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Oh well. So why am I living in Minnesota? It's stinkin' cold here!! We haven't had a full day of school all week. Monday we had completely off at both schools. The blizzard was kind of a flop, but the blowing and drifting in the country still sucked, and the windchills were nasty. More snow on Monday night and continued windchill pushed the Tuesday starts back two hours all over the region. Yesterday, the kids' school ran on time but mine stayed 2 hours late. Diesel buses and children fare better if the sun is actually up, even if it is still blessed cold. By noon yesterday, my district, and several others in the area had already set today's start times back. Most of the rest followed suit by the 10:00 news last night. In this part of the country, almost every district is consolidated to some extent, which means lots more rural routes and shady township roads. With winds, some of them plug back up as soon as they get plowed open. Today as I look out the window, it seems pretty still, but holy cow, the "actual" temperature is -24. Blech. Usually we get one or two "Alberta Clippers" every year, and the severe cold is short-lived (after that it's just cold). We seem to have had more than our fair share of bitter cold this year, and more snow than the past few years. Out and about people are either complaining that it's "the worst winter in several years" or "the first normal winter we've had in several years." The latter is usually heard from snowmobilers and ice fishermen. As I drove home from school around the lake, I noted that it must really be cold, as there were no ice fishermen out, but as I got to the parking area at the boat landing, I saw the DNR hadn't plowed yet. I'm sure if there had been parking spots, the fishermen would have been out. Fishhouses stay warm. I suppose I had better scoot mine out to the bus. Snowsuits ahoy.

Weeee're back! Hooray and hoopla! Let's see what's happened around here lately...

Thanksgiving was nice. I worked, but that was actually kinda fun, spending the day with the residents who chose not to go home for the holiday. Then I met my family at the in-laws, and we had a nice visit. Friday we left to have the first Christmas gathering of the year, with my side of the family. We took family pictures Saturday morning, so I look forward to getting those sent out. Later in the afternoon was presents and feasting. Check my homepage for pictures of sis and I in our Christmas thongs. We have such progressive parents! (these pics disappeared in a server dump. We had them on over our jeans. Ha ha, aren't we clever...)

For those of you who haven't heard, the first snowstorm of the season (not blizzard, you need more cold and higher winds to create actual "blizzard" conditions) dumped nearly 30" of snow on us. Luckily, I had the day off, so we spent the day digging out of the gunk the snowplow dumped in front of the cars, and doing some major house cleaning and plastic hanging. We also got to battle the basement floor drain. One of the joys of potty training is teaching the kid how much paper to use. Thing 3 still needs a little work in this area, as she clogged the main sewer line with paper. Yeeks.

Well, off to feed the brood. Take care.

I am sick to death of our domain being down!!! Argh! We're registered with Network Solutions and they haven't solved the (%&*& problem their tech guy caused in the first place!!! The idjit looked up the wrong name server IP numbers for our ISP. Because of the wrong numbers, our email is down, so they can't send us a confirmation email for the correction order. AAAAAAAAAH. Bloody nincompoops. Think we'll be paying register.com a little visit.

Last night we set the alarm and woke the kids about 4:30 to view the meteor showers. It was well worth it. The kids actually got up without much grumbling once we told them what was up. We had a nice time. We snuggled against the house on our third floor rug porch and looked skyward. It was a clear moonless night, out here in a tiny town with few streetlights, we had a perfect view. God really knows what he's doing.

OK, I have to try posting again. Crap.

Last night I stood in line for the first time in my life to see a movie. We packed the kids in to see Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. It was worth the wait. They condensed it just a bit, but it was very true to the book and amazingly well done. The only complaint I have is that they condensed a bit too much on the kids' learning at Hogwarts. Harry Potter is a typical kids' book in that the kids solve dilemmas that the grown-ups apparently can't handle themselves, a common theme in children's lit. However, in the Harry Potter books, the author does a fairly nice job of building the characters up over the course of the novel so you can see how they learned the skills they use to solve the problems. They don't cover that aspect as well in the movie. Henson's Creature Shop does its' usual bang-up job on it's costuming and puppetry. Only gripe there is that the Goblins' hands were obviously gloves in that they could barely function, and were featured in rather close camera angles. It was a pleasant surprise to see ST:TNG's Rob Legato featured so prominently in the credits. Nice to know the crew is still working :). Anyway, highly recommended by me and my family. It does help to live in a town where you can take 4 kids and 3 adults to a movie for $24. And, wonder of wonders, our little bohunk theatre opened the movie, and will also be opening The Lord of the Rings. I am so pumped.

So that began our first family consumer night in a long time. I almost missed it. I was scheduled to work my last night at the hunting camp, but when I got there she said it was looking to be a very slow night, so I went home again and got to join my family at the movie. Anyway, the cinema is in the same congregate entertainment facility (ie: strip mall that houses less retail) as the bowling alley, so I wandered in to see if they had any lanes left for Rolling Thunder (bowling with disco lights and loudly thumping music), and, b'golly, they did for once, so we went right from Harry Potter to the Bowling Alley, and didn't get to bed 'til late. Thing 2 had a friend sleep over, and while she and the friend behaved fairly well, her sisters were obnoxious, and drew the wrath of the father on more than one occasion. I fear (?) we will have no sleepovers at our house for a while.

We used the nice weather today to move some of the Deadbeats' stuff out of the old house. I have come to the conclusion that these guys were just idiots. While packing today, hubby comes across a fannypack with Deadbeat #2's papers, bat pipe, scale, and stash holder, and his identification. *Blink* "Here, Officer, it'll be easier to book me for all this contraband if you just check my driver's license and fishing license there. The spelling's correct." I shake my head. No wonder he's divorced.

I am getting irritated without my email. We are in the process of moving our domain to the new ISP. Thought we could get by keeping our old mailboxes for a small fee, but the nice folks at the corporate office of our old ISP didn't agree with the prices set by the local dudes, who appreciate the business generated by Firestorm writing sites to be hosted on their servers, so we said "Thanks, no." and moved. However, Hubs had typed in some wrong numbers at the domain registration doohickey, and by the time he changed it, the old email was down, and therefore there was no valid email for the registry people to respond to, so they couldn't verify the change. Argh. So we had to FAX an internet company. Yikes. What's wrong with this picture? Anyway, email should be up again soon. *sigh*

Bruno has a friend here tonight from Finland, and they are having far too much fun with the new Karaoke CD-G machine (my early x-mas present--earns hubby back any points lost on that Harry Potter thing earlier) so I'd better go supervise...
G'nite!

I actually have come here a couple times over the past few days to update, only to discover I haven't much to say. Bummer.

Locally, the news we're paying most attention to is that of MLB threatening to contract two teams. If terrorism wasn't what it is at this point, I'd refer to it as such. Corporate terrorism. MLB saying "Give us what we want (new ballpark) or we'll take your team." A rough translation: "I'll take my ball and go home!" Friend John (as found in the Daynotes link thingy over on the side there) had a couple good posts on this issue in last week's blog, go check it out if you want some intelligent insight and interesting theory on the whole mess.

My biggest argument against building a publicly funded stadium is: we already done did that. It's called the Metrodome. If you don't like it, you should have planned it better 20 years ago, you twits!. Right now it's a perfectly functional building that doesn't rake in the revenues at the rate The Twins and Vikings want to see. Well, boo-farking-hoo. I'm still pissed about Met Center. The building was less than 25 years old, and they ripped it down after losing a hockey team because it didn't have enough LUXURY boxes, and would be more profitable as a parking lot and future development for Mall of America. Arrrgh! Then, the very next season, after women's hockey became "official " in the state of Minnesota educational system, they're bitching there's not enough Ice space in the metro area for college and HS kids to play hockey. Well, you just ripped down a major league hockey arena you idiots!!! There was so much more use left in that building. It just sickens me. I am not into waste. I am a fanatic about making sure my kids don't put too much food on their plate and wind up wasting it. Waste on that scale irritates me, and waste on the scale of Met Center just drives me up a tree. And I see it all happening again.

Well, got that rant out of my system. :) Now what? Almost done with job#2, and then we'll be spending lots of time cleaning here to make room for all the stuff that needs to be moved here from the old house as we finally sold it!!! Closing, God willing, Dec 19th. Woohoo! Didn't make what I wanted on it, but got it out of my hair, and one less payment! Yay! Maybe two. Gonna use any extra to pay down the furnace loan. Don't think there'll be enough to clean it up entirely, but will get it down to 2 or 3 payments left.

Well, off to get ready for the day. Educational inservice for work, so I didn't have to go in so early, but gotta get rolling now. TTFN

I have just written an utterly boring website for Glacier's Edge. I'm going to wait to post it until we get all settled in with the new ISP. I'm not sure yet if we're transferring the domain over or leaving it where it is. It seems as if Hubs may have more knowledge than the ISP guy. Oh well, one gets what one gets out here in the boonies.
I took a couple of images into photoshop to play with for the site, but wasn't getting the results I was looking for. Oh well, practice makes perfect, I guess. Just gotta keep practicing. Let's just say photoshop tennis is not for me just yet.