Severe, Massive, Near-Crippling

The words in the title of this post are the same ones used in the weather forecast for the past weekend. They describe the size and scope of the snow storm that we had. 5cms per hour fell starting early Sunday morning and continued into the afternoon. We went out to a dinner for breakfast in the middle of the storm which was good fun, and a little hairy at the same time. It's hard to tell exactly how much we had because the wind was up and it blows snow into drifts so in some places there's very little snow and in others it's very deep. Unfortunately for the kids it happened on the weekend so no snow-day for them, school was back on a normal Monday with all the roads cleared by the plows well in time for the buses. We had well over 18 inches anyway, about the same size as the largest dump we had last year. They, and I mean the guys who get paid to predict the weather, are saying that this will be a classic Canadian winter, nothing like the previous 10 years, so we might be in for a real treat snow-wise.

On that note it's looking more and more like we'll have our first white Christmas, the first two delivering some snow in early December an it all disappearing before Santa rolled up. It all started at the begining of the month while I was on a boys trip to Ann Arbour in Michigan, about 60k's from Detroit. Jay, AJ and I headed down through the starting snow fall to Windsor, then over the border, skipped around Detroit and ended up at a hotel on the campus of Michigan University, home of the Wolverines. Michigan has a huge rivalry with Ohio State (the Buckeyes) and we had tickets for the college hockey on both Friday and Saturday nights. The freezing rain fell on Saturday evening and we walked the streets with ice in our hair. The hockey was good, although the Wolverine lost on the first night and we had our Saturday tickets stolen while having a drink after the game. No matter, we spent Saturday recovering from a big Friday, driving out to get some food and passing all the frat and sorority houses with their greek demononations writ large (just like Lamda Lamda Lamda (you remember the tri-lams don't you? :-)). We drank Guiness and watched college football at a sports bar before demolishing a nice steak dinner with some aussie red. Then we hit a bar, played pool and had some fun with a hens night who were pub crawling through the neighbourhood. AJ and I were thrown out of a night club by an over-anxious, juiced-up bouncer and Jay bundled us into a cab with orders to the driver not to take us anywhere except the hotel, no matter where we told him to take us instead. My head hurt a little in the morning but nothing a giant vat of StarBucks couldn't fix.

I got home to find that Jo had cleared the driveway of snow herself, I should go away on snowy weekends more often, but don't tell her I said that okay? Alright so what else? Hmmm, here's some random bits that will be easier to cover as bullet-points rather than well formed, organised paragraphs -

• The girls have started music lessons at School of Rock, Jazz is learning acoustic guitar and Abs keyboard. The nice thing about the school is that they get one-on-one sessions and when they can play a song the kids are put into groups, with a guitarist, drummer, keyboardist etc and play like a band. Jazz is learning Smoke of the Water, I think everyone does, rock on.
• Still on the kids they all did very well in their first term at school, Abs has really impressed us and it must have a lot to do with her teacher this year. Last years was a disaster so it's great to see Abs with a really good one this year. She appears to get much more home-work then Jasmine which hardly seems fair, but she keeps at it and hardly ever complains.
  
• Winter coming early this year has caught me on the hop, I haven't got any lights up on the house and now it's covered with ice. We did put up a nice tree though and most of the shopping is done, just waiting for the fat bugger now. We'll have Christmas day at Jo's cousins about 40 minutes away. Bobbie and Warren are terrific and we've had a few nice evenings together, it's awesome that their two girls are the same age as ours and the kids get on like a house on fire. Should be a hoot.
• I haven;t related my Vegas trip, and it's not because I have too much stuff that I can't talk about, we were pretty good for a bunch of blokes in Sin City. It was just a massive party from which my liver will never recover. The three top nightclubs in Vegas are Tao, Pure and Moon, and they were awesome! The drinks there are triples, which they'd want to be for $15 a pop and it costs you $50 each just to bribe the bouncer so you can skip to the head of the line for the priviledge of paying another $50 door-charge to get in. The Playboy Club was actually pretty boring in comparision to the mega-clubs and I'll never forgto Jesse and his girl-friend from Minneapolis who bought a bottle of Patrone tequila for $400 and poured us triple shot after triple shot. The others just made it to the washroom in time, I on the other hand swallowed mine, but not before it tried to escape a few times. The less said the better actually.
• We had a leaving party at our house for the IBM project manager, Srini, in August and during the party a few of the guys started playing touch football in the backyard. Well actually it was full-contact football and they were taking it pretty seriously. We all ajourned across the road to the baseball diamond and setup a two teams to slide around on the wet turf. It was so much fun that we started playing after work on Fridays, IBM verses Bell Canada. When the weather got too cold we organised indoor sports like ball hockey and soccer, but the alure of football was too much to resist and we went out again last Friday to play in the snow. The soccer field where we play is pretty uneven and as we played we had to constantly watch out for hidden ice lying just below a surface covering of now. One step you'd have grip, the next you'd be fighting to stay upright while sliding across a big slab of several inch thick solid ice. Loads of fun for all the family. The game was four days ago and I'm still sore, not muscular pain, impact injuries. I scored one touchdown on a run by falling over three seperate times, smashing into the ice, getting up again and keeping on trucking, man that hurt :-). Apparently we're doing it again this Wednesday... we're clearly idiots.
  
• We have a trip booked for Feb, 3 days skiing at Mt Tremblanc in Quebec. We'd better get some lessons in for the younger kids and me before we go, hopefully we can do this between Christmas and NY. Other than that we don't have any plans, at least until we know when we're coming home. No news on that front at this stage although it is being sorted out. We'd like to stay a little longer but Immigration Canada wont extend our work permits, we've hit the duration limit. So we're working through some options at the moment, all of which allow us to come back to Australia and don't involve me leaving IBM Aus and emmigrating here, that's not an option we're currently considering.
• I pre-ordered Rock Band for the 360 and it was supposed to come today but didn't. It's an incredibly popular game that keep selling out in the US so I just hope we can get it before Christmas, the kids and I are dying to play it.

Well that's it I think, nothing much else to report. We're missing the warm/hot weather but the smell of pine through the house, the glow from the gas-log fire and the white view out the windows is a pretty cool substitute.

Andy, out.