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.