Wacky Weather

We'd had a pretty uneventful winter right through January, but the last couple weeks have been crazy.  It seems like our weather has lost its mind.

Three weeks ago we got over a foot and a half of snow.  That pretty much provided as much snow as I wanted to deal with this winter.

Then a week and a half ago we had a round of crazy frigid weather.  Sub-zero wind chills, a few inches of snow, and enough wind to make things challenging.  The kids didn't have school and one of the main expressways here, my main route to and from work, closed.  Buffalo went so far as to have a blizzard.

Four days later, it was 60 degrees and sunny.  It felt heavenly, but of course it was short lived.

A couple days after that, we had a minor ice storm.  It started raining in the morning and pretty quickly ice was accumulating on everything.  I had to work an event for work, and it was really nerve-wracking as we drove there and I watched ice accumulate on a truck's antenna.  Everything was slick, but luckily by the time we got back to the office it was starting to melt there.  I didn't even have to scrape my car.  But when I got home, it was a different story.  This is what our burning bush looked like...

Our basketball hoop was rather stiff, which was pretty awesome.

I couldn't help but take a couple pictures of our tree, and they may be a couple of my favorite pictures I've ever taken, at least if you look close enough to see the cracks in the ice.

The burning bush was cool from the other direction, too.

I figured it would melt by the next night when it started raining, but no, I still caught this impressive-looking grassy weed.  But a couple hours later it was melting off the trees so much you'd think it was raining!

And by Friday, we had 60 mph winds.  Enough to make me crazy, but not enough to do any damage (thank God).  Bonus points for coming out of Jacob's basketball game last night to measurable snow, after it had been unproductively snowing on and off all day.  Oh, and it was still windy.  Awesome way to end a really long day...not.

Anyway, it's starting to get a little exhausting.  We're busy enough with everything else these days, let alone to complicate things with weather.  Of course, six years ago this week we were dealing with even more extreme weather when I was super uncomfortably pregnant.  In fact, I wrote that post six years ago tonight, which makes me smile knowing that Carter's birthday is merely five days away.  Little did I know then...

And no, I'm not much better prepared for his birthday today than I was when I wrote my last post.  I tried, I really did...but it did not go well, and I just can't seem to think of ways to make it special right now.  But oh, tonight he seemed to be having a strep recurrence (same nausea minus the actual vomiting, slight fever, sore throat, and first bed wetting issue since the antibiotics kicked in last time), so perhaps we'll be getting the tonsils out in the nick of time.  We'll weigh the Sunday morning doctor visit when I see how he's feeling in the morning.  Poor kid, just in time for his birthday...just like three years ago.  But even if this is strep, hopefully it'll be the last time since a tonsillectomy seems to be the cure-all for that.  I'm still nervous as heck, but perhaps this will solidify the decision even more.  It's going to be a crazy week either way...