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).