Snow Days

We had school on Monday and Tuesday after the Sunday snow. Everybody bitched like mad. "The kids are having to walk in the street because none of our sidewalks are plowed." "It's too cold for our kids to be out in this four degree weather."

Then the predication's came in for Wednesday. Two to six inches of more powder predicted with temperatures at zero degrees. The mayor of Kansas City decreed that it was wise not to plow the streets because driving on packed ice and snow was "safer" than driving on clean streets. The KCMO school district had already been closed from Monday on because of the mayor's wise(ass) decrees. The Kansas cities and 'burbs all tried to keep ahead of the snow but by Wednesday, the predictions were just too dangerous. Even the Kansas schools caved and shut down.

My district has now been closed for two days and we will have our third snow day tomorrow. The weather is really, really cold. None of the snow melts. We have had high winds so we have snow drifts up to a foot deep. There is ice, of course. Driving is so treacherous in Kansas City, MO that the trash trucks have been sitting in their garages -- and in the shopping areas the trash is piling up to a dangerous level. No trash has been picked up by the city for the last three days. The idiot mayor of KCMO has finally had to face the snow facts and call an emergency session of the city council.

Meanwhile the temps keep dropping and the winds are still blowing. It is frigidly, frighteningly cold.

Our little house is mostly warm. We have some chilly spots but where it counts, in the bedroom and bath and kitchen, we are toasty. We have food and drink. Yesterday we feasted on sour dough toast and hot cocoa. Today we had meatloaf and baked potatoes. We are, however, down to our last two eggs and there is only a quarter of a gallon of milk left. We might need a run to the store . . . but I think we can last until the temperatures at least get about freezing and the wind chill is above zero. Right now our wind chill is -13 degrees. The dogs are using the pee-pee pads in the living room because the snow is now higher than their butts -- and nobody wants to poop in frozen snow when it's ten degrees below zero.

Christmas 2009 Pictures Continued

Blogger makes adding multiple photos a very dreary process.

These are photos of our crab dinner celebration on the 23rd of December.

#249

Interestingly this blog documents my rejuvenated teaching career -- I think it seemed more possible to be blogging than for me to resume teaching this late in my life. Both choices though have been satisfying -- teaching more than blogging, actually. This is the 249th post since I began my final career journey.

And here are some pictures from the Houston Christmas.

Hubby and the boys enjoying Christmas treats:

Hubby and his sister opening Christmas presents:

Just a portion of the Houston nutcracker collection:

Greetings from the Boys!

The Ought Decade

After reading the year and decade windup in Time, Newsweek, Entertainment Weekly, and People I began to think about our own decade events.

• 2001 was a pretty good year but it was the beginning of the end of my tenure at the #3 Telephone Company. I had a good run there and I loved the people I worked with. I was only a contractor (my choice) for them but I was employed by the smartest group of women I've ever encountered. Not only were they smart, they were also ethical and people-oriented. It was a great combination. My boss was brilliant, had a great sense of humor, and really cared about the people she employed. I have never worked with a better group of people in my life. Hubby and I bumped along. Wolfie was still alive and Fritzy had entered our lives. We were becoming very active in our church.


• 2002 was a bonus year at the #3; one I didn't expect. But the great women I worked with saw to it that I had a little cushion of time to get my life in order before all contractors were dismissed from the company. I lasted there most of 2002 though I really didn't have a whole lot to occupy me. Hubby and I stepped up our church activities and the boys were still full of vim and vinegar. I think this is the year we formed a lasting friendship with two couples we had met while attending the UMKC Signature Series concerts (one of the best bargains in town).


• 2003 was a year of change. The big event was the celebration of our 25th wedding anniversary with a concert to benefit our church. Wendy came from Houston, Lou showed up from Louisiana, and Hubby sang his heart out. The video of the event shows how really wonderful it was. My beloved Seville finally bit the dust and Hubby replaced it with The Tank -- a huge Cadillac and that never ran properly and made my existence miserable. My career sputtered. I got three temp jobs but none of them were satisfying. The worst was a weekend taking credit card applications over the Thanksgiving holiday at Nebraska Furniture Mart. Finally at the start of December I landed a job in construction which kept us from going to Houston to celebrate Christmas with family. It was a sad time.


• 2004 saw me continuing my construction job. I had a great boss and I liked him so much that the drudgery of the work kept me entertained. We continued to step up our church activities and that helped. Hubby and the boys seemed to be doing fine. We resumed our Christmas holiday in Houston, vowing never again to spend our Christmases apart.


• 2005 was dreary. The construction job had moved from its original small location to the Legends in Wyandotte County. I was now traveling 35 miles a day to and from work. The boss I had loved resigned. I was forced to give up my temp status with the company and become a permanent employee. I was so afraid of being unemployed yet again, that I agreed and this was a huge mistake on my part. I went through five insane bosses in a very short time - each one more dysfunctional than the last. My old boss helped us find a newer Cadillac to replace the dreadful Tank and the car ran a lot more smoothly. In October Wolfie, my heart dog, died. My heart broke into pieces. Though Gus came into our lives with his sweet ways and huge amber eyes, my heart refused to heal. We began to realize that our beloved church was losing ground and was in danger of dying. It was a very hard year.


• 2006 really shook the ground on which we based our lives. First the Cadillac burned in Hubby's driveway. He replaced with a 1991 Lincoln that looked exactly like your grandfather's car -- really dreary. Except it ran like a top and never gave us a lick of trouble. Hubby nearly died from a cranial aneurysm the day after Easter. He took the rest of the year to recover. I was informed a month after his attack that my job at the construction site was ending. A dear friend at church took me in hand as I dithered about what I was going to do and insisted that I apply for a teaching position with the KCKS school district. I finally did and I was eventually hired -- at the perfect job for me in the perfect school with the perfect staff. So, though three quarters of the year had been horrible, suddenly, at the end, everything was wonderful. The only flaw in the ointment was that I needed to go to grad school to get SPED certification, but even that turned out fairly well when I enrolled in the local Pitt State campus for six hours. At Christmas Hubby performed his last big concert and it was bitter-sweet. Age and illness had taken away his power of singing, not his love of it, but his ability to sustain great music for more than a couple of songs. Still Hubby was alive, I was finally working at something I loved, and we spent Christmas with our beloved family in Houston.


• 2007 found me hitting beginning to hit my stride in teaching. I continued taking grad courses. Hubby continued to gather strength. We found less contentment at church but continued to doggedly try to hang on to a dying situation. The boys were healthy, our friends were supportive, my career was flourishing, grade school was okay, and at Thanksgiving all the family met in Branson, taking in two concerts a day for four days. We had a blast and found we loved the resort town. We've been spending Thanksgiving there ever since.
  
• 2008 was more of the same. Hubby reconnected with his biological sister in Washington, D.C. and went to visit her in the summer. Fritzy died of kidney failure and Hubby insisted we drive to Tulsa to rescue a little mite of a nearly blind Schnauzer only eight months old. Luie quickly became an integral part of our lives. Our church lives changed miserably with the retiring of our old minister and the hiring of a new one. I succumbed to every illness the children at school could pass on and lost 30 pounds in the process because I was literary too sick to eat most of the year.


• 2009 found us doing more traveling than ever. We went to Chesapeake Bay in July to visit Sister, Branson for Thanksgiving, and Houston for Christmas. We finally left our church home, though it was a very sad occasion for us as a family. I started my fourth year of teaching and completed 24 hours of grad credit towards my SPED certification -- earning an A in every course. I continued to love everything about my job. We acquired a 1995 Lincoln to replace the 1991 one damaged in December by a tow company. We all drove to Houston for Christmas -- and it was the best one yet. Family love simply cannot be overrated.
  

Hubby will be 75 in 2010. I will turn 64 but have no plans to retire. Gus is now five and Luie is probably around two. We are all aging fairly well except for the bad knees and arthritis. We have friends who care for us, family who love us, and we have each other. I have a job, Hubby has his health and life. We own our home and our 1995 car. It's all good.

Relaxed

Sitting here in the computer room with snow softly falling, I'm dipping my sour dough toast covered in Christmas fig and ginger jam into Christmas cocoa. And I'm dreaming of the Houston weather. Normally I'm not a fan of Texas heat and humidity but today, with the temps hovering near 20 degrees, the wind chill around 10, the snow still piled up everywhere in the city, I'm wishing for those 70 and 80 degree days we had in Houston.

It was a spectacular Christmas holiday full of love and cheer and good times. We ate fabulous food: fresh crab in a buttery casserole, prime rib cooked to perfection, shrimp salad, fried chicken and potato salad, ambrosia with the freshest of melon and fruits, steak, barbecued beef and pork, chocolate pecan pie, key lime pie, and chocolate bundt cake. We had fantastic entertainment: a play filled with sweet music and good acting plus a warm Christmas message, the movie Avatar in spectacular 3-D at the Houston theater where dinner is served with the movie -- a treat we absolutely loved, games of Hearts, Zion-Check, and Sorry. We talked late into every night, sharing the stories of the year, our hopes and fears, and our love. We wrapped presents and then opened presents and we laughed and laughed and laughed. It was simply perfect.

The trip down to Houston was uneventful and so was the trip home until we hit northwestern Oklahoma. Seems from Miami, OK to KC there was a Christmas blizzard while we were basking in Houston heat. The ice on Highway 69 was bad. We did some white knuckle driving for awhile until we picked up Turnpike 44 over to Joplin and followed Highway 71 home. We found Kansas City still buried under drifts of snow and the side streets barely passable. Luckily our driveway had been shoveled out or we would still be parked on the street. The trash men have found the side streets impassable and thus trash is piling up from Christmas orgies of gift giving. The temperatures are very cold and last night we got a fresh layer of snow to cover the ice that had formed.

This morning Hubby ventured out to take me to the foot doctor for a check-up. Luckily we didn't have more than a mile to go and my foot is healing nicely. I need to go for one more follow up and then I should be completely cured. The doctor was not nice to me because I had not been following his orders. Seems because I have an open wound I should have been keeping it bandaged during the day and putting on the special antibiotic oil I had picked up from the pharmacy on his prescription. Except I lost the bottle the second day I had it. And I was supposed to soak the foot for 20 minutes every morning and evening and I didn't ever do that either, especially in Houston where only showers were available. But I'm a really good healer so though the doctor was concerned the foot was a bit red, it still was healing nicely even though I didn't do one thing right.

Yesterday I cleaned up the kitchen, washed all the sundry cups and glasses and odd forks we had sitting around, and we did a smattering of grocery shopping. The frig was empty by the time we left for Houston. Now we have bread and eggs and milk and mushroom soup so we can survive. I baked a frozen ham, too, and got some Swiss cheese and pepper jack for sandwiches.

Hubby has hooked up the Christmas Wii but I haven't read all the instructions yet. That's part of today's challenge. Also I've got a stack of new magazines that arrived while we were away and a new series of mystery books I've started and I can laze happily under my soft quilt, burning my many Christmas candles and cuddling with the boys.

It's good to be home but I miss the love of the Houston family and friends. It really was the most perfect of Christmases!

The 12 Joys of Our Christmas

I dislike singing the 12 Days of Christmas - and every year it seems I end up singing it somewhere. This year Hubby and I are not singing anywhere, so I thought, "Why not list the 12 Joys of Christmas" in lieu of singing that nasty song. So in no particular order: the 2009 12 Joys of Our Christmas.

1. An A grade in my grad course -- yeah! 24 hours of A now.

2. 2009 Christmas blessings at school with the kids and staff. Lots of food, happiness over the gifts, teachers satisfied with their remembrances.

3. Friends and a Hubby who support my efforts at school. Besides supplying my classroom with notebooks, index tabs, novels, and nourishing treats throughout the year, they hike into Wyandotte and celebrate Christmas with the kids.

3. Almost all the washing complete before the trip to Houston. I discovered when I finally ventured into the basement that we hadn't done the wash since Thanksgiving. Oh my! Maybe my joy should be that Hubby and I have enough underwear to last for a month without doing the wash.

4. A new car (to us) that Hubby brought home yesterday evening -- a really pretty 1995 Lincoln Town Car. I can drive it! Now that's a real joy! And right now, at this moment, the car is pristine beautiful! With two dogs and a Hubby who thinks that a car is only utilitarian, it won't stay that way -- so I better get out there and take pictures NOW!

5. Two little boys who bring both Hubby and me so much love and delight. Gussie, the little guy who doesn't jump, managed this morning to claw his way into the bed (he jumped, he slipped, he clawed like mad -- and made the top of the mattress) just so he could cuddle with his mama. Luie's eyes are doing do well and right now he is functioning on all cylinders.

6. A trip to Houston where all dogs and humans will be welcomed with open arms.

7. Friends and family in Houston who go all out to make Christmas a jolly event. Before Christmas a lobster and prime rib dinner is being held in our honor!

8. Employment! It's wonderful to have a job that is rewarding.

9. Employment in a beautiful school working with the most talented people I've ever encountered. The SPED department at Wyandotte High absolutely rocks!

10. My computer friends -- I may never see you but you bring so much joy into my life. Technology has made my world so much better.

11. Good health for both Hubby and me. My foot is healing perfectly. Hubby is alive and well. Last night I got the start of the stomach flu (all the miserable symptoms -- and spend two hours in the bathroom bemoaning my fate) and suddenly, the symptoms were gone. Today I'm tired and my tummy is a bit queasy, but I'm not going to have to eat chicken soup all through our Christmas trip (bring on the lobster!).

12. The resources to have a good life and share it with others.

Our home -- our family -- our boys -- our friends -- these are the most important joys in our lives.