In my experience, it’s hard to differentiate between temperatures below freezing.

They should give up counting at that point and just call it miserable.

Of course, my experience of freezing is in past. Or was in the past, until this week.

I have been updated.

(Oh! Don’t freak out, North American friends! These temperatures are in Celcius… Our low was -7 degrees C which is just under 20 degrees F)

Last night my friend in Seattle told me I should detach all the hoses from the outdoor faucets or something drastic would happen to our pipes, but by the time I got out to do that the hose was frozen to the faucet. The Daddy told me to get back out there with some warm water, but wouldn’t do it himself. Oh, how I laughed at the futility of his request. And if a pipe bursts as a result, it will be his fault for refusing to complete a manly chore. There are times when all feminism needs to go out the window, and one of those times is when I am freezing my butt off.

So. I know some of you up North and abouts are reading this and then looking outside to the driving snow and laughing a bitter, hollow laugh.

I understand, I really do.

But it is all relative.

Exhibit 1: Furry Boots.

Have been in storage for the last 5 years, since we came to this hot and sweaty state. I pulled them out in the hopes of keeping my tootsies warm, only to remember that they can only be worn with mini skirts or skinny jeans. Hmm. Skinny jeans and mini skirts, I remember you fondly from another life. A life to which I can now only aspire  ;-)

Exhibit 2: Protesting Tropical Plants:

One thing I did manage to do was cover some of our many tropical outdoor plants with plastic so they wouldn’t get frostbite. But I had my Mom brain in at the time, and only looked after the children. All my teeny tiny little cheap-to-replace plants have been protected, thank you very much. Why did I think the more expensive mature plants would be able to protect themselves? Maybe find themselves a warm nook to crawl into?

(Yes, this is a very bad long distance shot. Due to my reluctance to step more than one foot out of my semi-warm house).

Exhibit 3: There is no exhibit 3. I just want you to know that I get very very cold very very easily. And now I am off to wrap myself up  in a blanket and sulk.

My new years resolution: I will no longer let the king size duvet cover beat me.

But if the king size duvet cover should win, I will not let it make me cry.

If by chance I do cry, I will not let my children see.

Because I know, that if they grow up believing that they can insert a king size duvet into a king size duvet cover then they will totally be able to do it.

And then I can get them onto bed changing duty.

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And now for something completely different:

Here are a few of the things my children have made recently. The kind of triumphs which give me hope and confidence and prevent the whole duvet cover thing from keeping me awake at night:

A Pile of Leaves.

And then a Mess of Leaves.

Yet Another Gingerbread House.

(apologies for the poor quality photo. It was dark that day)

A Ugaglaon Wood (Congratulations Award) - try it with a Texan drawl and it starts to make a little more sense.

But only a little bit.

An Alphabet Crown. Yet another Very Useful Product from T-Bot Industries.

Inspired by Hero of the Rails, this is Niro of the Rails. Constructed of cardboard and what looks like a whole roll of clear parcel tape. Sigh. This is how my children keep me poor.

Oh, and here are some of the projects I didn’t show you. Be thankful. Be very thankful:

Happily, Baby Sister and The Wictor started back at school yesterday, so I will no longer have to virtually live at the office supply store. Although being at school does not prevent Baby Sister from using paper, and I still have to find places to proudly display all she brings home. I presume her liberal and enthusiastic use of A3 sized sheets is the reason behind the local elementary’s renewed fundraising efforts. So, indirectly - I am still paying.

The Wictor is also no longer tracking bucket loads of dead leaves into the house, but only because the trees are bare. Not that we would want to be out there anyhow, given that we have arctic winds and the promise of 4 consecutive nights of frosts. My team of furnaces is having trouble keeping up, although they make a valiant effort. And suck all the moisture out of the air in the process. I wonder if a cicada feels like this just before he sheds his hard dry shell. I am jealous. I want a new skin.

But otherwise fine. You may get more sense out of me when my friend the Sun makes his return.

Happy New Year!

One reason for moving to Texas?

I really, really, really, really don’t like the cold.

So I wanted to live somewhere where it doesn’t snow.

Slight fail.

The snow started to fall around 10am.

Real, live snow, just like in books and movies! And then it settled. I was starting to worry we would be snowed in

Remember what I said before. No hats, no gloves, no galoshes. Not that I even have a clue what galoshes are, but I have read about them in books. I know that if you live in America, you need galoshes for going out in the snow. It is probably highly irresponsible to go out without them.

Which is why I preferred to stay indoors. Indoors was warm. Every five minutes I opened the door to take some brief video of the boys frolicking, and every ten minutes the boys would run in demanding a hot bath because they couldn’t feel their hands.

Baby Sister got out of school about 2pm. And then we built a snowman!

I didn’t grow up with snow either. By the time I encountered it I was too old and cool… so this was also my first snowman experience. I remembered how to build one from an old episode of Caillou (sometimes, I amaze even myself…)

Turns out though, there is a limit to how big you can roll a snowball with no gloves.

(The pain! The pain!)

And here’s a shot for perspective:

Awwww…. He’s small, but he’s sweet! And he’s all ours! At least… he was until he melted…

Well, it was great while it lasted. Big plus, the Daddy got to come home early before we would have had to bust out our snow chains. The kids demanded hot chocolate (where oh where did they learn so much about snow? That would be Caillou again. Honestly, does it ever not snow in Canada?) so The Daddy risked his life driving through the snowdrifts to get some.

By 3pm it was all over. And now we are left with only sweet memories.

Oh, and a garden full of dead plants.

Alert! Alert!

Zaburbs have moved to Condition Orange! Severe Weather Conditions are forecast for Friday, and school may be shortened, or even canceled.

Tell me what is better than a White Christmas? A White Christmas, early, with no school.

Yes folks, up to 1 inch of snow should be falling on us by this time tomorrow. How I wish now that I had given in to the temptation to stock up on hats and gloves from the Target $1 section.

Which brings me to something very much related. Does the whole of America give a simple hoodie the very warm and fluffy sounding monniker “Jacket” ? Or is it just Texas? My children have this type of jacket but that is all they got. Also, no hats or gloves.

One girl-scoutish thing I did do though. I got the furnace checked this fall, for the first time ever. I thought the price was a bit steep but better safe than sorry, after all these things do spew out noxious gases at will if left unchecked. Then, when the technician ascended to the attic to check the thing he announced that the furnace had multiplied. Or invited its friend to the party or something. Our furnace was now two.

And the maintenance bill also. Ouch.

I am smiling about it now though. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

I’m sure most Dads would do anything for their daughter, but how many of them would do this?

One Friday a few weeks back, inspired by that TV commercial where the businessman goes away, taking his daughter’s stuffed animal with him to photograph in different places  (I think - I can’t even remember the damn thing to be honest - and it is 12.30am - but I am assured this is the gist of it), Baby Sister begged her Daddy to take Butterfly on a photoshoot in Houston.

This is Butterfly.

To be more precise, this is Butterfly sitting on the table of a restaurant during The Daddy’s lunch hour.

I cropped The Daddy’s Boss out of the picture.

These are the extremes to which The Daddy will go for his daughter.

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Here is The Daddy in the restaurant holding Butterfly.

Yes, he does look a little embarrassed.

Even I would have looked a little embarrassed. And I look good in pink.

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Cut to Butterfly on the bridge The Daddy walks over to get from his carpark to work.

He carried Butterfly for 10 minutes along some very public sidewalks. Now that is true dedication for you. I can’t remember what that businessman in the commercial had, but I am pretty damn sure it was not a pink poodle.

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And now, some local interest shots for the folks back home. Butterfly on the bridge. See the lamp in the background?

Here’s that same lamp, on Tuesday (when school was cancelled and half the city stayed home, but The Daddy took his little car and aquaglided in to work):

Yeah, Houston floods. Just a little.

Power came back on around 8pm tonight and one minute we were all whiny and “how come the other side of the street has had power all day while we are sitting here steaming and getting snarky at each other” and the next we were all “whoop! whoop!” and feeling repentant because really the loss of air conditioning and a functioning coffee machine is nothing when others have lost their homes, their livelihoods, their lives. 

I am not kidding about the “whoop whoop” either. When the lights went on, the neighborhood was ringing. Truly, it was like Party Central in our street. And oh, the blessed relief of cooled air. 

Ike was noisy and he was not pretty. But we were lucky to be inland and fairly sheltered. Still, it is not a comfortable sight to look out into your yard and see the trees whipping their heads in circles and almost to the ground. Or to hear random booms and not know what is happening. This morning we noticed the wind had rolled the neighbor’s full-size steel basketball hoop about 15 feet across her driveway. Before the hurricane hit an evacuating friend listening to NPR phoned me with tips and so I had braced the garage doors with 2 X 4s. Half of them ended up being forced out. I can only imagine that Ike was trying to get in. 

We don’t have the recommended “interior room” in our open plan house so instead we transformed my walk in closet into a nest for the children, so they could be near us and away from the windows. It worked out well. They were shielded from the worst of the noise and slept for most of the night, and we were all together without actually having to host them in our room. Except for The Wictor, who had to be extracted halfway through after kicking Baby Sister in the face, and spent the rest of the night kicking me in the face. I was mostly awake anyway, listening to the progress of the hurricane on the radio. 

This morning we went out and surveyed the damage, and we got off pretty lightly. Apart from a lawn strewn with minor snapped-off branches, there is just this: 

What used to be a fence and the remains of a tree. We finally got to meet the back door neighbors. I am sure will be learning a lot more about each other in the days to come, now that we can see into each others houses. 

Of course, there was also the problem of what to do all day with the kids when you can’t go out and there is no power. And you are not a board-game loving kind of family. Mostly they amused themselves. And then, if they asked for TV or the internet too much, we put them to work doing useful stuff:

We were hoping for power by dinner time but it wasn’t to be. As we were debating whether to eat sandwiches or try and light a fire on the patio, The Daddy came up with this idea. It’s kind of like a camp fire, but indoors. I started to regret not buying marshmallows. 

So, that was our Ike experience. Yet again, we have been lucky. Reports are that parts of Houston will be without power for two to four weeks. Buildings have been torn apart in the central city, and let’s not even talk about the coast. We’re still waiting to hear exactly how bad that is. 

One more thing. We have a house guest, a refugee from the storm. We found her in the fetal position on our doorstep this morning, cold and shivering. We think she was probably out in it the whole time, and maybe even fell from a tree. We wrapped her up and she slept all day, this evening she was still pretty weak but managed to eat and drink something.

 And she is making an enormous racket in our shower right now, banging and crashing about. It was the only place I could think to put her. I actually wanted her put out in the street but The Daddy won’t hear of it until he is sure she is strong enough. 

The Daddy wants to call her Agrippina. The kids and I are calling her Sandy. 

So I figured that since I am not getting much done right now - and by not much I mean wandering around gathering up hurricane supplies and trying to put them in some semblance of order, while wondering if I should be trying to board up the big window in the master bathroom, and how do you board up an aluminum window anyway? - 

So anyway, I figured I may as well take a few minutes out here and there to blog a little about what is happening. Especially since, unlike some folk, we are not in an evacuation zone, so are not on the road right now, desperately watching our gas meter and hoping that all those non-evacuees won’t have bled the gas stations dry by the time we have to pull off the I-10 to fill up.

Seriously, in 2005 when we lived further North in a community people were evacuating to,  all our neighbors had filled up all their cars so that they could sit them in the garage, just in case. Leaving people who had evacuated from the coast stranded the length of the I-45. This morning, The Daddy went to gas up at 6.30am (because both our cars were near empty) and there were people there filling up dozens of canisters sat in the beds of their F-150s. I have since been told that you use gas to power generators and this makes sense, but dude, I just hope you are going to share your generator with your neighborhood, and any stranded motorists who come your way. 

(I am looking across the road. Our neighbors appear to be evacuating now, as I write. I am quite relieved to note that they backed out and then came back to drop their basketball hoop to the ground. I don’t fancy that through my window…) 

So, this morning after the school drop-off The Wictor and I made a run to Wal-Mart, your one stop shop for hurricane essentials. The lines were long but everyone was in good spirits. I was just happy that I did the bulk of my hurricane grocery shopping yesterday, before everybody else had the idea. It was around 85 degrees today, but the humidity has been very high and truly it has felt like 100. 

Really nothing is happening here, everybody is just waiting and watching, and although the hurricane is forecast to go more or less over the top of us, we are far enough inland not to expect anything but wind damage, unless we are incredibly unlucky. Friends of ours from town were planning to come ride out the storm with us, but have since changed their mind. The most exciting event of the day was caused by The Daddy, who put oil in a pan for hamburgers before coming out to help move garden furniture into the garage, let himself get sidetracked by garden ornaments and an impromptu soccer game, and burned a hole halfway through the pan.  We had to open all the doors and windows and invite the mosquitoes in before the hurricane had even arrived. I am calling it a dry run.