Three less than yesterday

This morning Mikey got up bright and early with me, and about 7:30 we hit the road. Was I taking him to school? No, of course not... he home-schools! I was taking him someplace he was scared to go: to the oral surgeon's office. He had an extra tooth that needed to go, still inside his gum front and center over his two front teeth, shaped like a bent boat paddle. Mikey's dentist had also recommended that we extract the two canines from his top jaw while we were at it. So we went, bright and early (because there was a fast-for-eight-hours-before stipulation... if we had done it in the afternoon he would have had to wait all day to eat!) and shortly after 8am, Mikey was sniffing some laughing gas, ready to go! He was really nervous about it all the way there, but once he was in the office he was so brave. They gave him an IV and he didn't cry or even say "ouch"! He wasn't scared of the gas mask, and he even joked a little with the doctor and his assistants while the anesthetic took hold. They finished up quickly and I was with him as he came unsteadily out from under the anesthetic. He did great!

For the rest of the day he bit on some gauze to stop the bleeding, ate some milk shake (strawberry, from Sonic) and some fruit smoothie (strawberry/blueberry/blackberry, from Mama!) and took some Ibuprofin for the pain, and within an hour or two he was happy and joking with Cathy. He even ate some tuna casserole with the family tonight. In a day or two he'll be back to normal! He even got to keep his three extracted teeth!

Have I mentioned that we had some seriously PSYCHO weather this weekend? Friday it was 70+ degrees and people were wearing shorts. Saturday it was near freezing and snowing! Sunday it started out at freezing and ended with a slight warm-up, and Monday afternoon most of the snow was gone. Today you wouldn't know it had even snowed at all. And through the whole thing, I was recovering from a cold that was bad enough that it actually kept me home from work Friday.

Welcome to Oklahoma!

Weird Weather

Last Friday we closed the office in anticipation of the huge snow and ice storm that was being forecast. It was supposed to start snowing Thursday morning and not stop until late Friday, or maybe even Saturday. Well, it finally started snowing midday Friday, after a lot of rain and some ice. Here's the view I saw from my front porch Friday evening... isn't it pretty?

Saturday I took a walk to get some pictures of what was going on. You can see the whole set here, but I've included a small sample below. You'll notice that there was a lot of beauty to see, and you can also see in one picture that the ice on the tree limbs was as big around as my finger. I measured almost 5½" of snow on a picnic table in my back yard, and the ice must have been about ¼" under that. Needless to say, we stayed home, although as you can see from the pictures, the roads were basically clear by Saturday afternoon. We also had a couple of pretty mean icicles in the backyard... longer than my yardstick!

Here's my favorite picture of the day for irony:


I think tryouts may be postponed.

Needless to say, two 5+ inch snowstorms in less than a month (see this post for more about the snowstorm a month earlier) is odd weather for Tulsa. We've also had several extremely foggy days. Today was one of them. Look what I found when I got downtown for work!

This morning:

Similar pictures in clear conditions:

If you want to see the whole foggy batch, look for it right here.

The Tulsa Christmas Eve Blizzard of 2009

Every morning when I get up for work, I take a look at the morning weather forecast. I ride the bus, and the walk to the bus stop is about a half-mile or so, so obviously the weather is going to make a big impact on me. Generally when they show the long-term forecast I don't bother to look too closely; in Tulsa the weather is pretty unpredictable, and those forecasts are going to change before those days get here. But about a week ago I started looking at the last day in the 7-day forecast. What was it going to be like on Christmas Eve?

The first day the 24th appeared at the end of the list, I got so excited: "Flurries Possible!" A little bit of snow for Christmas? Could it possibly be true? In Tulsa it rarely snows at all before January, and usually the end of January (although we did have a freak snowstorm last March).

Remember what I said about the forecasts changing before the day gets here? Well, we had WAY more than "flurries". On Christmas Eve it rained a slow rain for most of the morning, then it sleeted for a couple of hours, then it snowed, and snowed, and showed! It was windy, too... I think I saw on the news one time that we had 35mph sustained winds and 50mph gusts (which is what made it possibly a "blizzard" and not just a "snowstorm"). Apparently it was only the third time in history that the National Weather Service has issued a blizzard warning for us.

Needless to say, it was a great night to stay home and open some presents! Christmas Eve services were canceled at our church (and even at the church we just switched from... most churches in town canceled because of driving visibility problems) so we hung out at home, opened presents to each other, and got all ready for Santa. In this picture you can see a remarkable number of our presents... when I snapped it I didn't realize that virtually everything we gave to each other was in the frame! :) Everybody got good stuff; nobody came away disappointed. The kids went to bed and got safely to sleep before Santa showed... but boy, did he show up in a big way!

Mikey woke us up early and discovered that Santa had left a Nintendo Wii for him! We had a blast later exchanging friend codes with Mikey's cousins Elizabeth and Eden and racing Mario Karts with them over the Internet, us in Tulsa and them just outside of Fort Worth. Hannah slept in a little later, but when she got up she found that she had gotten a 2-year-old-sized kitchen playset, complete with oven, microwave, fridge, and even a cell phone and a (sticker of a) CD player! She also got a little Disney Princess folding table and chairs, just the right size for her and a teddy-bear friend. I spent some quality time in the driveway with my snow shovel; you can see some of the pictures at the top of this post (and some more via the link at the end of the post). There was about an inch layer of sleet on the bottom, and then probably 6-7 inches of snow on top of that (more in places where it had blown into drifts). I've had enough experience to know that if I let it go for a day or two without clearing it, it would likely melt and re-freeze, and that makes it twice as hard to clear, so I wanted to do as much to get it out of there as possible the first day!

We had planned to have lunch out with my mom and dad on Christmas, and then go to visit Cathy's brother's house later on for dinner, opening presents in both places. Well, the weather was OK for driving (carefully), but for some reason it hadn't occurred to us that nothing would be open on Christmas day! Mom and Cathy both called around, looking for restaurants. I was using Google Maps to just try to remember what restaurants were close by so we could call them, and Cathy told me "Type in 'restaurants in Tulsa that are open on Christmas.'" I was like, you have GOT to be kidding me... but I did it anyway. The first hit on Google was a 5-year-old Tulsa World article talking about Tally's Cafe being open on Christmas. I've driven past Tally's (at 11th & Yale) any number of times, but never had any reason to eat there. Cathy called, they were open, so now I had a reason! Mom and Dad said they would meet us there.

The roads were still a little icy; not difficult to maneuver as long as you kept it down to, say, 30mph or so, but I figured the highway would be a little clearer, so I hit the on-ramp. The highway was at LEAST as icy as the city streets! I doubt I saved myself any time at all! But we did get there safely... and I tried to park, and got stuck! A couple of guys came out right away to help me get out, and I think one of them was Tally himself! :)

Tally's is kind of a 50's diner kind of place. The ambiance is wonderful, the food is plentiful and quite tasty, and the waitstaff is attentive and friendly. We all saved enough of our meal to eat half for lunch the next day! (At Tally's they have a huge stack of to-go boxes right next to the cash register, if that's any indication.) I think we'll be going back... even on days when it's not the only restaurant open in town!

We decided to go over to Mom and Dad's and open presents, despite the fact that it had gotten dark and I really didn't want to ice-drive in the dark. Mikey went with Mom and Dad, and Cathy and Hannah and I loaded up in our car. I had parked in a church parking lot behind Tally's which appeared to have been sanded or cleared somehow, because there were some clear parking spaces where I knew I would be able to get traction enough to pick up speed and get out of the slushy parking area... but someone had already gotten stuck in the exit I had planned to use, so I couldn't get out! I looked around for another way out, and spotted my exit behind the car. It wasn't going to be easy, but it was going to have to do.

I got the car turned around without taking the wheels off the de-iced cement and looked over where I needed to go. As straight a spot as I could find was what I was looking for, so my front-wheel-drive Pontiac Vibe could use its own momentum to carry it over any slushy spots. I put my foot on the accelerator, pointed the wheels at the exit, and hoped for the best!

The ride was REALLY bumpy. There were ruts in the ice from previous vehicles, and the place that I thought was an exit turned out to have a curb hidden under the snow... WHAM! But we got out without getting stuck. And Hannah was LAUGHING the whole time! She LOVED it! As I was driving down 11th Street toward my parents' house, she was still saying "Do again! Do again!!" (in about eight or nine years or so, she's going to be Mama's buddy on all of those Tulsa State Fair rides I won't go on!)

We opened presents at Mom & Dad's and they opened ours, and I managed to get us all home without sliding into anything. Unfortunately, I had to call my grandpa in Shreveport, Louisiana and tell him that we didn't feel confident that the roads were sufficiently safe to make the trip down to see him the next day. He told me that he was glad to not have to hear the news that I slid off the road backwards on the ice in my car trying to get down to his house. :) They only got flurries down there, and I don't even know that it stuck at all. Hopefully we can make it down there as soon as the snow melts.

So Saturday we got up with very little planned. Mikey and Hannah were having fun with their new stuff; Hannah cleaned up her toy kitchen while Mama cleaned up the real kitchen to get some yummy pancakes made for breakfast. In some parts of the world, the 26th of December is a holiday called Boxing Day (traditionally a day for giving to the poor), but Cathy and Mikey made sure it was Boxing Day by beating the snot out of Mii boxers in Wii Sports. :) Later Hannah and Mikey and I went out in the back yard and let Hannah have her first chance to play with real snow, and I pounded Mikey with snowballs! (Actually, he got in a good lick or two, too!) Then Hannah went in for her nap and Mikey and I went down the street to a place where Mikey could do some hill-sledding with a plastic sled we picked up a few years ago. We had a great time sledding! And for a dad, I think we had just as great of a time walking a few blocks down to the hill, just me and Mikey. Those times are opportunities that come too few and far between in these busy times. You can't buy that kind of time with your kids. If you have children, seek out times to be alone with them every once in a while. I figure that if I don't, once they're grown and gone, I'll wish I had. Something comes to me quite frequently as my kids are growing up: THIS time for them is exactly like the 70s or 80s were for me. One day they will be the age I am now, and today will be a time from their childhood, just like days from 1979 or 1972 are to me. What I do today is part of the childhood memories of someone in the future. I want to make the stories they remember and tell their own children happy ones!

After that things became more mundane... I worked a little more on the driveway (which I had failed to make it all the way up the night before), then I went to Wal-Mart for a few supplies and to check out road conditions (not perfect, but better... we're going to attempt the trip to church in the morning), then I came home and we made our annual day-after-Christmas birthday cake for Jesus. The day after Christmas can seem like a big bummer sometimes, so a few years ago we decided to treat what normally is a quiet, uneventful day as our Santa-free, gift-opening-free day to think about Jesus and bake a homemade cake. Kind of gives you something fun to look forward to, instead of full-speed-ahead Christmas and then it's over so suddenly that the airbags deploy! We played some more Wii and did our thing (Mikey and I are becoming fairly accomplished Wii Tennis players, but I'm still pretty dismal at Mario Kart Wii... Mikey took to it like a duck to water the first time he played it, though, and he almost always wins first place in the races!) Now the kids are in bed, and it took so long to write this post that Cathy's in bed, too! If you want to see pictures of the snow, Mikey sledding, etc. check them all out here. If you want to swap friend codes and race Karts sometime, shoot me an email and we'll set something up! I'll warn you, though... Mikey will kick your hiney. Just sayin'.

First Steps

What an eventful day! This evening, Hannah surprised us all by standing by herself for a good twenty or thirty seconds! Here's the picture:



After that she took three or four steps without any help and totally under control, and then she did some walker-toy lifts, just to keep the old blood moving:



We were TOTALLY excited for her! Now if she'll just give up the Hannah-ese and start speaking English so we can understand her...

The weather reports we saw tonight said that Tulsa got in the neighborhood of 7" of snow today. There were areas nearby (I think they said Mannford) that got as much as 10" in this one day. Last time we had that much snow at once was like three years ago, and that sure wasn't March.

Snow in March???

It Starts Snowing In Our Back Yard

At about 8:00 this morning, it started to snow. The video is of the very beginning of it, when you could still see green grass. It kept snowing, and kept snowing, and kept snowing! In fact, as I type this, it's almost 5pm, and it hasn't stopped yet! Mikey and I went by Meme's house so I could break her computer, and while we were there he made a snowman! Later we went home, and what did he do? He made ANOTHER snowman!



Here's a batch of pictures of the morning's events.

Merry Christmas, Tulsa!

For most of the day today, March 12 2009, it was SNOWING in Tulsa! Generally in Tulsa we don't get snow until after January 1, but it's a little unusual for it to snow this late in the winter. But it did give me a good excuse to do something I've been needing to do anyway... post our family pictures from Christmas! Here they are... or take a look at the whole set here!

        

On A Clear Day You Can See Forever

The other day I blogged that there were still branches in my neighborhood that were making it hazardous for me to get to my bus stop. That was Saturday... imagine my surprise when, on Thursday, I found that some of the branches had been removed! (Unfortunately, not all of them had been taken off, but it was a little safer getting to my bus.)

The only reason I had the camera with me that day was because a few days before that, I took a bunch of pictures from my office window of a "snowstorm" blowing in. I thought it would be interesting to take some similar pictures on a clear day so you can see how far the visibility really is from that window. Here are a couple of examples:


Snowy Day


Clear Day

I should have waited for the next day... it was much more clear... the pictures in the set were taken when it was kind of overcast, but you can still see a lot of stuff. I also took some pictures of my desk... anyone who has been to see me in my office will attest that it has (ahem) "character". (Really... it has cartoon characters.) I also took a few kind of pretty sunset pictures. Click over to see the whole set!

January 31, 2008 Snowstorm

Today there was a snowstorm that had been trumpeted by the TV news as pretty severe, and then turned out to be something of a non-event, at least in Tulsa proper. As it turned out, it was mostly pretty. I took the camera with me to work to try to take some fun pictures... this one is one of my favorites of the batch. Click over to see the whole set!