Ice and more ice

Wow.

You know, I like winter in general. I can live without bitter cold weather, but some cold is just fine (and keeps the bugs in control). Snow? Not so bad, and fun to play in. But ice? Unless it's in a cube and keeping my drink cold, or in a glacier somewhere, I can do just fine without it, thanks. You can drive in snow, but ice makes traveling pretty hazardous (especially for people who seem to think that an SUV can get them anywhere).

If you haven't heard, the midwest got some nasty weather over the weekend, and more is on the way. We got about 1/4-inch of ice/sleet/freezing rain over the weekend, and our area got of easy compared to the southern part of the state where my parents live. I haven't tried to call yet, but I'm betting that they're sitting in the dark, based on the Ameren maps. (They don't have Ameren electric, but I doubt the downed lines are just an Ameren problem.)

It's bad enough that our governor declared a state of emergency over the weekend. Joy. It hasn't even been a year since our last nasty ice storm, and some rural areas are still cleaning up the tree debris.

Anyway, we've still got power, and enough groceries to tide us over until the city could get the streets clean. (Living near the main city streets and less than a mile from the grocery store can be an advantage at times.) There's an Ice Storm Warning until Wednesday night; they're predicting up to another 1/4 inch of ice. The weatherman is predicting ice and/or freezing rain tonight, then rain tomorrow, and so on until Wednesday. And our local weather channel, which used to show the weather radar all the time, has now gone to crap. It's about 50% commercials now, and in the middle of this weather mess over the weekend, their forecast was 3 hours old. Totally worthless.

And now, on to the good news:

• My email to Ziploc last week about their lid issues got some results. I didn't get anything specific as a reply (lazy eejits), but I did get an envelope today with coupons for 2 free packs of Ziploc containers, along with some other coupons. Makes me think I should send them another comment about the bowl that melted in the microwave this summer - in spite of saying "microwave-safe" on the label, and being heated for less than a minute.
• The Christmas Tree is up. Of course, that took all of half an hour, and most of that was finding the power strip and getting it set up. It's a 32-inch fiber optic tree from the post-Christmas clearance at Dollar General 2 years ago, decorated with an 18-foot strand of copper-colored beads (20-cent clearance find). Yeah, we really splurged on the decorations. :) Now I just need to hang the lights in the windows and on the railing.
  
• Check out the Christmas Cards from the Hubble Space Telescope. I may print a few of those off, if I don't have enough photo-cards to go around (since I can only find one of the two boxes of cards).

El Burrito's vocabulary made some leaps last week. We've started a list of the words he knows, although most of them probably aren't clear enough yet for a stranger to understand. I'm still not sure where he learned "pie" since it's not a common thing in our house. :) "Read!!" is still the big one, complete with exclamation points. And we had to call Grandpa over the weekend, so El Burrito could tell him what a sheep and a chicken say. The boy does a pretty good chicken, a hilarious sheep, and a good pig impression, too. I'm just sorry that we never got his original duck sound on tape - he sounded a lot like Daffy Duck. I managed to get the rest of them on video last week, though.

The boy's also got some muscles. He was "supervising" yesterday while we put the groceries away, and he managed to lift a 5-pound bag of potatoes off the floor and carry it over to me. All of 2 feet away, but I was still impressed.

Ah well. Back to the laundry.