Happy Christmas

HAPPY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE

Love to everyone back in Blighty, we miss you very much and wish you could be here with us at this special time (or else how can we manage to eat all the sweets that Andy has made).


Hope everyone has a great turkey (or is it pigeon this year?) and a lovely day.
Sausages wrapped in bacon on the grill (following the turkey) and check out the Minnesota version of a wine cooler.


You can't really tell from the picture but it is really snowing outside. We got another 2 or 3 inches today.



The kids were quite impressed with the flaming Christmas pudding, not sure it needed any extra brandy the amount Andy put in it. It tasted excellent though, you can't get Christmas pudding here so Andy made ours about a month ago.

After dinner it was time to burn off the 768,406,683 calories in the dinner, we decided that snowman building and snowball fights were the best way to do this. The roads were pretty bad so we just stayed in the front garden.


Looks like we need to clear the drive - again




Just to keep up the blog here are some pictures of Minihaha falls taken yesterday.



This is taken from behind the falls!

Snow, Hockey and Cards

Been a bit slack on the blog recently, Martin, Margaret and Jon (Andy's parents and brother) have arrived so we've been fairly busy. Andy has literally baked anything that looked like it might fit in the oven so we have mince pies, pumpkin pie, meringue towers, chocolates etc.

Andy has sold some more of her chocolates , its not likely to make us rich , but she might break even and its a labour of love - here is the latest batch. If you have had some leave a comment on the blog for fedback. I think she was particularly proud of her Earl Grey truffles.After nearly 3 weeks with no snow we finally got a bit more yesterday.The weather turned warmer for a day and managed to make it above freezing which just created a big ice problem when it dipped below again - I wasn't able to brake in time for a junction yesterday, the anti-lock brakes couldn't help on ice. We're due for a whiteout today, not a lot of snow but snow with wind creates driving problems.


After a disappointing visit to the American football which was pretty dull truth be told ( I think the reason there are so many advert breaks in American football is to make the game seem more interesting) we went to see the Minnesota Wild ice-hockey team, and we got a great game.

After going 0-1 down, things picked up when some beer arrived.

Then we got to see something that had never happened in the history of the team before and had last happened in the National Hockey League in 1996 - one player scored 5 goals! Marian Gaborik played a great game, when he got his hat-trick about a hundred caps were thrown into the ring and caps were 50% off on the stalls.
The Wild celebrating their victory.












Dan ready to tube.

Not at all cold

Its not all cold here in Minneapolis. The picture below of the Mississippi frozen over is a bit misleading given how hot it is at the moment.


And this picture of me going tubing (sliding down the side of a hill in a rubber ring) is the sort of thing you can do pretty much whatever the weather.Last week it was zero degrees when I cycled in. Which wouldn't be too bad if it were in Centigrade - but it isn't.

Margaret, Martin and Jon have arrived so they're getting a taste of proper cold, they've been out to buy warm weather gear and John and I went tubing last night for a couple of hours and didn't get too cold. More updates soon.

Still Winter

Christmas is approaching quickly and Andy is beginning to kick in with the decorations and preparations. She has made her own Christmas cake and Christmas pudding which both look fantastic - I would include a picture but it would be like taking a picture of a glass of really good wine to show how good it is. Instead here is a picture of our tree and front room.
The schools in Minnesota are paranoid about children getting their heads stuck in giant jars of M&Ms so they enforce the wearing of head protectors.
Compare and Contrast

Winter in London: An inch of snow and the temperature drops to -1C, everything stops, people go home from work early, cars are stranded on the motorways, a group on a London bus resorts to cannibalism. The next morning all the snow has gone, the temperature is 10C and raining, people reclaim their cars from the side of the motorway and the group of cannibals on the bus fall back on their M&S sandwhiches that they were keeping for an emergency.

Winter in Minnesota: 12 inches of snow in a couple of days, -15C people drive a little more slowly for a day or so until the snowplows have done all the roads - literally nothing else changes.

Its just beginning to sink in that the winter is going to be loooooong. Here is an anecdote to show just how different it is. The other night I was popping out to the shops and I asked Andy 'is it cold out?', to which she responded 'of course it is!'. But what I was really asking was 'is it so cold that you have to put a hat and gloves on to walk from the car parked in front of the shop to the shop?' Anything above about -12C doesn't count as cold!

In the last 2 weeks the temperature hasn't gone above about -6C even during the day and has gone down to about -20C at night.

In order To cope with the cold we had to go out an buy a faster sled, here is some footage of Dan and I trying it out. Tomorrow we are off in search of faster slopes - google maps has just added terrain so we can see where the good slopes are - nice.



Thought I'd stick in a shot of my work taken from the car - you can see why I am often late for meetings if I have to make it from one end of the campus to the other (e.g. from the left end of the left building to the right end of the right building).

Sledging

The snow is much better for sledging today, so we went to Arneston Park which is just a few minutes drive away and so went and hurled our children down steep slopes on not much more than a plastic tray. This was also the first time I'd ever been sledging I'm pretty sure. If you ranked the real reasons I wanted to come to Minnesota this probably ranks higher than my job :-)

Poised at the top of the slope, the intrepid explorers prepare to launch themselves into the unknown.


And some action footage, we missed the wipeout where Becky and I hit a huge snowpile that I mistaken call a slope in one of the clips.



Andy also spent a while making the kids advent chocolates so they wouldn't be corrupted/poisoned by any Hershey's nonsense. If she could persuade people to part with $1,000/calendar then she would probably make minimum wage, they're not exactly quick to produce.

First Day of Winter

Yesterday marked the first day of winter and our first 'proper' Minnesota snowfall which started at about 9am and continued until the evening.

Rather than stay inside we decided to go exploring and had an interesting time driving on roads where the markings were obliterated by the snow - and that was on the interstates! The minor roads were pretty much invisible, and unlike the UK, its so cold that the snow doesn't melt when there's a lot of traffic over it. I did drive pretty carefully though which marks a change from normal behaviour.

The firs at the front of our house are looking suitably seasonal now

The picture above is of lake Cornelia near our house, its difficult to tell the different between a lake and a car park at the moment.

We tried sledging down our driveway but the snow was too powdery when it first fell, we're hoping for better sledging snow today.

Winter exercise

This morning I spent an hour and a half shovelling snow from our driveway - very good exercise.

Yesterday was Dan's final ice-skating lesson of the sessions we've booked for him. He really has developed a unique style that we call the 'Very Fast Not Quite Falling' style - see for yourself.