Snow Day!

Today was Saturday, but it felt like a holiday. My husband and I woke up - no. I woke up at 8a and made him get up, too. }:) Heavy sleet was rattling against the window, and I looked out over 6 inches of packed snow with an inch or more of sleet over it - a recipe for death on the roads. I watched one of my neighbors try to clean off her car by scraping it, warming it up, fail, and then attempt to back it out of its spot coated in ice and snow. There was a big lumpy edge of snow and sleet it had to ascend, and it failed repeatedly. After 30 minutes of trying, she got out and went back inside!

The first thing we did was go look at his carnivorous plants, which have miraculously sprouted! I think we have one itty tiny Venus flytrap and one kind of sundew plant rearing their meat-eating heads. The second thing we did was play video games until lunch, which was comprised of 1) my pancake fail and 2) Caspian's dubious pancake success. We did get to eat pancakes in the end.

Afterward, we got bundled up in scarves and coats and whatnot and went out to explore! This ice and snow is packed down and crispy enough for me to walk on it without making tracks if I hadn't been clomping around like a 6-year-old. Caspian would find a patch of ice, get a running start and go skidding across it. We slid and hopped down the bluff, yelling and almost faceplanting, to go look at the creek - which had a coating of ice over the pools! I threw maple gumballs and lobbed pieces of packed snow into it to see how thick it was, and we wandered through the bracken to find a place where a deer had climbed down the bank and stepped into the water - it must have thought it could walk on the ice, but broke through. Brrr!

We got tired of the sleet blasting into our faces and came home to hot chocolate and a 2-hour nap. Made dinner, ate it, and now we're restraining ourselves from turning the thermostat up to 80 degrees, because our last power bill was up in the $110s.