Crusty-Nostril Cold

Hitting the season for Christmas parties at the moment. Being the Scrouge that I am I wasn't going to do anything but Andy suggested we have a party here for the IT team and in a moment of weakness I agreed. Only now have I realized (far too late alas) that the reason for this is so that Andy can assume her dangerous alter-ego of 'The Fearsome and Unstoppable Baking Machine'. I mean, I like some shortbread with my tea as much, or maybe more, than the next man, but even I know that it has to stop somewhere - but not Andy. My only hope is to send her out for ingredients and hope she freezes long enough for me to hide the cookbooks. Luckily fortune is with me and the temperature has dropped from a balmy 3C on Sunday morning (which means we don't pack coats when we go out) to a high of -21C today. Here are some things that happen at this temperature:

• You can get an ice-cream headache in less than a minute if you go out without a hat on
• Your nostril hair freezes the first time you inhale through your nose
• The local school has a pyjama day and the kids wear their pyjamas to school and back again while trying not to get hypothermia

Anyway, shouldn't complain, Saturday was lovely and we went sledging and actually got to warm. Andy was always complaining that she was too cold so we went out and got her some proper winter clothes - like snow pants (over-trousers really) and decent boots. Up until now Andy has never wanted us to waste money on these as she 'never gets warm anyway so it wouldn't make any difference' (please tell me I'm not alone in thinking this is something of a self-fulfilling prophesy). The result was that we went sledging for an hour or so and got too warm!

Can you spot the snowball that Dan has just thrown in the picture below?

Since then it has snowed another 4-5 inches so we're beginning to get a proper wintery feel - and as the salt doesn't really work on the roads when its this cold there's nothing like sliding towards a busy junction with your foot on the brakes and nothing happening to really put one in the Christmas mood.

Here are a couple of phots from Claire's visit that didn't make it on in time.

Dan about to help me with the BBQ

Thanksgiving and Black Friday

The day before Thanksgiving I took the day off to get a speeding ticket - this is why I don't take time off. Becky was in nursery so we played our new addiction, the 'Settlers of Catan' board game.

Thanksgiving is the most 'traditional' of the American holidays. Lots of people will fly or drive home to be with their family and almost everyone has turkey. Our tradition is to have Claire here with us as she has been both years we're been here, we are actually planning to try to fatten her up and eat her one year to save on the turkey.

For the meantime, not being ones to argue with a fine tradition we also had turkey (done on the BBQ of course) adding in the British secret weapon.

You can't beat roast potatoes and they are almost unheard of here which makes them even more of a treat.

Andy also did a fantastic pumpkin pie, which might sound a bit odd until you realise that there is very little pumpkin in it, its actually really good.

Provided you can make it off of the sofa after all that a walk around the park is just what's needed with a chance for the kids to play on the swings.
The day after thanksgiving is Black Friday, the biggest sales day of the year by far. Its called Black Friday as it is typically the day most stores go into the black on their balance sheets. Not so sure about this year! Anyway given that stores open at 5am on the east coast I had to be in the office at 3:30am central time with a bunch of people from my team to be on point and check all our systems were operational. It all went pretty smoothly and I got out of the office in time for us to head into Stillwater in the afternoon.


Despite the fact that we'd had a pretty warm spell for about a week the river was still slightly frozen.

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We are getting the hand of making sure the kids are warm enough now. The rough rule of thumb is 'if they can move properly they don't have enough layers on'.


Claire here is demonstrating the popular 'Eat Yourself Warm' technique.



The next day we braved the Mall of America and the kids survived a 7 hour shopping trip. There is actually plenty for them to do so it really wasn't that bad and everyone here says it is too crowded to shop but compared to a UK high street in December it is comparatively deserted, you rarely have to queue up for anything unless you come on Friday at 5am.I also got to check out one of our new Best Buy Mobile locations which are a little bit like the larger Carphone Warehouse stores (but even nicer I think)

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