Weekly Review January 29 '16

Maybe I should start out by listing all the things we DIDN’T do this week: We didn’t go to church, the boys didn’t go to school, I didn’t volunteer in the school library, Jared didn’t go to work or to YM, we didn’t have Cub Scouts, Frank & I didn’t go shopping for a kitchen table, and I didn’t exercise Wednesday, Thursday, or today. Most of those things didn’t happen because of the snow storm. Church was cancelled on Sunday (the parking lot hadn’t been plowed yet, nor most of the roads—including ours—either) and school was cancelled every day this week. The snow plow came down our street around midnight Saturday so on Sunday morning the whole neighborhood was out digging out their cars. From Sunday afternoon on, we have been able to get out and about but it has taken all week for the city / school district to get all the streets and parking lots plowed, as well as sidewalks shoveled on roads to the schools. Some of the sidewalks still aren’t done. As for the roads—they are plowed, but all the residential roads only have one lane cleared so you have to look ahead for people coming the opposite direction and take turns. There are also huge piles of plowed snow at all the corners, making it hard to see when making turns. But at least we can get around. The snow has actually melted quite a bit—we’ve had temperatures in the 40s a number of days since the storm. We’re supposed to continue to have warmish days too so hopefully that will help in melting the huge piles of snow left everywhere by the snow plows.

The reason I didn’t exercise the last few days is I’ve come down with some sort of strange cough / scratchy sore throat thing which is making me somewhat miserable. My right eye has been watering more than normal and yesterday my right cheek was actually getting chapped from all the moisture. It got bright red and stung a little, but today it’s better than it was. My nose is only slightly runny so I can’t complain too much. Could be worse! Meanwhile, Seth has had an increasingly congested head / nose all week and today he has been complaining that his ear hurts really badly. He has a fever too.

That’s not all the excitement—last night I took Snickers out and we roamed a bit farther afield than usual because he was sniffing around for a place to poop (all his usual places are covered with a couple of feet of snow). When we got around the corner from our house, a guy who lives in one of the houses over there let his dog out and the dog came running over to us when she saw Snickers. She and Snickers were sniffing each other and all seemed well when the other dog suddenly snarled and jumped on Snickers and bit him! The dog’s owner had followed her outside (if he had seen us before he let her out, I’m sure he would have put her on a leash) and he quickly caught up while I pulled Snickers away from the other dog. He apologized profusely, saying his dog had never done anything like that before. Snickers only yelped once—after I got him away from the other dog. We looked him over a bit as well as we could in the dark and discovered that he was bleeding. The owner of the other dog told me he would pay the vet so we could get Snickers checked out (which I would have done anyway). I told him our house number and picked Snickers up and carried him home. He was bleeding pretty profusely from a spot on his head and I wasn’t sure if he was injured anywhere else. I got him home and we put him in the tub (no water) and I held a paper towel to his head to stop the bleeding while Frank called the vet. Our vet’s office was closed, but the vet on call talked to Frank and told him another place we could take Snickers that is open 24 hours. So we wrapped him in a towel and took him there. It took forever—we got there around 9:30 and didn’t get home until shortly after midnight—but thankfully Snickers is okay. He has two puncture wounds on his head—one between his left eye and left ear, and the other near his right jaw. They had to shave off his hair near the wounds so they could examine them and clean them. They didn’t find any other injuries anywhere. The wounds are not too deep so they think he will heal up just fine. He is on an antibiotic to ward off infection and they gave us some pain pills for him too. He seems to be doing pretty well. He was shivering a lot at first but he calmed down while we were at the vet. He slept well last night and has mostly been himself today—maybe a little more subdued that usual but that is probably because of the pain pill. His fur was getting pretty long so the shaved off places make his face look kind of funny and lopsided:

So here is what we did do the past week:

• Frank made homemade donuts--yummy!

·         Watched a lot of snow come down. It started snowing around 2:30 pm on Friday and didn’t stop until about 9:30 pm on Saturday. I’ve heard lots of different “official” snow totals for Frederick, but I think we had somewhere between 32 and 36 inches.

·         Shoveled a lot of snow—mostly Jared did that, but Frank helped a lot more than he should have. Not only did they shovel our walks and dig our cars out, but they also helped a lot of other people in the ward who needed help with their shoveling. There is a less active sister that lives near us who needed to get to work on Sunday so we gave her a ride there and back on Sunday and on Monday they went back and helped dig out her car so she could drive herself to work.  Jared also went with two other priests to help their Seminary teacher dig her car out on Tuesday. (He and one of the priests spent the night at the other priest's house on Monday). Frank tried not to do too much, but even standing up for extended periods of time is hard on his back so being involved in the shoveling at all was really hard on his back. He decided to take a day off on Monday since he did too much on Sunday, and then he ended up helping with more shoveling on Monday!  

·         Seth, Jared, and Jessie went sledding out back on Wednesday. Seth also played outside for a while on Monday with a friend from church (who came over to play) and on Sunday with one of the neighbors' granddaughters while the rest of us were digging out cars.

·         Fed the Sisters on Monday and the Elders on Tuesday. The Sisters were supposed to come last Friday, but their mission president had “grounded” all the missionaries until after the storm, so they couldn’t leave their apartment. One of the Sisters got transferred on Wednesday and we are sad because we loved her!

·         Bought a new snow shovel because our only snow shovel broke on Sunday—bad timing!!

·         Worked on school work for Seth—did some math work online.

·         Read a lot of Harry Potter. Seth and I finished the 4^th book on Friday and we watched the movie that evening. Now we are about 10 chapters into the 5^th book.

·         I did some indexing. I completed about 5 batches.

·         We didn’t have Cub Scouts, but I sent out a number of emails related to Cub Scout stuff

·         Dad and I had our temple recommend interviews with a member of the stake presidency. We were supposed to have them on Sunday but that turned out to be impossible with all the snow so they were rescheduled for Wednesday evening. Thankfully, enough of the stake center parking lot was plowed in time for us to be able to do that on Wednesday. Now if I can just stop coughing, I can go to the temple!

·         I worked on my personal history—completed a couple of blog posts.

·         I got my hair cut. (Just a trim; nothing new.)

•  Took Seth to the doctor. I already had him scheduled to go today for a follow up on his ADHD medication, so I was able to have his ears checked at the same time He does have an ear infection, so we got an antibiotic for him. The doctor decided that we should try a different ADHD medication to see if that will help him, since the other medicine didn't seem to be making much difference. When I took the prescription to the pharmacy, however, they said they didn’t have it in stock because of the recent snow storm and probably won’t have it until later next week. So we are going to need to check around and see if we can find another pharmacy that has it. Jared is at work now, so maybe life is going to start getting back to normal again! Maybe by next week we'll be able to open the door to the deck again!

I already put all our snow pictures on Facebook, but I'm going to add them here at the end of this post so I'll have a record of the snow here too. 

Everyone have a good week and remember...only about 51 days until spring!:)

The first picture was taken around 2:30 pm on Friday, January 22nd, shortly after the snow started falling. We tried to take a picture or two about every hour (while we were awake) during the storm to show the snow accumulating:

Snow accumulations were slow that evening, but there was a big change while we slept that night. This is about 8:00 am Saturday morning (the 23rd):

We continued to take pictures every hour or two:

Now it is Sunday morning, January 24th. The snow has finally stopped falling, but we have close to 3 feet of snow!:

The whole neighborhood came out and we had a big shoveling / digging out cars "party":

The plow came through in the night, and left this huge pile of snow at the end of the court. The kids loved playing on it:

The end!