Baby Calvin

About a week after Calvin was born, I got to fly down to Phoenix (Chandler) to spend a week with Melissa and her family. I had a fabulous trip. Everything was perfect. My flights were great; the weather was wonderful (mid-70's is wonderful in mid-November). And of course, nothing is better than hanging out with family -- especially grandchildren! I love them all dearly!

Snow Again??

February 7, 2014:  After that snowstorm we had in December, I wasn't really excited when the weatherman was predicting snow again. It took me 40 minutes to make it home from work yesterday (it usually takes 10 minutes), and I wasn't sure I was going to make it at all. I was glad Arlene said we would close the office today.  I think we got more snow than predicted. It was snowing basically all day until late in the afternoon, paused for a little while, and then started with a light freezing rain, which doesn't seem to be diminishing the snow at all. I went outside once to take my necessary photographs of the snow (I have to keep up the tradition of taking photos of EVERY snowstorm we get), but it was too cold to even go for a walk. It was such a powdery snow that it didn't even stick to the bottoms of my pants even though it was deeper than that, i.e. they weren't even damp when I came back inside.

 

About 4:30 this afternoon, I noticed a post that Neil had made to Facebook. It was a picture of one of our neighbors in his backyard, building what turned out to be a large square "snowman"? I called it a Snobot because it looked like a very basic robot made of snow, but Neil poked fun of me (as usual). I don't know how long he was working on it -- because it was huge! I bet the bottom layer of it was 5-6 feet on each side and came up to his waist. The middle layer and "head" were not as tall as the bottom layer. He had to get up on a ladder to work on it. He finished it off with a traditional-looking snowman face. The eyes might have been tomatoes, then a carrot nose, and perhaps rocks made up the smile? At least that's what it looks like when I zoom in on the photo I took of it. I felt kind of awkward spying on him from our upstairs window. I hope none of our neighbors saw us there, especially when we were taking pictures into their backyard. That's probably not very "neighborly" behavior!

 

 

Over the next couple of days, we noticed that there were dozens and dozens of robins hanging out around our neighbor's yard and also our yard. They seemed to really like the red berries on a plant that had climbed up among the neighbor's tree.

 

 

 
They were very "round". I don't know if they were fluffing up their feathers to keep warm, or if they had really pigged out on those red berries?

 

 

A big limb broke off the tree out front, but luckily missed all of our vehicles. Others were not so fortunate. I've never seen so many branches and whole trees lying around town.

 

 

 

Needless to say, I wasn't going anywhere for a while.