Snow Storms in October?!?

Snowstorm last night-- we had maybe 5 inches of wet snow. Had this been a month later, it would have been no big deal, but since so many of the deciduous trees still had their leaves, a lot of the snow "stuck", and so there were huge numbers of limbs down.

We had a couple of really big limbs come down in our back yard last night (in fact as were were going to sleep, we could hear the creaking and cracking of branches breaking). We had a big maple limb, a substantial section of an oak tree, and then a medium-sized cherry tree on our fence line broke in half-- I'm going to have to see if I can borrow a chain saw to take the rest of it down. Cleanup photos below. My dad and Joanie were visiting this weekend, so they helped out with the work (rather cold and messy it was):

About a third of the town is without power at the moment (luckily we only lost our power for a couple of minutes). What's more annoying is that our school superintendent has cancelled school for tomorrow-- apparently N-Star hasn't been able to guarantee that they will be able to restore power to the schools by tomorrow morning.

[Update on Tue Nov 1st: the schools were shut down for two whole days, gah. As of this evening it looks as though power is at last restored to all the school buildings, so the kids will go in for class tomorrow. Whew.]

New Halloween Looks

Apparently somewhere along the line we crossed over from the "cute" phase to the "creepy" phase when it comes to Halloween costumes. Here is Lydia showing off her outfit (complete with scowl):

I had to crack a couple of jokes in order to get a smile:

This was taken just before a friend's party (the actual trick-or-treating event hasn't taken place yet).

School stuff

Small nugget from Ethan's teacher this week: Senora Huff (his Spanish instructor) shared an interesting mnemonic device with the class. The following Spanish verbs take irregular "tu" constructions in the imperative:

   ven di sal haz ten ve pon se

This hard-to-remember list can be transformed into "Vin Diesel has ten weapons, eh?" (not at all hard to remember, since Vin is an action movie star :-).