Yup, still here. Not posting nearly enough but just like last time I intend to get caught completely up in about a week. Man the big freeze just swooped down on an Oklahoma that collectively responded by asking "Man, what's this white stuff?". If you think Kansas City is bad, the entire Tulsa area is worse. Drivers here will honk at you if you are driving 5 miles an hour over the speed limit on a solid sheet of ice when nobody is entirely sure where the road is. Throw in a healthy dose of power outages and you'll have an idea what we were dealing with for almost 10 days. The governor declared a state of emergency it was that bad.

I didn't teach for an entire week because school was canceled each day, but I did end up making about 2 trips a day up to the farm so that we could feed the goats and cows. That was a real pain because we essentially had to fill 55 gallon drums full of water, load them onto the back of a truck who's tailgate couldn't be raised and who's truck bed was a solid sheet of ice, drive the buckets of water out to the trough without having it fall off the truck, and then empty it into said trough AFTER breaking out the solid block of ice that the last batch of water had become! Needless to say, by the end of the week the animals were real excited to see me coming. Oh well, the adversity became an adventure and our little family got to spend a lot of unexpected time together, bouncing off each other in the Claremore house again.

Oh and not to be forgotten, the ice! Everything that couldn't move was covered in up to 2 solid inches of ice. Trees although beautiful looking would make a constant crackling noise as the branches struck each other followed by the intermittent popping of a branch just giving up the ghost and snapping off. Grass collected more ice than I would have thought an individual blade could. The air was sharp and clean, and the ground was smooth and hard... as my butt can attest. We have a ton more pictures of frozen things but you'll have to wait for a picture album or collage to see em. Check back soon for more posts. I mean it. Check back in like a few hours. Geesh!

P.S. I dominated that Monopoly game. Helen had me on the ropes with those darned railroads, but then through a series of ridiculously good rolls I turned my luck around and crushed her. Not that I'm gloating. *grin*