Like icing on the neighborhood

Friday we had enough snow to make everything look pretty, which conveniently melted off by 10 am. My kind of snow!

I plan to be proud to partake of your patio room**

Yesterday morning, before the work began:

Yesterday afternoon, as the work was winding down:

Yesterday evening, after the storm that dumped several inches of rain and hail on us:

Luckily, the track that will hold the third wall up wasn't installed yet, so I used a shop broom to sweep the water out of my new, 2" deep swimming pool that's located conveniently right above the sump pump in the foundation.  Then I spent an hour this morning blowing all the leaves out, and setting up fans to try to get the concrete dry enough for them to glue down the third track today.  The volume of leaves knocked down by the hail was impressive - maybe 25% of what was on the trees in our neighbors yard ended up plastered all over the side of our house and every other vertical surface in our yard ... like the panels that will make up parts of the walls of the room:

I keep telling myself that at least I won't have to rake those leaves up this fall, but the suckers will probably regenerate by then.

The hail wasn't record-sized, but it was kind of cool to see that it was obviously formed in two steps instead of one continuous process:

Not huge, but we got quite a bit of it.  This was taken more than an hour after the storm:

My plants were not exactly in favor of the giant julienne-slicers falling from the sky: 

What's funny is that I always take pictures of my new gardens right after I've mulched them, and I always joke that I have to do it then, because it's never going to look that nice again.  Good thing I did, too, since this was what it looked like on Sunday:

Notice the non-shredded hostas right above this?

Oh, well, at least we didn't lose any trees, have the power go out, or end up with a flooded basement.  Things could have been much worse than having to do a bit of sweeping and ending up with a lot of new "green" material for my compost pile.

** When Harry Met Sally reference.

I wasn't kidding about the storm, guys

Yesterday a hail storm blew up out of nowhere, dumping shooter-marble-sized chunks of ice as fast as an in-door icemaker can. Luckily, it was a short storm - maybe five minutes before it switched to rain - so it didn't shred many of my plants. It was freakishly localized, too - we drove less than 10 miles north of our house and not only did they not get the hail, it was dry as a bone and hadn't seen a drop of rain all day.

Want a quick peek at why my cats ended up hiding in the closet during the storm? I'd turn down the volume on your speakers, if I were you.

Once again, I am proven right.

The "rain" outside is bouncing, once again proving that in Cleveland it ALWAYS snows before my birthday.

Now, if only I could remember where I stuck the ice scraper when I put it away last May ...

10 signs it's fall in Cleveland

10. There's a pile of 10 coats by the front door, because you never know if tomorrow will be 70F or 40F.

9.  There's a pile of dead leaves inside our back door, because no matter how often I sweep, the suckers reappear like magic.  I swear, I'm going to nail that door shut if people don't stop tracking leaves into my dining room.

8.  Spider house party in the basement!  Aaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!

7.  Brussels sprouts and Winesaps.  'Nuf said.

 

6.  On any given night you're liable to see one of our neighbors having a bonfire in his backyard that's at least 4' across and 15' high.  Leaves burn reeeeeeeeal good after a heinously dry summer.

5.  There's a metric shit-ton of political ads in our mailbox.  Seriously, they've killed entire forests for the sake of a bunch of snarky ads that make me hate all of the candidates, not just the ones being slammed in the ads.

4.  New exercise plan: weight training with the leaf blower, aerobics with the rake, and endurance while dragging the bags of leaves around to the side of the house, then up to the curb a few days later.  These, my friends, are the 26 bags of leaves I carried to the curb at dawn this morning.  That's just from this week.

3.  Did you notice that the trees in my backyard are still far from bare, even after the 26 bags of leaves this week, and more than a dozen bags a week ago?

2.  Wacky weather = cool sunset rainbows that appear to end in Liza's best friend's backyard.

1.  Vampire children!  EEEEEEEEEEK!  (or is that just at my house on days when I'm playing around on Picnik.com?)

Dear Management:

I'm writing to inform you of what I believe to be an error in your planning of the weather for this week, which is in mid-April, in case you weren't paying attention. Last week it was balmy, Sunday was lovely, and Tuesday was so warm I had to do my training walk in shorts. The cats have been staking out their turn in the sunniest spots in the living room, trading off whenever one of them gets so hot they're in danger of spontaneous combustion. The daffodils and hyacinths are blooming, my tulips are about to open, and all in all, it's been a wonderful spring so far.

Now I can understand how you may be confused about what the weather is supposed to be like around here, what with a USDA projected "last frost" date in May and a population that insists on hauling out the tank tops and shorts whenever the temperature rises above freezing for more than ten minutes. You make it hot, people complain that we've skipped spring and gone straight to summer. You make it cold, and all the magnolia blossoms go all brown and nasty-looking. You make it warm, and my husband starts grousing about having to cut the grass already. You make it cold, and my daughter (who happens to be the weather watcher for her preschool class this week) just about pees herself with happiness when she spots the snow.

Yes, I said snow. See why I think that there may have been a miscommunication when you ordered up the weather today? Because I'm pretty sure that nobody around here asked for a cold, grey, drizzly, flurrying 35F to end our week.

Perhaps the timing is meant to be ironic? It can't be coincidence that I finally put away all of my turtlenecks and sent my wool sweaters to the cleaners yesterday, and now it's snowing. All of the kid's warm clothes are put away, too, so we're going with the "layered hobo" look for school today, thank you very much, Mr. Unexpected Cold Front. But don't think you caught us out completely, dude - the plastic may be down from the windows, but the flannel sheets are still on the beds, and the portable heater won't leave our family room until at least July. And I haven't even started most of our seeds yet, much less started to think about hardening them off outside, so you haven't managed to ruin our garden. Yet.

For the sanity of all of us in northeast Ohio, please turn the thermostat back up to at least 65F, and ditch that weird overcast green light we're getting today. Some of us are really, really in need of some vitamin D ... and all those tank tops and shorts look kind of scary on people who are so goosebumpy you can't even see their spray tans.

Sincerely,

Me

Happy Easter!

Yesterday I took a loooooong training walk in the Metropark, and I was delighted to see that the wildflowers are starting to make an appearance. Acres and acres of forest were carpeted in the most vibrant green, with tons of little yellow daisy-like flowers on top. And then I'd walk around a bend in the trail, and the forest floor was completely barren - no leaves, no flowers, no nothing. Keep walking, and I'd get to large clumps of lily-of-the-valley plants, which weren't blooming yet but had lots of foliage. Some places had daffodils peeking out from behind trees, and there were even a few violets along the edges of the trail.

I believe it's safe to say that spring has officially sprung in Cleveland.

Annual spring river stomping

Just like last year, we managed to take advantage of a freakishly warm break in the weather to go stomping down at the river. Notice Liza's idea of appropriate attire for wandering around in the muck:

"'Watch for ice?' Yeah, right."

There is nothing more fun than standing in 1/2" of freezing cold water.

Unless it's TWO people standing in 1/2" of freezing cold water.

New skill of the day: the rail fence sideways shuffle.

Her favorite part of the trip? The deep puddle - complete with floating trash and dog poo - in the library parking lot.

The latest in spring fashions

Hoodie, yoga pants, and rubber boots. She's all that.

Ten signs that the apocalypse* is upon us

1. Liza is at a play date with the girl down the street. I'm at home. By myself. Getting work done. By myself. Did I mention there's no one else home besides me? (cue choir of angels)
2. Last week Liza volunteered to go to the kid's club at the grocery store to hang out while I did the grocery shopping. She stayed there the whole time and was sad to go when I was done. (cue a larger choir of angels)
3. I'm typing a blog post while sitting in the sun on my couch. So THIS is why I paid the extra to avoid getting another desktop machine ...
4. I successfully gave my daughter a French braid yesterday. This is notable because a) her hair is long enough, b) she stood still while I tugged on her hair for 10 minutes, c) it stayed in all day and gave her beautiful waves when we took it out last night, and d) before yesterday I'd never managed to French braid anyone's hair but my own and have it stay in for more than 3 seconds.
5. My daughter managed to embroider this with only minor assistance from me. You can read more about it here.
   
   
6. I bought seed-starting supplies this weekend. I guess I need to sit down and calculate the best planting date based on our last frost prediction (May! We have the chance of hard frosts until May!), lest I end up with an egg carton full of seedlings and a glacier in the back yard.
7. I've finally started stocking my new etsy store, G Sees. Go forth and buy 5x7s!
8. We bought a weeping pussy willow tree from the grocery store last week, and we haven't managed to knock it over, pull off all the catkins, drown it, starve it, or otherwise permanently damage it (yet). It's happy and leafy and weepy and fuzzy and pollen-y and I lurrrrrrve it.
9. The snow in our front yard is almost entirely gone. There is, however, still a solid 6" of snow on our entire back yard, should we decide it's necessary to make another snowman.
10. We have the first flowers of anyone in our neighborhood. I cannot tell you how happy these make me every time I see them.

* or spring, it could be spring instead of the apocalypse. Hard to tell, really.

Hah! Screw you, Phil!

Okay, so the groundhog may be under the impression that we're in for six more weeks of winter, but some of the crocus in my front yard have different ideas.

As do the ever-dependable sedum.

And even the Japanese maple tree is giving Phil the finger.

Also - apparently I need to moisturize more. In hi-res, that photo of my hand is downright disturbing.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go dig out some shorts and a tank top. It is 35F, after all.

Why sending Jason out to play with the kid is sometimes a bad idea

Leprous Staring Snow Baby says,

"Step closer so that I may suck the delicious brains from your puny head! Oh, and let me know if you've seen my legs, okay?"

First week of summer

Forget dates on the calendar - there are more reliable signs that it's summer in Cleveland ...

Rain dances

trapeze action

sitting around looking moist

(pretend) butterflies emerging from their cocoons

teeny tiny produce

So, MLF, enjoying the heat down there in Texas? It was 82 here today ... I thought about turning on the air conditioner, but then the sun went behind some clouds and I forgot all about it. Bwahahahahahahahahaha

Again with the bullet points

Sorry to go MIA, folks. Not dead or institutionalized, just leading a life that is mindnumbingly un-blog-worthy. Rather than bore you with the details, I decided to skip it. In the interest of catching up, here's the best of the past few weeks:

• Jason has been buying these miniatures he needs to play Warhammer 40K with his gaming buddies. His army has a couple of people called "librarians," which I think is pretty funny. And he's got some kind of motorcycle thingees that are pretty cool now that he's got them painted and everything. But the other night a friend suggested that he retrofit one of the librarians onto the motorcycle, and I decided that combination should be called the Bookmobile, and I just about peed my pants I was laughing so hard. See? This is why I haven't bothered blogging.


• Also, tonight Jason decided that one of Liza's kids' magazines was called Your Big Backside, which I think would be an awesome fitness magazine for obese preschoolers. Get to it, NWF.


• Liza drags home a couple new pieces of art from preschool every week, and that combined with what she produces at home has gotten us to the point where we were taping stuff to the walls in the dining room. Four rolls of ribbon, a few nails and washers, and some clothespins fixed that problem: From now on, if it doesn't fit in the art gallery and it doesn't mark a milestone, it hits the trash.


• Today Liza finished the third level of Hooked on Phonics workbooks. Sometime in the past few days she started actually recognizing a lot more things as words, rather than letters, and she read the second half of her final book pretty fluidly. Here's an excerpt from it, just so you know what I've gotten myself into: "Then Dad and Tim woke up. They looked at the camp. 'Who set up the tent?' Dad asked. 'Who got the sticks for the campfire?' asked Tim. 'Who got the nuts and berries?' asked Dad. 'Who got all the fish?' asked Tim. 'We did!' said Kim. 'My pals Fox, Skunk, Chipmunk, and Frog helped me!'" She got three mylar balloons from the dollar store for finishing the level, and you'd have thought they were dipped in gold, she was so excited. Of course, if they were dipped in gold they wouldn't float too well, so it's just as well they were plain old balloons.


• Last week after we got back from my parents' house, I started letting her look through her Bob Books while she ate lunch, mainly so that I could read my book at the same time. She was actually reading them, not just flipping through the pages, which was the first time I've seen her reading casually.


• Speaking of my parents' house, Liza was unimpressed with the flower show. She was only lukewarm on the train ride, perhaps because we went the day after the giant snowstorm and it was blowing 40 mph and about 3 degrees at the (outdoor) train platform, and the train was late. She was in favor of the cupcake at the Reading Terminal market, but she lasted for about five minutes in the actual flower show before she started whining about wanting to go home. Here's her attitude during the parts of the show when she wasn't whining: She liked the family lounge, which had movies and games and crafts and animals visiting from the Philadelphia Zoo. There was a bunny - that kept her busy for a few minutes while my parents saw the show. She was also in favor of the Fuzzy Wuzzy plant I let her get, which is currently dying on our less-than-sunny windowsill.


• This weekend she started reading road signs to us ("Do Not Block Drive" is her favorite). Tonight she started reading the back of Jason's cup to us while we were eating dinner. OMFG.


• Liza liked the natural history museum we visited near my parents' house. Can you tell it started off as some rich guy's seashell collection? Liza visits the "big fucking shell" corner. It was cold the day we visited, so we didn't get a chance to walk through the gardens outside, but we did visit at least one of the bronze statues they have on the grounds:
• Speaking of cold, when we got home from my parents' house, this was in our front yard: As usual, winter can officially bite me.
So help me god, if you so much as bruise that crocus, Charlie and Lola are going straight back to the library and they're staying there forever.


• We've gotten a lot of rain in the past few days, and the river is a little, um, full. I think this shot was upstream from the bridge: And this shows roughly the place where I was standing when I made the video ages ago:

Yeah, okay, so that's enough for today. Hopefully something interesting (or at least infuriating) will happen soon so I have something to talk about.

I hate the hole in the Lake Erie ice pack

Last night after dinner, on the local NPR station: "Tonight's weather forecast calls for a possible one inch of snow accumulation tonight, followed by another inch tomorrow, tapering off in the afternoon."

Two inches, my ass.

By 10 am I had to clear 6-8 inches off the driveway, and it kept snowing heavily all day, at least in our neighborhood. Jason works downtown, which usually sees heavier snowfall than here, and he said it didn't do a thing there all day. Everything we got was that insanely light stuff that just flies back in your face when you try to shovel it (yay!), but at least it was decorative:

I can't decide if it looks more like some form of virulent mold, or a feather boa.

Check out the weather report summaries for the past couple of days and notice how nobody seems to know what the heck is going to happen. My personal favorite quote was from the forecast at noon today, when they said,"The total snowfall from this storm from overnight to this evening will probably reach 10 to 18 inches." Yeah, that's like NINE TIMES as much as you were saying yesterday. Slight difference there, folks.

This, combined with the 40.5 inches of snow we got in January - yes, that's only 2" shorter than my daughter, and 2.5" short of an all-time record - and the lack of thawing means that the ends of my driveway look like this:

And according to that damn groundhog, we've got another six weeks to go. Really, really wishing that Jason's conference in Orlando next week hadn't been turned into a videoconference, because we were this close to being in Florida this month. Florida. Where, you know, you're able to wear something other than snowboots every single day for months at a time.

Slogan you'll probably never see in a brochure

Kia Rondo - the perfect winter car for people who like to pray frequently while driving!

I think there may be a special edition with a rosary and St. Christopher's medal embedded right in the steering wheel, designed for days like today when steering and stopping were more suggestions than commands, if you know what I mean. It wasn't just me sliding around out there, but it does seem like this car is more touchy than our previous cars.

Oh, well - I needed a little excitement in my life anyway.

Dear Township: plow our street already

It's been snowing pretty steadily since yesterday, and the almost complete lack of wind meant that everything came straight down and stayed where it fell. It's a much easier-dealt-with snowfall than the nasty swirly drifting ones, as at least you know pretty much what depth you're going to be shoveling or blowing for the whole driveway. Plus, it looks cool.

Behold, the marshmallow effect:

Don't believe me about the lack of wind? Here's Liza's disc swing, which moves if you breathe heavily nearby:
I've been up since around 8am, and while the streets were obviously plowed sometime overnight, nobody's done squat with them as the snow piled up all day today. There are up to 8" of snow in parts of our street, even in the areas that were "plowed" last night. The mailman apparently drives some sort of all-terrain assault vehicle, because he managed to bust through about 18" of snow along the sides of the road so that we could all get our useless catalogs today.

When I was out dealing with the snowfall for the second time today, I decided to make life a little easier for the mailman by clearing away the worst of the snow on the street near our box. Can't you tell? (also, here's a bonus view of the tunnel-like path to our side of the box):

Sometime around lunch the temperature went up a degree or two, just enough that some of the stuff on the exposed areas started to thaw a bit, which is how we ended up with The Icicles Of Doom hanging over our back door:

I'm just itching to reach out and break one off, but I know if I open the back door a foot of snow is going to collapse on the hardwood floor, and that's just not an acceptable tradeoff.

That was a first

This year I decided to bite the bullet and buy an offical Honeybaked Ham for Christmas dinner. We've had imposters in the past, and while they were okay, for some reason I'm convinced that this one will be ambrosial. For what I paid, it had better be.

In order to procure this most crunchy of holiday entrees, I had to drive in the snow for half an hour, at which point I found out that the store was so busy they had police directing traffic for the parking lot. Like, half a dozen cops, with orange cones and "lot full" signs and the largest boom box I've seen in years blaring Christmas carols out into the scrum.

We managed to park at the restaurant next door, and I carried 40 pounds of sleeping preschooler across the icy unshoveled parking lot in 9-degree cold (with a wind chill in the negative teens) to wait in the cattle line they had set up inside the front door. Luckily, there were only a handful of people ahead of me, and they had - no kidding - eight people working to pull hams for customers, plus another four or five on cash registers, so we were out of there before Liza even woke up all the way. I still got to carry a 40-pound kid in one arm and a 10-pound ham in the other, all the way back across the ice.

And this was AFTER the $185 trip to the grocery store, when I purchased the heaviest load of groceries in recorded human history. Start off with a 25-pound bag of rock salt, five pounds of flour and a couple pounds of sugar, and it's all downhill from there. I think I was probably pushing 150 pounds of cart/kid/groceries by the time I got to the register. Let's not do that again, okay?

Urgh

The only thing "it's beginning to look a lot like" around here is a Slurpee. Wintery mix sux.

Feature my car needs

So the other day it started to snow as I was driving home from The Good Yarn Store, and the closer I got to home the worse the roads got. It was snowing a pretty fair blizzard, but the roads were mostly just slushy because they had warmed up earlier in the day. At any rate, they were worse than I thought.

I was approaching a traffic light and braked when it turned yellow, in plenty of time to stop with only light brake pressure ... only I didn't. Aside from that ominous ABS chattering, I got bupkis for stopping power. Pretty soon I was standing on the brakes and muttering wordless prayers that the people in the cross traffic lanes would notice that - hey! She's not actually slowing down! - and maybe keep from ramming into my daughter's car seat.

Luckily, I was "stopping" while sliding straight ahead, not at some weird angle, and the people in the cross traffic were polite enough to not even honk at me as I slid by. Maybe the look of panic on my face was enough to stay their honker hands. In any case, major bullets were dodged, and the rest of the trip home was uneventful.

For the past two days, though, I've been reliving the moment and trying to figure out what I would have done if the other traffic hadn't noticed my predicament. I've decided that I probably should have started honking like a maniac to let them know there was a problem, although that probably would have backfired and made them think that the people behind them were getting antsy so they should pull out right into the side of my car.

I think we all need a new feature on our cars. I'm calling mine the "OhHolyHellTheCarWon'tStopPleaseDearGodDon'tLetThemPullIntoMyLaneBecauseWe'dAllEndUpDeadAndItWouldBeMyFaultKindOfAndThatWouldReallySuckSoPleasePleasePleaseStayWhereYouAreAndPreventMyCertainDeathFromAStupidWeatherConditionFuckFuckFuck" button. Pushing it would turn on a revolving light on all sides of the car and a recording of a primeval scream. I think the button should be near the "emergency flashers" button on the dashboard, and the icon should show somebody screaming and waving his arms over his head. I'd like mine to be acid green.