Fire and Ice

The weather is finally turning a bit warmer this weekend. It was -30 during the week (inc windchill) but got above freezing today so I took Dan to Centennial Lake which is at the back of our local shops - its all free and as usual with Dan skating you can guarantee some good spills.




We got Dan some second hand hockey skates today and this was the first time he used them (hockey skates are a little shorter and trickier than normal skates) so we got even better 'almost falling' skating style than usual.



In the evening we went round to Debbie and Robs, they're just about to move back into their house after a 6 month remodelling job (remodelling is basically a major renovation of all or part of a house). Their house looked great - no pictures sadly but then we went out for a Japanese meal with a lot of theatrics which the kids absolutely loved - 'best restaurant ever' for them.

Skate the Lake

Went to Prior Lake after church today for 'Skate the Lake'. The first surprise was the carpark, which was the lake!

Not at all worried about falling through the ice, honest!They Zamboni a path all around the lake and have lots of hockey rinks for people of different abilities - sadly none for people like me with close to zero ability. Dan was sad as they didn't have any skates for hire but soon made a friend and spent the next hour and bit having snowball fights. I skated the 1.5 miles round the lake which I just managed to do before nightfall.

Please can we go in now

Hot chocolate is about the only way to keep the kids warm when there is a cold wind blowing.

Not Welcome In DC

Dan's Birthday in the US.

Dan and Becky helped to make Dan's birthday cake. To do this simply start with a tidy kitchen, basic cake making ingredients (chocolate, sugar, flour, eggs, chocolate, sugar, sweets, sugar, butter and chocolate) and two willing helpers.
Split the ingredients in two, one half goes in the bowl, the other half spread liberally onto the clothes of the helpers and all available surfaces. Add some patience, jiggle for a few hours, lose patience and all grip on reality before pulling it all together for a final burst of creativity.
The finished result has, as you can see, enough sugar to allow a medium sized group of children to be enough of a critical mass to cause a chain reaction of running and screaming. Sadly the only effective control rods for this particular reaction appeared to be the promise of more sweets so we played pass the parcel - a phrase we had to repeat a number of times because the American parents though it sounds 'awfully posh' and they don't have this as a party game in the states.







On an unrelated note, Andy promised Margaret and Martin some pictures on Becky in Bunches.


Rubbish Job
We have sliding doors that separate the bedrooms from the rest of the house and a few months back I slid the door so far into the wall that the little wheels on top of the door fell off the runner and try as we might we couldn't get it back on. This is the point at which we discovered that American houses are built in a particular order, which like time's arrow is non-reversible. The only way to fix the problem was to cut away a hole in the back of a bathroom cabinet and then spend about an hour wedged into a space no wider than a size zero model's ankle trying to get the door rehung and to make sure it didn't happen again. Here are some pictures of my trauma for your DIY schadenfreude.

Believe it or don't I managed to fit through this gap.

I had to go to Washington DC last week for a night - they must hate me there as I always seem to bring extreme weather. The first time I went it hadn't rained for 2 months and a couple of hours after I got there they had a torrential rain. The second time I went it started snowing and they had the biggest snowfall of the year. This time they had an ice-storm, the rain literally froze where it landed and made everything super-slippery. It was hard even to walk across grass without slipping up!

Going on the trip meant I missed my next snowboarding lesson, but seeing as how I am such a cruel boss and made the entiure project team work until 10pm on Monday I left early on Friday and went to have a practice by myself. Typically I soon got bored of the practice slopes and had a few goes on a proper hill reached by the chairlift (which I found exciting seeing as how I'd never been skiing before). As I never made it down without at least a couple of spectacular wipeouts each time, today I feel like I'm held together by duct tape.

Today both Andy and Dan had ice skating lessons. This is about the only time when Andy has been pleased to go backwards - as she finally was able to do backwards skating - the trick apparently is not to lean forwards. Dan is getting faster and faster and now has a 50% chance of falling when he hits the sideboards. After lunch we headed out to explore somewhere new, in this case the Carver State Park which about 20 minutes away. This makes it seem like we just had lunch and headed out - the reality of the process is more convoluted and involves ensuring the children have been to the loo, then a good deal of searching for items such as the children's gloves, which, although not large, should not be so hard to locate as they are. Then of course the rounding up of the children, and all the cold weather gear, snacks, directions etc. So much time is required for these steps that the kids need the loo once again and you feel it would be as easy to go away for a week as a couple of hours.

Still we finally make it out for an afternoon of freezing the children. Its actually not cold (about 0) but there is a wind and we take them on a short hike which they're not really up for. To make it easier for them we hire a pull along sledge (for a dollar) which I can't unfortunately be trusted to pull at any sensible speed and end up spilling the kids a number of times more often than they find funny. Still they do eventually defrost and we've been out in the sunshine which was great.

Back to the cold

Back in the US now. We decided that chocolate didn't count as food so despite packing about 5 Kg of it we didn't declare it at customs but then got a random search - luckily the customs people don't regard it as food either so now you know you're safe to bring chocolate with you if you ever visit (no pressure mind).

We managed to miss the second biggest drop in temperature in Minnesota since records began, it went from +5C to -32C in 24 hours! Glad to have missed that one as there was a nasty wind chill factor too, it is no fun at all when it gets that cold. Someone at work didn't wear gloves when they went out to the shops and got minor frostbite.

The day we got back we went to our neighbour's superbowl party, its a great house to host it in as they have bags of room for 100 people and 11 TVs in the house! Sadly we had to leave before the end of the game (actually it was sad to leave because there was still food left) as the kids were knackered having been up for 20 hours.

I also had my first snowboarding lesson this week. There is a ski school about 2 miles from our house which is the biggest ski-school in the mid-west. I have to say I was rubbish for the first hour and then it kind of clicked - a long way to go but its a lot of fun.

Holiday in Blighty

Just got back from a great holiday back in England which we really enjoyed. It was great to meet up with so many people. Having been away for so long we also got to see things with a fresh set of eyes and we realised that some things were much better than we remembered about home which we'd previously taken for granted.

We'd been missing roast dinners and fry-ups (hard to find good pork sausages, beans, bread and bacon here) so we went a little OTT and had at least one roast or fry-up every day which was rubbish for our hearts but great for the soul.

Another thing we'd missed was the colour GREEN which we saw for the first time in a few months. Everything is Minnesota is either covered in snow or snirt (snow and dirt) and brown, black or white.

Here we are walking back from Richmond towards Ham on Dan's birthday (in case you didn't know how old he is he's giving a hint here).



And this is a view over London from Richmond Park (you have to click to view the larger image, see how many London landmarks you can identify).

One of the highlights of the return trip was getting to have a bonus Christmas round at Denise and Bill's. Dad managed to make the trip down which was great, he is recovering slowly from his heart op and we even got to see his scar (would have posted it but would have got reported for inappropriate content). We had the full roast dinner and presents afterwards plus we got to see some of the Dorset crew which was a bonus ball.



Toby is all perky now that he is out of his cast


Becky's favourite at the moment is her very own lip salve , not to take any chances she regularly covers her entire face with it.By the end of the day the kids were exhausted as you can see from this opium den-like shot.

We got to lots of our favourite local haunts, such as Richmond park, here is a shot, not of the park but of the view through a public telescope of St Paul's cathedral, one of the few protected vistas in London which is remarkable considering its across 14 miles of the most expensive real estate in the world.


We also got to the RHS gardens at Wisley to see the new greenhouse



Of course one of the primary reasons for going home was for Dan's birthday.




On the day after his birthday we had a party for various of his friends at Horton farm which was a great way to catch up with lots of people - some more pictures to follow.