Still Winter

Posted on by Jordan

It’s amazing how hard this time of year seems to hit… every year. There isn’t much to look forward to in the days after Christmas and winter has only begun to bare its icy fangs.

So, twice in the past seven days we have gotten a flash snow storm bad enough to choke traffic going to work in the morning. Both times I managed to see an accident on my ONE MILE drive to work. Also, it was several degrees below zero on the way to work… again.

Sorry, I don’t mean to complain, I mean everybody knows it’s going to be cold in the winter. and this isn’t the first nasty winter we have seen in Iowa. That being said, it still surprises me how quickly it gets us down.

Driving home today, I did see one approach to dealing with winter:

Cold_outside

Mind you it was a balmy 5 degrees out by this time. I don’t know if this was an attempt to feel warm by dressing for summer or what.

-Jordan

Zombies? And Other News

Posted on by Jordan

This past week was noteworthy in a few ways, but the headline event was the RRV “Zombaree ” that my Scout Troop attended.

I will continue with my policy of avoiding posting pictures of random other people on here, but you can find pictures of myself and the troop scattered in here, and a deep link to our troop and the bridge that they made here (hopefully that works)

The guys had a lot of fun at the camporee, ahem, zombaree although one could be forgiven if they forgot it was a zombie event… there was a notable lack of zombies. The weather couldn’t have been better and it’s hard to complain about camping on a perfect fall weekend.

I got to pretend to be scoutmaster for the camp out due to a parental shuffle that left the actual scoutmaster at home. I was luck in that the majority of the weekend was being run by the district guys, and we had enough of the veteran scouts in our troop to comfortably lead the troop without too much input.

It’s surprisingly hard to find that balance between letting a bad plan flounder and taking over when your job is very much not to take over. I can’t say that I did a great job of it, but I probably ended up on the side of letting things fall apart instead of jumping in, so maybe it was a change for the guys.

Other notables:

Heather is 28 weeks along! This is apparently a milestone in that if the baby were to come today, odds would be in her favor to make it. Obviously we would like her to wait another three months, but it’s nice to know shes making progress in there 🙂

Also, 28 weeks is when the mom-to-be gets to drink… “glucose-up”… or some near literally named sugar concoction in order to determine if she has pregnancy induced diabetes. We had lots of good news there, Heather isn’t diabetic, and she survived the sugar drink without a massively upset tummy (A frequent problem with her and sugar)

So to recap, no close encounters with the undead, nice weekend, healthy baby, healthy mom.

I think it’s been a good week!

-Jordan

Snow… /sigh

Posted on by Jordan

I had been toying with the idea of having a commemorative blog post just for the fact that we finally have our garage organized to the point both cars can park in it.

That didn’t end up happening, but this morning we woke up to find a reason to be really happy both cars were inside:

This snow is slushy enough I don’t think there is much risk it will be with us until March, but it still means the effective start of winter and it’s hard to be excited about that prospect right now.

Alright, that’s probably enough whining… 🙂

-Jordan

A Welcome Reprieve

Posted on by Jordan

I know this won’t last, but the last few days have been amazing!

Not only did the temperatures make it into the low 40s, but it was a weekend! I mean… I saw someone wearing shorts yesterday! The snow is melting, the sun is shining… it makes you feel like maybe there will be an end to the winter.

I can’t complain too much, as cold as it has been, this year has nothing on last year when it comes to painful winters.

So, talking about the weather is perhaps a boring blog topic. What else have Heather and I been doing?

We started taking a more proactive approach to keeping the apartment clean It may not sound like much, but trying to keep things clean instead of waiting for the weekend to clean up has made our apartment feel a lot bigger, nicer, and just easier to hang out in.

Our big observance of Valentines day consisted of a marriage conference put on by our church over the weekend. I have to admit I did a lot of foot-dragging beforehand, kind of expecting it to be a really long day. It wound up being rather pleasant, Heather and I got to spend a lot of time talking about “us” something that is apparently waaaaay to easy to forget to do.

We are also averaging slightly over two dinner with guests events a week at our little apartment.  I don’t know if we can keep that pace up forever, but it has been fun to get to interact with friends in the evenings so often.

Having just double-checked Picasa, I can confirm that we do not have any new pictures… not real surprising considering how un-photo-worthy the past few weeks have been.

Maybe we will break out the camera and get some pictures of the muddy puddles where the snow used to be… it seems like a pretty beautiful thing right now! 🙂

-Jordan

Two Years

Posted on by Jordan

January 24th marked the end of our second year of marriage.

I just dug around the blog, and found that I never actually put up a post detailing the first year’s activities.

So, on year zero (the honeymoon) we were in Colorado skiing.

Year one, we went to a local “paint your own pottery” place. That wasn’t terrible, but the end results of Heather’s work: cute, my work: sad. I guess they will both last forever, and that’s something. The only downside is, someday our children will ask why we have a plate dad made in preschool arts-and-crafts.

Now that your up to speed, this year we did something outdoors again!

Oh wait, another tangent! When we set our wedding date in January, people often said things like “well at least you can go someplace warm on your honeymoon” or “yeah, but you can go on trips to the beach for your anniversary.”  I have to admit that I did little to kill off those ideas, because saying “Bah, you just need a better coat and to move around a little” isn’t really what they wanted to hear.

Right, so back to this year: Heather found out that the local parks department was hosting an outdoor winter activities workshop this past weekend. We thought it would be a fun alternative to dinner and a movie, so we headed up after church.

They had a really neat program going, and plenty of participants! The first station we encountered was snowshoeing, but they had every single pair of shoes already out, so we trudged on down the trail. Up next was ice fishing.

It didn’t take long to determine that ice fishing wasn’t going to be our thing. I should mention, as you can kind of see from the picture, we had a beautiful sunny day. It was still quite cold, but being outside in the sunlight was a wonderfully refreshing change from our normal lifestyle.

After checking our pole back in with the ranger, we headed over to the cross country ski station. As with the snowshoe station, they had every single item already out in the snow. We were able to put our names and shoe sizes on the board for later that day, letting us wander back over to the snow shoe station.

On the way we found the dog sled team, resting after their exhibition.

The snowshoe station had just a few shoes, but a few is enough for the two of us! Granted, the snow wasn’t anywhere deep enough to really need snow shoes, but we still gave them a try. 🙂

After a loop around the meadow behind the lodge, we headed back over to the cross country ski station. Even having our names on the list didn’t mean it was a painless process, but eventually we had two pair of boots, poles, and skis. We headed down the trail, having no idea what we were doing.

I guess we were just naturals though, because we moved on down the trail without much trouble 🙂 I may have fallen a few times, but that is the price you pay for finding out how fast you can go. Heather stayed on her feet the entire time, although I am sure she doesn’t know how fast she can go yet. We learned that the DNR rents out the skis any day they aren’t offering a free workshop like we were participating in, so maybe Heather can figure that out another day. 😉

-Jordan

Deep Thoughts… Or Something

Posted on by Jordan

Over the weekend, Heather and I drove out to western Nebraska for a wedding.

But before that, let me setup my frame of mind…

First I saw this video:

And then, the Internet being what it is, the remix video:

So, back to my drive out west. The song was kind of stuck in my head, and at the same time I was driving into an awe inspiring lightning show. I mean a really incredible storm! Clearly I all to easily forget how intense a storm can be.  I was really enjoying the lightning show, and started thinking about the guy in the video.

Now, I am afraid he may have been under the effects of some mind-altering chemicals at the time of that filming, but I don’t think that means he was wrong really. Rainbows, storms, all the other things you see outside… they are so amazing and I kind of take them for granted too often.

I actually have started investigating some ways to force myself to get outside, and outside of city limits, but I won’t post any details until I actually get something going. For now lets just leave it at enjoying the amazing show weather patterns in the Midwest can produce, and in awe of the splendor God has built around us.

-Jordan

The Snow Is Gone!!!!

Posted on by Jordan

Just a quick note to observe that today is the day that the huge pile of snow beside our parking lot where they piled the snow all winter is finally gone! I honestly had given up hope of it melting before July.

My understanding is that we are a mere three inches from the all-time record for snowfall in Des Moines! The only article I could find doesn’t have the latest snowfall factored in, so my numbers are basically just an estimate. On the other hand we are less than ten inches away from the all time record, and I think that counts enough that we can say it’s been a long cold snowy winter.

Here is to sunshine and green grass!

-Jordan

Snow!

Posted on by Jordan

I was expecting to get to do a nice little post about the first snow in our new home. Unfortunately the weather didn’t cooperate:

snow

We are more or less trapped at our apartment until the plows roll, and right now that isn’t expected until tomorrow morning!

-Jordan

Up Up And Away!

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I will be Heading to Florida for Chrissie’s wedding. The same Chrissie who was in our wedding, and now in a nice turnabout, Heather gets to be in her wedding. I will be mostly trying to avoid getting sunburned.

I feel bad saying this, but I am hoping this weekend isn’t another of the hit and miss amazingly nice spring weekends Omaha has been seeing. That would be such a waste 🙂

-Jordan