Happy Birthday to Me

The innocuous looking photo below was taken yesterday, the 21st of November at about 7:00am and nicely illustrates the deceptiveness of Minnesota weather. Guess how cold it was outside when I took the photo?
-14C is the answer! By the time you add a little wind chill you can imagine that my cycle to work was a little nippy. A good day to just hand around the house mucking about.






With the day spare today we went to the zoo.The bears were not too active and given the weather it was almost tempting to join them.
Always good to see camels in the snow
Does Becky like throwing snowballs at dad?

Oh yes!

Snow covered lakes and its not even Winter yet
All was going well at the zoo until Dan started petting the sharks and stingrays (not dangerous ones - apparently) and leaned over a little too far...
Luckily the aquarium is only 2.5ft deep but Dan still made a splash and obviously our trip was cut short. As you can tell Andy is full of empathy and not at all amused that her son fell into a pool of sharks and stingrays. Dan obviously was not so amused but it got him off of doing some chores later in the day so who's to say it won't 'accidentally' happen again.

Earlier int he week Dan also had a school play where they sang 11 songs in French

And today when I woke up, for the second year in a row we had snow on my birthday :-)
And as you can see the lake opposite has frozen over, as have a lot of the smaller lakes, winter is on its way and the ski slopes are starting to open. Weird to think that 3 weeks ago it was warm and sunny outside and we were dining al fresco.

On Thursday I queued up for something outside a hop for the first time in my life. There is a really good radio station here that has its own studio and they do a charity CD every year or live studio perfromances that has a limited run of 30,000. I forgot about the release until I was at work then drove to the nearest Target (kind of a cross between Tesco and John Lewis) where at least 1,000 people were queued up (bear in mind that there have to be at least 50 target stores in the Twin Cities) and got in line wearing only a thin tee-shirt and a light jacket and got mildly frozen as it was well below freezing. You can almost get away with wearing ear muffs here and not looking stupid - sort of.

American Teenagers are Compressible

Now that we help with the church youth group we can start to see some of the ways in which they differ from their UK variety. Here are some of the notable differences:

• They are far more likely to wear school related clothing (e.g. with the name of their school team on a sweatshirt for example) - I think close to 80% of the time they have some school related clothing on.
• They are extremely compressible - here is a picture from Saturday night when we had 17 people for a sleep over and 10 girls slept in our cinema room overnight (you can imagine how much they appreciated Dan waking them up at 7:30).
  

• They tend to be more sporty and the boys and girls spontaneously play team games together, such as ultimate frisbee, dodgeball etc.. (rather than the boys going off to play football and the girls chatting, which was our UK experience)
• They do far more organised events - they do seem to be committed most nights of the week to something.
• They speak with a funny accent

Everyone is losing something

Got a phone call from Andy at work today, Dan lost his first tooth while he was at Kids Club. The tooth had been wobbly for a while but I'm sure that the activity Dan was engaged in didn't help - eating ice from a frozen puddle.
The tooth fairy has been scheduled to arrive tonight and leave a quarter in exchange for the tooth. The tooth fairy then sells the teeth for a significant markup to flower fairies who use them as rocks in their magical rock gardens - the reason they need teeth is that the rock gardens actually bite people who trample on the flowers.

Talking of biting, the recession (let's call it what it is) caused Circuit City, Best Buy's only real rival, to file for bankruptcy today. The mood at work was pretty subdued as, while it is natural to want to do better than your competitors, there are ways in which you want to do it and this is not one of them. Most US based retailers are now bracing themselves for a very hard Christmas period - and that is the ones that have not already folded (over 6,000 location so far this year have closed). So far Best Buy Mobile has been doing very well but you get the feeling that no-one is sitting pretty in the wake of so much uncertainty. Here is the BBC link to the story http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7720047.stm.

Sunday lunch and Spaced travel well

We had our friends from church round last night for a sleep over. In preparation Andy made too many cakes (although she would claim this is an oxymoron). We did roast chicken with roast potatoes and stuffing (picked up from the British section of the local posh supermarket - though Andy had to find the packets that were still in date!). We had to explain what roast potatoes were and stuffing, but it all went down pretty well even if we do say so ourselves.
We fell into the usual party trap of filling the kids with sugar and then turning them loose on the house.


Finally after getting the kids down we introduced everyone to Spaced which went down so well we stayed up until 2am watching it - which is early for Ken who normally works later and who just received his business cards as a Security Host.

Election Fever and Other Things

Tomorrow sees the vote to determine who gets the hospital pass from George Bush (note, for those who are not familiar with this Rugby terminology it relates to getting passed the ball in a situation where there is no opportunity to escape a bone-crunching tackle - thus even though you now have the ball it would have been better if you didn't). With the US now > $10 trillion in debt and the US on the brink of a recession I'm almost wondering if the winning candidate will look back in a couple of years and wish that the other guy won.

I found out today that Best Buy's main competitor, Circuit City, is closing 150 of its 700 stores which is one of the first visible signs that the crisis in the financial sector is finally having an effect on consumer spending. We'll find out tomorrow who gets to try to sort out the mess, and it will be a big relief not to have to endure any more political radio ads for a while. You have to hear the ads to believe them really, its not politics as we know it in the UK that's for sure.

The other over the top thing here at this time of year is Halloween, which is almost the biggest festival of the year; odd for an allegedly Christian country. There is even a good number of people at our church who celebrate Halloween which I find hard to reconcile. Lots of political tie ins too this year, especially in Minnesota where the local Democrat is ex Saturday Night Comedian Al Franken and kids were dressing up as Al Frankenstein which I have to admit is pretty funny.

I heard that the UK nearly beat Minnesota to snow this year, we actually had the first snowfall on Oct 26th but the weekend just gone was about 23C which was just glorious. There is always something to do in the garden though and at this time of year it is certainly leaf raking.

You do get great colours just beforehand however

On a lighter topic Andy got me some tickets to see Yael Naim for our anniversary at a little venue in Minneapolis (probably seated no more than 300 people), definitely one of the best concerts I've ever seen and a super talented band. Her best known song is 'New Soul' definitely worth checking out and she also does a great Britney cover