February Catchup

A couple of important things have happened recently, and they've made it to our Flickr account but haven't made it to this blog yet. So here goes!

Last Saturday was Pinewood Derby for Mikey's Cub Scout pack, Pack 137. Saturday morning Papaw Jones and I took Mikey to Home Depot to the Kids Workshop to build a car display stand... it's maddeningly close to being just the right size to display a Pinewood Derby car! We thought it would be perfect, but it's a little bit too low for comfort. Still works though, so not a total bust!

At Pack 137 we're not particularly competitive at Pinewood Derby; they run a couple of races for each den so the boys get to race their friends, then later you can sign up for family-built car races or to race kids in other dens. Mikey's car wasn't the fastest one, but it wasn't the slowest either! He had a great time taking "instant replay" video with his video camera that Papaw Angel got him for Christmas the year before last. Meme and Papaw Jones were there too, to cheer him on and eat some pizza. Enjoy the few pictures below, or visit this page for the whole batch.

        

Back up to New Years Weekend... a few pictures from our great trip home to Shreveport (mostly Mikey and/or Hannah in Grandpa's back yard) are up on this page. Here's one of them:

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.

Less snot - more ice

Monday morning I stayed home from work to take Hannah to the doctor... she had been congested and coughing since the Wednesday or Thursday before, and because she would cough and cry during the night, nobody in the house was getting very much sleep. Turns out she just had some congestion, and swollen tonsils probably irritated by the coughing and making it worse. We've known for a long time that her air passages are a little narrow, so every bit counts for her. :) They gave us a prescription for some medicine, and she's feeling much better... but now Cathy spent so much time sleep-deprived that she's feeling sick! Everybody is slowly getting better, although there is still quite a bit of coughing happening around here.

Tonight in Tulsa is literally the calm before the storm. Tomorrow we are expected to start getting rain, then freezing rain, then sleet, then maybe a little snow by Friday morning. Everybody is thinking about the horrible ice storm we had in 2007; depending on which weather forecast you watch, this is either expected to be as bad as that one, or not really quite as bad. The power company is much better prepared this time; they've been cutting tree limbs more regularly since then, and they have already called in extra help from nearby unaffected areas, so if people start to lose power, PSO should be able to get it back up much more quickly than they did then. We'll see what happens; my main concern in these kinds of situations is to make sure we keep warm if the power goes out. Luckily for us, our heater runs on natural gas... WOO-HOO! But our blower is electric... D'OH!! So when the power goes out, we don't have heat in the house. Worst case scenario, we have relatives with fireplaces and we'll go over to one of their houses until the power is back up.

Fox 23 is predicting that we'll wind up with 2"-4" of snow/sleet on top of .25" of ice before it's over with. It will be below freezing all weekend, and dip back above 32 by about Sunday afternoon. Low of nine degrees Saturday evening! Should be exciting! :)

Yuv

Last night we were headed into church. I had taken Hannah out of her car seat and was carrying her in my right arm. She was asking me where her binky was, and I was telling her I didn't have it. "I checked all my pockets twice, and I don't have it!" I said. (Turns out I was wrong... I found it this morning in a pocket I had forgotten to check!) So I was walking across the parking lot with her, and she turned her head and kissed my shoulder, and she said, "I yuv you, Daddy!"

There are some moments in parenting that make it all worthwhile. :)

The Jones Flood of 2010

I was at my Mom and Dad's house last Sunday, installing a printer driver on her computer, when the call came. Cathy had gone to the store, leaving me and Mikey and Hannah over at Mom & Dad's so I could fix up her computer, and she had just gotten home. "Come home!" she said, and I could hear the stress in her voice. "There's a flood in the garage, and water is spraying everywhere!"

Cathy has been known, from time to time, to overreact to water in the garage; one time the "flood" she reported wasn't enough water to quench a grown-up's thirst on a hot day. But I could tell she was totally freaking out this time, so I hurried as quickly as I could. Turns out, her stress was justified. When I got there I looked through the window into the garage to see a vertical slot in the wall above the clothes washer, and water was indeed spraying out of it at an alarming rate. There was so much water it was running down the driveway, freezing in place and making the driveway even more treacherous than it already was! After the snow on Christmas Eve, our time above freezing had been limited, so one of the pipes that supplied water to the laundry had frozen and broken. The water was shooting out of it with so much force that it had drilled a hole in the sheet rock and it actually was spraying out into the garage.

In our nine years of living in this house, our garage has only flooded one time before. A year or so ago, it rained and rained for several weeks straight, and the water table was so high that we got some water in the garage. That was NOTHING compared to this. We shut off the water at the street (Dad had come with me) and surveyed the damage. Our garage is a good inch lower than the driveway, so you can imagine if the water was draining off onto the driveway... it was pretty deep! When I stepped down into it wearing my boots, it covered the toes. I grabbed my snow shovel, which was right near the side door of the garage, and started shoveling out water; I figured it was the quickest way to get a bunch of water out of there. It actually worked fairly well; I got most of the water out in oh, maybe an hour or so.

I had learned some things in that last flood, and the main something I had learned was this: wet cardboard must be gotten rid of as immediately as possible. This is because cardboard, left wet on concrete for a week or so, becomes very slimy and disgusting, and anything that is inside that cardboard mildews and has to be thrown away. So once I had the water under control, I started trying to get things out of the wet boxes and get them out of the garage. Knowing that pipes were likely breaking all over town, I called a friend of ours who is a contractor, remodeling houses for a big part of his livelihood. I needed to get the pipe fixed as soon as possible... I couldn't afford to wait until Tuesday or Wednesday for a plumber while my family lived in a house with no water!

Dwayne answered the phone with a groggy voice. He had spent the weekend on Guard duty, and he had been taking a nap. I told him basically what was going on, and he came over right away. Long story short, he wasn't able to fix the problem that day (although he tried) because he didn't have the part he needed, but when the supply store opened the next day, he went out and got the part he needed, and we were fine before noon on Monday. It's awesome to have friends who are so competent at what they do, and so willing to help out a friend in dire straits! He is definitely getting a meal out with us in the near future!

The one thing that really differentiated this flood from the last one was that this was clean water, not muddy rainwater that had seeped in from outside. Most of our stuff was also already up off the ground from that former episode, too, so although I threw out a lot of cardboard and set a lot of stuff out to dry, not very much of any consequence got thrown away (in fact, a lot of stuff that I did throw away wasn't as much water-damaged as just needed to go anyway). It was kind of like spring cleaning in January! And I did find some old pictures from several different eras of my life, Cathy's life, and our life together, and I got to take inventory of all the CDs full of pictures that were out there. I found some pictures from the wedding that originally brought me, Kevin and Candi (and Littlefoot) to Tulsa, and some even older pictures of me from high school. I found a Goodbye card that my youth group gave me when I was leaving Shreveport to go to college at ORU. I found a report Cathy wrote on marriage for a class when she was about 17 (VERY interesting reading!) and a bunch of bubble-gum cards with pictures from Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and Bogus Journey. It was fun to experience and share some of those things again!

One week later, there are still some things out there that are damp. Some of the cardboard is still outside; the garbage collection will only take so much at once. But things are basically back to normal; the garage is much clearer; and I'm committed, once it warms up, to doing a real spring cleaning. This is a great excuse to simplify and remove some of the junk from our life!

New Year's in Shreveport

Wow... I feel pretty rested today. It's Friday, and I've just recovered from our trip to Shreveport last weekend! Too much fun all at once, I guess!

New Year's Day the office where I work is always closed, so since it was Friday we decided to take a day of vacation and make a 4-day weekend out of it. So we loaded up in the car and headed down to Shreveport! My Grandpa, Uncle and Aunt live there, and we keep trying to find chances to go visit. They've only got a chance to see Hannah once, about a year ago, so we knew she wouldn't probably even remember them. Gotta get the kids exposed to the Fam, right?

Well, she certainly exposed us to something. Tulsa to Shreveport is about a 6-hour drive if you don't stop, but we generally stop around Paris, Texas (which is roughly 3 hours from either end of the trip) for a break and usually a meal at McD's or somewhere. We stopped to eat a clown-burger and get some Happy Meals with talking chipmunks in them, got a potty break/diaper change, let the kids play for a few, then headed on out. Well, the late lunch plus the long car ride plus the afternoon sun flashing through the bare tree trunks was apparently too much for poor Hannah... about an hour or so after we left Paris TX, she gave us her lunch back.

So we were in a dilemna... two hours from our destination and a car seat full of something you don't really want to smell for two hours! We stopped at the first gas station we saw, and while Cathy took Hannah into the bathroom and changed her clothes and rinsed the fouled ones out in the sink, I stood there in the parking lot with some paper towels and tried to get as much of the stuff out of the car seat as I could. Then we sat Hannah on a blanket we were willing to sacrifice for the evening and drove to the closest Dollar General, where we bought a huge bottle of their generic version of Febreze, took the baby out of the seat, and sprayed it down, then sat her back down on the blanket again. Miraculously, although everything was still damp, our field cleaning job did the trick well enough that we smelled very little on the rest of the trip. Hannah was never sick after that, and none of the rest of us had any queasiness, so we figure it was motion sickness (as opposed to a virus or food poisoning). Even so, I'll bet it's a while before Cathy wants to stop at that McD's again!

We had a terrific time on the weekend. Grandpa's great; he gets tired easily, still gets his bouts of upset stomach, and keeps the house unbelievably hot in winter (the thermometer on the thermostat said 85 degrees one time that I checked!), but we love him so much. My Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Elaine hung out with us for a big part of the weekend, too, and they're always fun. This trip they took us to the Norton Art Gallery, which I've always heard about but never remember visiting. Grandpa loves to go out to eat, so we went out to Cracker Barrel (sort of a favorite for our family when we're on trips) and one of Grandpa's favorite places, which Uncle Jimmy calls "The Green Weenie". We missed my cousin Derick again this time; he was unavailable this time and last for different reasons, but I'm sure we'll get to see him again eventually!

We got to visit with some old friends of mine this time... we went over to Tom & Pam's house for some ferocious Wii playing with them and their two boys (Mikey especially liked the Monster Truck racing game they have, in which you basically crush everything you can see until you get tired of crushing stuff). This time we also made it out to a service at my church there, Word of Life Center, and ran into several people... Chad Giddens, Glen Ware, even Tom's sister Lisa (who I didn't recognize at first because she was like 16 the last time I saw her, and that was a LONG time ago!) We saw Chad's wife Dixie, up on stage during the music portion of the service, but we didn't get to talk to her, or Pastor Sam and Becky Carr either, although Dixie told me later on Facebook that she and Becky had spotted us from the stage and Becky told her an embarrassing story about me from when I was a teenager. :)

It was a great weekend; no puking occurred on the way home (although we did eat at Taco Bell and not McD's!) and we didn't even see any of the snow until after we got off the Indian Nations Turnpike. We're hoping to make this at least a twice-yearly trip for us instead of just this annual thing we seem to have fallen into, so it won't be long before we do it again!

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'.