Miss Mischief

All was quiet this morning . That's usually not good. Where's Anya?

Andrea found her in our bathroom with the toilet brush in the toilet, toilet paper spread across the floor and a guilty look on her face.

Yesterday she threw Paxton's shoes in the garbage...

Help Wanted

Seriously. The two littlest chaos makers seem to be getting the best of Mommy lately. Anyone got a day or a week to spare?

Yes, those are the chairs in the front room, flipped onto their noses for perfect little hideouts for Pajama Girl and her sidekick Stinky.

Blizzard 2011

That's what all the TV networks called it: BLIZZARD 2011! Often accompanied by dramatic music.

I generally don't have much patience with media hype, but I'll give them a pass - this one was a doozy.  It started snowing on Tuesday afternoon with the wind howling out of the north-east and it didn't stop until this afternoon. Here's what we saw out the front window this morning.

The boys and I went for a short walkabout, but it was pretty miserable with the wind blowing. Check out the drift against the back fence.

I started shoveling. Kenrick and Anthony started tunneling. Here they are against the drift at the front walk. By the time the wind stopped blowing, the peak of that drift stood as high as my chest.

The wind made some pretty wild looking shapes with the snow.

The drift in the driveway was so deep that I had to cut through it one block at a time. The kids took advantage of the abundance of building materials to make a strong fort - complete with a tunnel entrance!

I don't think we'll get the trailer out any time soon.

I spent pretty much all day shoveling, but I finally cut a slot to the road. The sixty foot drive had four feet of snow at one end and about two feet at the other end - a total of about 20 cubic yards of not-so-fluffy fluff that I had to heave into the air.  My back is shot.

To Do List

To Do:

1. Finish writing about our Epic Winter Vacation
2. Take more pictures of Anya with her lopsided toothy grin and her flyaway hair
3. Paint the kitchen
4. Start packing up our house again

Packing up you say? Yes, I'm afraid it's true - we're moving again!

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that the machine program at work that I moved us up here for got suspended. At that time, our hope was that we could work on temporary assignments for a few months until the acquisition of Bucyrus International was finalized. We were instructed a few weeks after that, however, to start looking for permanent positions within Caterpillar and to assume that the Mining Shovels program would not be back any time soon.

Long story short: today I accepted a position in Decatur (Illinois) with the Large Mining Trucks division.

We don't know for sure what the timeline for moving looks like, but shouldn't have to go anywhere until school is out. In the mean time ... where did I put all those boxes that we had around here a few months ago?