The tree itself lay in pieces on the living room floor for an entire week before I finally wrapped and stowed it in it's corner of the basement.
The plastic pine needles that fell off the tree remained on the living room floor for another week until I finally found the time to sweep them up.
Yesterday, BoopityBoop helped me put the furniture back where it belongs. Then they drew me some lovely pictures. #6 and her parents came over to see us yesterday, too. It was a fun day of kids, crayons, paints, football and chicken wings.
January has been fun and busy! We had a pair of great nephews from Arizona stay with us for a night. They wanted to experience a Minnesota winter, as all of their enormous extended family came from here and the vast majority of us still live here. I don't know what kind of stories their parents, grandparents and desert dwelling aunts and uncles told them but they must have been good because the boys were eager to try all things deeply frozen. They're timing was perfect. In the week they spent in Minnesota, they experienced a bull blown blizzard, featuring 8-12" of snow, white out conditions and power outages. They spent a day ice fishing. They took snowmobiles from a lake shore home to a nearby small town for dinner. They met lots of kinfolk. They had a blast.
Jay is the one who took them ice fishing. They drove to a large lake a few miles south of town and rented an ice house from a young, local entrepreneur. Jay had discovered this lad online. He owns several ice houses which he rents air bnb style to ice fishermen who need temporary shelter. Genius!
The boys had fun on the lake but it was a bit scary, too: Jay's truck got stuck on the lake.
This has been a strange winter. We had two weeks of sub zero weather very early; pre-Christmas. Ice fishermen love that, they call it 'ice making weather'. In order to drive on the ice, it needs to be 12-14" thick. I asked my nephew, who lives on a lake, how he can tell if the ice is thick enough and he answered "when I see 8 other vehicles out there. I'll never be the first one out there."
Smart man.
In addition to that early deep freeze, we had a lot of snow early in the season. Believe it or not, we can't take a white Christmas for granted, not even up here. It's not unusual to have a brown Christmas in Minneapolis. It's not normal, but not unheard of. Usually, we've had a few dustings of snow by Christmas and everyone hopes it sticks. Sometimes we get real, measurable snow cover by Christmas and once in a while, blizzards. This year, we had real blizzards before Christmas and well over a foot of snow pre-Christmas. It was shaping up to be a brilliant season for out door winter sports!
Then things got weird.
In January, we've had several more inches of snow but we've also had weeks of just above freezing temps, bringing with it sleet and rain. This has ruined the ice, not just for fishermen, who have to slog through deep slush to get to their holes, have no confidence in the depth of the ice and can't drive their cars on the lake even if the ice is thick because they'll get stuck in the slush, which is what happened to Jay and the boys. They couldn't quite get all the way to the ice house Jay'd rented so they walked the last bit. The young man who rented them the house was also on hand to tow Jay's rig back off the lake: too much slush in the wheel wells made the SUV nearly un-drivable. A car wash and a few hours in a warm garage and all was back to normal. Jay didn't tell the nephews how nervous he was out on that slushy lake. It's gotten much worse since then. I don't think it's going to be an ice fishing year at all, which makes Jay very sad; he loves to ice fish.
Meanwhile, the skating rink across the street has seen a very strange season. While the hills in the park have been covered with kids sledding for weeks, the huge rink wasn't open for use until two weeks ago; too much snow kept falling. Then, after Christmas, it was hardly cold enough for the ice to set. Finally, in mid January, they got the hockey boards up and it was cold enough to skate. For three glorious day, that rink was covered in skaters of every description. At all hours of the day and under the lights at night, we counted several dozens of skaters from toddlers pushing chairs while their parents skated beside them to hordes of kids, racing around or playing hockey. It was winter perfection!
Then we got two days of snow and the temps jumped up into the high 30s again. It was too snowy to skate and too slushy for the plow to clear the rink. The out door skating season is short no matter what: the sun gets too high in the sky by late February to sustain the ice. I was afraid that was it: a three day skating season this year. But this morning, the plow was out again. It's in single digits this morning, although it is supposed to get up near 30 again by this afternoon. That's kind of perfect: cold enough for ice but warm enough to be out on it all day.
Not nearly cold enough to form lake ice thick enough to drive on, however.
Yesterday, Jay and I drove downtown to the Basilica of St. Mary for Mass. It was over cast when we left our house but the drive was lovely, as the trees along the way were all ice tipped. It hadn't snowed, so they didn't look like they'd been frosted with a heavy hand but they were all made of crystal. If the sun had come out, the whole world would have glittered in the half hour it would have taken for the ice coating on the twigs to melt. The drive north was beautiful. Then we turned east toward downtown and everything changed. Just like that the highway was enveloped in a deep fog, visibility was 50 feet and traffic came to a stand still. We were fortunately able to exit the highway immediately and take back roads into down town. It wasn't just fog; it was a white out blizzard we had just entered! Visibility was terrible but there was very little traffic on the streets, unlike the highway, which at our last glance, looked like a parking lot and we could see the flashing lights of a police car and/or tow truck a few hundred yards past the overpass. We made it to church, although we missed the opening hymn.
Mass was lovely and Father gave a powerful homily on the value of human life. He reminded us that as Catholics, we are called to be Pro LIFE, not just pro birth. He also reminded us that here in the U.S., there are enough of Catholics that if we ALL lived the faith, we could transform this nation overnight.
Something to pray for.
We came out of church and the blizzard was still going on: the intersection on which the basilica stands was clear but in all directions, we could see a dark gray cloud of falling snow that reached all the way to the ground. I felt like I was in a Steven King book and the church was an oasis of light in a world of menace.
Then we drove south toward home, came out of the storm and by the time we got to our neighborhood all was clear, if not quite sunny.
And an hour later, my house was filled with little girls.
What a great day!