ARCTIC BLAST 2011

Good headline 'eh?  What do you bet at least one local news station has used it?  Pretty safe bet, I'd say.


When I was a kid, if I stood with the refrigerator door open too long my mom would pass by and say, "the penguins are coming!"  As in, I'd had the fridge open so long our house was going to be cold enough to attract penguins.  For years I misinterpreted that and imagined the penguins coming out to me from somewhere way back in the depths of our refrigerator.  Kind of like the wardrobe.  Except I hadn't read that book at that time.  ANYway....


All that refrigerator and penguin talk just to say... it's COLD!

While a large portion of the nation is under the blanket of the record-breaking, news-making blizzard, we only received the tip-tail end of that and got less than half an inch of ice and a whirlwind of snowflurries a couple of days ago.  But man, oh, MAN did we get the cold.  


Because the area Greg's school is in got a good bit more precipitation than we did, he has been home for two days.  Because we did not have any snow to have a 'snow day', the boys and I carried on with school.  Only, we had Daddy home.  It was nice.

And since it doesn't usually get this COLD in Texas (how cold? lows in the single digits. wind chills in the negatives, thankyouverymuch), there were some problems somewhere with a couple of power plants (little tiny problems like not producing any electricity) and a power regulating organization decided that to prevent massive long-term outages, we should all share the wealth.  So at 7:15, 9:30, and 11:30 this morning, we were without electricity for 15 minutes.  It amazes me that people all across the state were very very angry about this.  At our house it was all fun and games and Dale thought he was the luckiest kid in Texas to get to set all the digital clocks TWICE!  (Once after the first time it came back on, before we knew it would be going out again, and once late in the afternoon after we were sure it would not be going out again.)

Other cold kid fun included skating in the massive puddle at the end of the driveway.  Very rare that it gets frozen SOLID!  

I've just noticed I used a lot of ALL CAPS in this post.  Apparently ARCTIC BLASTS and all their FAR REACHING effects just call for that.  


And simply for good measure, here is one more picture of Tyler, because he's just THAT CUTE!