Beautiful out the last couple of days. It will probably rain this weekend, they are saying that anyway. I doubt it. I have Drill this weekend which normally means the weather is beautiful. I was teaching Sam how to play P-I-G the other day; we had just put the basketball hoop back up. I waited until he made one and then I missed on purpose. I told him, "Ok, now I have P!" Then he missed, I made one and he missed, so I said, (not in proper English) "Now you got a P!" He just looked at me funny. He said, "No I don't." I started to explain that after I make a basket and then he misses, how he gets a P. But he interrupted me and yelled "Dad, I don't hafta pee right now!" He thought I was telling him "You gotta pee." Lesson: proper grammer and pronounciation with 4 year olds is a good idea.

The snow is gone and it is supposed to get up to 50 degrees today. Right now it is 49, but the wind is making it feel like about 40. Everything is covered with sand and salt, makes the world look dirty around these parts. A couple good hard rains will take care of that.
To motivate myself to start running again, I looked for a race to sign up for. I missed the deadline for Grandma's marathon this year, and its too early to sign up for the Twin Cities Marathon. What I found was a suprisingly shorter route, only a 5K, but to me much more meaningful than any race I have run in the past. It became something more than just a reason to train. My Race for the Cure Page.

The snow was all gone. All that remained were the big piles where the plows had stacked it up high and dirty. Sam starting wanting me to take the training wheels of his bike, because we can "see the grass now!" That has been remedied. Early, early this morning it started snowing. And it is still snowing. Looks like about 4 inches where I live, more than that to the South and East. We had a huge snowball fight in the driveway this morning. You can hardly tell I shovelled before the battle broke out.

Lots of snow here now. It has been snowing off and on for a couple weeks and it seems like there is always something on my driveway that needs to be moved. We have been lucky in that for the most part it has been the light fluffy snow and not the dreaded wet, heavy stuff. On most occasions I am out shovelling off the driveway by myself. Or at least cleaning up what my neighbor didn't get with his monstrosity of a snowblower. I think it has a bigger engine than my truck. He does other people's driveways once in awhile just to justify its enormousness. One recent shovelling evolution had me, and my youngest two sons out in the cold, battling to clear space. I was at the bottom of the driveway chipping away at the dam, which is the hard packed snow that the city plows back into your driveway after you just got done clearing it out. It was about 9 inches thick and packed too tight to be broken up with a shovel. I had to use the ice chipper. I would break it off in large pieces, then break the large pieces into smaller ones so my youngest, Caleb, could lift and throw them up over the snowbank into the yard. This went on for 15 minutes or so, and every time I looked over my shoulder, there's Caleb chucking snow chunks over the bank. I realized he was not making any progress at all though, there was still a lot of them on the driveway. So I put down the chipper and walked back toward him and started helping him pick them up and throw them into the yard. As I threw the first couple over the bank, another one sailed past my head and landed right back in the middle of the driveway. A couple steps forward and a peek over the snowbank revealed my middle son, Sam, throwing chunks of snow back on to the driveway at a pace equal to or maybe a little faster than Caleb was clearing them.

Interesting article that I will share but not comment on. The fact that I am posting it should allow you to read into my thoughts on its content.

Addiction, Brain Damage and the President