Brrrrrrr

Today it was cold when I woke up, but looking out the window there was no frost so I thought it couldn't be that cold. Turned out I was wrong, I cycled to work and 3 of my fingers were numb when I got in even though I had gloves on. What I didn't know is that in the winters there is very little moisture in the air so it doesn't look cold. This morning was -14C without wind chill and -22C with wind chill. The warmest it will get this week is -2 and most days won't get above -6.

Its a bit late now so I'll stick some picture on here and add some text later

Visited the state capital on Sunday, really pretty building and a beautiful day.



Here is some video of us doing some skating on a free ice rink in St Paul

After the skating we warmed ourselves on a closed fire

And the lights were pretty


On Saturday, we revisited Minnehaha falls, we've been here before, but now it looks a little different





Andy making her first commercial batch of chocolates, she sold 5 boxes to one of the mums from Dan's school and spent the $36 dollars on 9 new tops, 4 pairs of shoes, 2 winter coats , some cheese and a flat screen TV


For those without taste-o-vision, they were yummy

And here is some video of driving past the lake that is about 200 yards away from the front of our house and which I cycle past each day to get to work

Uber Visitor and Black Friday

Here are some pictures of Claire, who is staying with us at the moment. We have effectively kidnapped her and are making her do many households tasks, such as baking pumpkin pie and babysitting.


To keep herself trim Claire is observing a strict diet where no more than the tiniest morsel of pudding may be consumed in any one sitting.
Most of these pictures are taken with Claire's camera which we've raided for the blog.

Here are some pictures of us at the park on thanksgiving.


The turkey cooked on the BBQ came out as the best turkey we've ever had!
And the pumpkin pie was way better than it sounds, Andy even preferred it to apple pie.
And here is Dan making the pastry for the pie.

Black Friday

This morning I got a call from work at 5:30 asking if I could come in because some reporting wasn't working and today is BLACK FRIDAY. This is the single busiest shopping day of the year in the US, loads of companies put on insane deals and people camp out in the sub-zero temperatures to get to the bargains. Last year one of the BestBuy stores sold 25 50" Panasonic plasma TVs for $10 each!

So I got to work and phoned Sri, the guy who put the reports together, luckily he was in Vegas and hadn't gone to bed yet so he was able to help sort it out. Brian is the other person who was in helping and he had run out of fuel in the dodgiest part of Minneapolis at midnight the night before, had to walk home and then cycle back with the dregs of the fuel he had in the garage then wait this morning for the petrol station to open. So overall it wasn't the best start to the day - especially as Andy was not best pleased (to say the least) that I was called up so early. Her wrath was really directed at BestBuy but I was the lucky vitriol conduit.

On the plus side we decided to take the children to the Holidazzle parade. This is one of those things you do 'for the kids' that the kids don't really want to do but you feel they should. It involves a load of lit up floats trundling through the streets of Minneapolis with lines of watching children crying with the cold.

And here is some footage of the kids mucking about in the front room.

And at the mall of America

Thanksgiving and Birthday

This is a quick post just to say that for the first time in my life it's snowing on my birthday! Here's what our driveway looked like 20 minutes ago and I reckon we've got a few inches on its way today.
It's also Thanksgiving where the Americans give thanks that they don't have bird flu and can afford really good turkeys.

I'm following the midwestern American tradition and grilling my (albeit rather small) turkey as you can see. In Texas they deep fry their turkeys!


The lake behind our house has frozen over and the snow has settled on it, not quite ready for skating on yet but its only a matter of time.

All in all a rather splendid day, snow, turkeys, no work and my birthday - who could ask for anything more.

First snow of of our tenure

We got our first bit of snow this week, it actually snowed on a couple of occasions; nothing settled but we are getting an appetiser of what's on the menu for December to February. We keep hearing about the halloween of 1991 when there was 30 inches of snow in a day! Someone we know from church got stuck for 2 days in their car in that one.

First snowflakes, taken from my office window

The weather has been around minus 2 or 3 overnight and staying that way for my ride into work which means I need to wear my silly hat. Actually, its only silly if you don't have to cycle in freezing weather, when you do its a really sensible hat. Over the last couple of days I've felt like I'm coming down with something so I guess I need to freeze the flu germs out of my system. Either that or start taking the car into work. Here when they say that it often doesn't go above freezing for days at a time in January and Feb its easy to forget that they're talking about Fahrenheit!

Had a meal out with work this week to celebrate our first project going live, I honestly think it was some kind of miracle. Literally no-one on the team thought we had a hope of delivering it, including me, but somehow it made it so we got to go out and blow some cash on a meal. One of the key people in the team was also leaving to start his own wine tracking company that week so we got some very decent wines in. No pictures but for many of you this will be an easy thing to visualise :-)

On Friday both Andy and I finally managed to take our driving tests, and both passed (hoorah). It was very bizarre as we didn't even have to go out onto the road, it was all done in the test centre. Still, we're not complaining and now we are legal; in fact I think it was harder in the test centre as it wasn't exactly real-life situations. For the reverse park you had to park inside some flags which when you hit them (as I did) doesn't give the same satisfying crunch as it does when you hit a real car.

Later on Friday we had friends from church round for an evening meal and sleepover. We made the mistake of being outnumbered by children as there were 6 adults and 7 children. They actually behaved them selves really well, most of the time

Dan teaching Anneka and Abi how to play chess

We didn't get some of the other fun stuff on camera though, like the time it was quiet for a while and Andy found all the kids in the bathroom standing in the bath in an inch of water with their socks on.

Also bought a toy for us at the weekend, in the true style of Rolf Harris, from the picture below can you guess what it is yet?


While you're guessing that one, here are a couple of shots from my phone which I think merit a place on the blog.

Becky has a unique style of eating rice

Dan and Becky had to share a bed when we went to Duluth.

And here is Andy and I playing with our new toy in the unfinished part of our basement
I won't say who won, especially as it can't be easy for Andy playing against the 'Undefeated World Indoor Lorden's Basement Table Tennis Champion of the World'.

The current plan is to finish this masement and make it into a proper games room. The door at the back of the last picture goes into where I hope to make my home cinema. At the moment it is the storage room for Andy's chocolate. She made her first batch of chocolates this week and they have gone down rather well, the bailey's truffles are just gorgeous. We gave some to our next door neighbours a couple of hours ago and Andy is really pleased as they just phoned up to say how much better than Godiva they are and that Andy should sell them; which is completely true. So if my work goes pear shaped we now have a fall back plan.

Going to the zoo

Joined Netflix this week on the cheapo rental deal - $4.99/month for 2 films and got out 'The Bridge to Teribithea' about two young children who are outsiders at school and invent an imaginary world. - we thought it would be a good one to stay up late with Dan and watch. It was a really enjoyable film but it was not the super happy film we were really expecting. I'd recommend it though. It may the last film we see in a while as we gave back the DVD/TV unit we'd borrowed from the neighbours so we are now without a TV. I'm still holding out for the corporate discount which had better come soon, there is some issue with our visas that they are trying to sort out before we can become BestBuy employees and thus gain the key to the kingdom of cheap electronics.

Its not such a bad thing not having a TV as it means we can keep going on sorting out the house. We started on Dan's room this week and managed to finish it within a few days which is the 4th room we've done since we got here. We still need to replace some desk handles and sort out painting spider man on the wall (I'll post the picture when we do so you can have a laugh at our efforts).

We've also bought our next door neighbour's dining table and chairs from them as they've upgraded to a bespoke table about 12 feet long before any leaves are added. I have a suspicion we'll end up furnishing our house with their cast-offs as they tend to be nicer than anything we'd buy for ourselves.

In the afternoon today we went into St. Paul to Como Zoo to take advantage of the nice weather - not really encouraged by someone at church who had been telling us about how in the past it has been a nice day and then a blizzard hits which one time killed 59 people in downtown Duluth and hundreds in Minneapolis, which is why he always keeps warm weather gear and plenty of food in his car. Thanks for that Mark.



Not sure about the zoo, the animals looks pretty fed up, but there was a spectacular polar bear.

Becky was rather impressed and so were we!

Don't Mess with The System

So today I got into a lot of trouble and thought it prudent to warn anyone who might visit about the dangers lurking beneath the surface in our house.

Take a look at the picture below, looks fairly innocent doesn't it.

DANGER - DANGER - DANGER

See those teeth? Pretty large huh! Just ready to sink into the fool who might rouse her into a terrible fury by the heinous sin of 'taking the wrong shade of brown towel'. Well I learned my lesson I can tell you, so if you ever visit the system is:
eye level - spare towels for the beach or swimming
next shelf down - on the left, guest towels, on the right our towels (but on the right in front of the light brown towel is a guest beige towel - personally I would class that as entrapment.
A message from Andy at this point, she claims that Karen would understand, Karen if you are reading this then I hope for your sake that's not true.

Onto more serrious matters - drive thru (note the spelling) banking.
So our bank now has drive through cash machines, which is great I guess for when it gets really cold, but there is one thing about this that is a bit worrying. You pull up to the cash machine in your car, wind down the window, insert your card and then enter your pin, all normal you might think - but the keypad has braille on it - on a drive-through cash machine. So you might want to be careful on the roads here.

Nice People We Know
I got back from a couple of days in San Francisco where I was checking out some company's technology. I went with Debbie from work who is the reason for the expression 'Minnesota nice' - but she is good fun to be with too and we got given a limo and a driver for the 2 evenings we were there so we drove around town a bit - see below. Her and Andy went to the local cheese specialty shop a while back but I have to be nice to her about it as she always puts in a good word for me when I annoy people at BestBuy; which is most of the time.

So her and her husband Rob have threatened to teach us to ski (Rob is a slalom skier) which means if I end up writing a blog from hospital you'll know who to blame.