play Christmas music.
It was just very minor flurries—nothing even stuck—but it’s enough to pass my test!!
Well, that was a nice two-hour nap.
Storms are pushing through which means Maggie was attacking her crate trying to get out. Which means she woke me up and now I get to deal with her until the storms pass. How do I do this? By closing all the bedroom doors and going downstairs to “sleep” on the couch so she’ll hopefully keep close to me instead of waking everyone else up. And then Charlie joined, too. Needless to say I don’t get much sleep.
Maggie slept with us tonight.
So it was raining and lightly storming again when it was bedtime. We put Maggie in her crate and went upstairs. Within minutes she was clawing madly at her crate again making all sorts of racket. We went down to check on her and her paws were already bloody. 🙁 We couldn’t leave her in there so we thought maybe if we put her in our room in a different crate it would be better. But first we had to bandage her paws. (I didn’t think when I bought the self-adhesive bandages I’d be using them on the dog first.) Then we put her in and tried to go to bed. Nope. She clawed like mad to get out of that crate, too. And knocked her bandages off. So we had to clean her up (again) and bandage her up (again, better this time) and figured the only way this was going to work was to just let her sleep with us. We figured we wouldn’t get any sleep because she moves constantly… and snores loudly. But amazingly the weather calmed right as we were getting back into bed and she layed down and didn’t move all night.
OMG! Poor Maggie!!
I went to bed quite late after staying up to work (normal for me lately) so I was in bed and heard some weird screeching noise downstairs and thought it was a cat or something and ignored it. Then it happened again, louder. I couldn’t place what the noise was—it was really very strange and nothing I’d heard before—so I went to investigate. I thought maybe the raccoon was in the window and both cats were squawking. I turned on the living room light and HOLY F’ING SHITBALLS!!
Maggie’s head was sideways, squeezed halfway between the metal bars on the door and side of the crate, and she was drooling and wheezing and “screaming.” She probably couldn’t breathe. I’m guessing she tried to push her way out (why?!) and got stuck.
I opened the door and pulled her out and petted her and she seemed okay but just freaked out. She eventually let me hold her on my lap and after awhile I pulled her bed out (blood splatters—not sure if it was from her claws or teeth or what), wiped up the floor, and tried to put her back in. She went but she wasn’t happy. I went back up to bed and before I even got settled she was manically pawing at her crate again.
So I’m sleeping on the couch with her at 2:30am. 😣
I’m glad she’s okay, of course, as this could have ended very differently had I not heard her or gone to check.
But still. This was just the topper on a mostly shitty day.
HOLY SHIT WE’RE AWAKE NOW!!
It had been storming all night—lots of thunder and lightning—with some being extremely loud (close). Then about 6:20am I was awoken by THE. LOUDEST. NOISE. I’ve ever heard in my LIFE. It literally jolted me out of bed and instantly set my heart racing. Obviously it was a bolt of lightning but I didn’t think much about it other than Wow, that must have been pretty close. I knew Katie would be in our room pretty quickly so waited for her. Yep, within a minute. So while we were cuddling (and I was trying to fall back to sleep), Owen came up to ask if we’d looked outside. Well, no…I was in bed. He excitedly said we had to look at the tree. So I got up and looked out our second-story window and…
Well then. That would certainly explain the super loud crazy lightning strike we heard! YIKES!
Then Tom came up and we ooohed and aaahed and then we thought “Hmmm. Maybe we should check our electronics.”
Yeah. Most everything in the living room was dead. The amazing 55″ Pioneer plasma TV that Dad and Lin had handed down to us nine years ago (that they don’t make anymore). The 2-year-old Yamaha receiver. The lifetimed TiVo. The new-in-January Roku HD. The Xfinity cable box. The cable card.
Oh! And two UPSs/surge protectors (the damage came in through the HDMI cable so the units didn’t protect against that surge).
Needless to say that is not how we envisioned our morning starting.
And how sad is this? Our master bedroom TV moved down so Tom could troubleshoot.
Our first thought was making an insurance claim because the damages totaled about $3000… But it’s always nerve-wracking making a claim on something that isn’t major (and while this felt major, it wasn’t catastrophic). So we just went about gathering receipts and prepping just in case.
What a difference a week makes.
Last week at soccer, winter coats and freezing. This week, 75° and sweating. I’ll take it.
How Katie drinks from her water bottle. 🙂
Illinois gets drunk, too!
Saturday was so cold we were wearing winter coats, hats, and gloves at a soccer game. Today? I just turned the air conditioning on. Illinois, I’m glad to see you get just as drunk as Michigan in the spring time.