Yo - snow!

We haven't seen this much snow since (blimey!) October last year.  It started falling around 11am and pretty much continued all day, leaving a lovely inches-thick blanket over everything.

But it's February 29th, so not a "real" day (with apologies to my sister-in-law who is celebrating one of her rare birthdays).  And I fear this won't be real stick-around snow, not with temperatures set to rise again by the weekend.

The clocks are going forward in just a couple of weeks (earlier than in the UK), so really it looks as if the snow has decided simply to bookend what has passed for a winter (until today we were on course for Albany's least snowy February on record), and before we know it we'll be properly into Spring.

Fedorable?

Shucks, of course we'd never trade in our Girl.  But we have made her doubly cute.

We passed a couple of outdoor ice-rinks on our trek around New York City - one at "the Rock" and one in Central Park - both obviously popular.  We weren't tempted to stop and skate though - we're too spoiled and prefer our spacious and empty upstate rinks.  However, our local rink will be closing in a couple of weeks.  For one reason and another I haven't done as much skating as usual this season, but I managed a good forty minutes on the ice at lunchtime today.  The Girl had been down at the rink, too, before school, preparing for another ice-show coming up this weekend.  Which reminds me, apparently she needs to wear a fedora for her next practice session. There's no knowing what disguise she'll appear in next...

Pandamoanium

If you know anything about our kids you'll not be surprised to hear that they didn't take being marched across Manhattan the other day lying down.  The Boy did try sitting down a couple of times, in protest.  Mostly though the two of them made their feelings known with a steady stream of light to moderate whingeing.

For the Boy, at least, there was a direct benefit from all that walking.  He has something called a Pokewalker which is a sort of bells-and-whistles electronic step-counter.  He carries it with him wherever he goes because he can later download the steps into one of his games where "steps mean virtual prizes".  In NYC he walked just shy of 30,000 steps - his all time record.

As for the Girl, well, in the end we just got tired of her moaning.  We had a word with a street vendor and traded her in for something cuter.

Fun on planet Ski

We've had different conditions every week for skiing, sometimes not so good.  But today...everything was wonderful.  Warming sunshine, clear blue sky and superb snow.

For our final lesson of the season, the instructor took my group down the three-quarter Colonel.  This had scared me when I tried it a few weeks ago, but today it was a piece of (perfectly frosted) cake.  In fact for the very first time today I thoroughly enjoyed myself skiing from start to finish - for once the fear:fun ratio definitively favoured fun.  This even lasted after sunset, when the light plays tricks and seems to flatten out all the bumps in the snow (although the bumps are - woaaah! - decidedly still there).

As usual, members of our family were the last to hand in our gear at the rental shop at the end of the session.  The moon was bright when we finally left, Venus and Jupiter clear beside it.

Met our match

Our focal point for the day was the Metropolitan Museum of Art - but first we had to get there.  It was a fair old hike from Penn Station, where our train pulled in, to the Met.

What a hike, though - oh look, there's the Empire State Building!  And now here we are in Times Square (curiously named - it's nothing like a square)...now we're heading through the Diamond District...and here we are on 5th Avenue...Rockefeller Center on the left...here's Trump Tower...FAO Schwartz....now we're at Central Park, looking over the wall into the zoo...

And finally we made it to the museum.  Which is magnificent, one of the world's finest collections of - well, you know, just about everything.  But for the kids, after all that walking to get there, I'm afraid it mostly felt like more walking.  It doesn't set out to be a kid-friendly, interactive kind of a place, and for a child without a context to place all those amazing artefacts in it's probably not too different to visiting some high-end furniture shop where you're not allowed to touch anything.  Through favourite books and shows our kids are quite into things Egyptian, Greek and Japanese, but even these collections felt rather remote and dry to them today.

Ah well.  They'll be back one day, I'm sure, under their own steam.

Soaps tone

We're taking a little city break - we've driven down in the rain and are currently shored up in a hotel in New Jersey, ready to catch train into NYC for a full day tomorrow.

The Girl is highly amused by the bossy soaps she has found in the hotel bathroom.  One says "Clean your face" and the other says "Clean your body".  Realising that the Boy has been wearing the same felt-pen tattoos all up his arms since Tuesday, I'm thinking I should probably invest in some "Clean your body" soap for our house.

Photo Finnish

The Man writes...in our latest attempt to find us some winter, the Girl and I today travelled about fifty miles north-east of Albany to Lapland Lake in the Adirondacks.

The Girl had been mainly looking forward to some outdoor ice skating, but even here the ice was covered in a layer of slushy water. So the day was devoted to cross country skiing.

The extensive trail system mainly passes through pine forest, but usually also ranges over a frozen lake, which wasn't really skiable today. On the other hand, the benign conditions - soft, wet snow - meant we were able to tackle even the most difficult "black" runs with ease. Although the Girl now prefers the speed and thrills of downhill skiing, to her credit she threw herself into the activity with energy and enthusiasm. On one occasion she stopped up ahead apparently for a rest or to let her poor Dad catch up. As I reached her I was greeted with a grin and an enormous snowball in the chest. At which point I realised she was probably having a good time

We ran into our next door neighbours and ended up having lunch with them. This seemed a big coincidence, but since they are avid cross-country skiers and there are currently no alternative venues closer to Albany it was maybe not so odd.  It is perhaps odder that Lapland Lake was so quiet in such circumstances, especially during holiday week, but maybe people didn't realise that it had plenty of snow, or just don't think about skiing when the weather is so spring like.

Perfect pitch

The Girl has no interest in playing baseball or softball.  More's the pity - she'd make a mean pitcher. 

Here she is in action in our backyard.  It has been another fine spring day in can-it-really-still-only-be-February.

At home

British kids are presumably back at school this week after half-term, while ours are off, for Presidents' Week - or "winter break" or "February break" or whatever you want to call it.  Not "half-term", anyway, as we don't have "terms".  "Semester" is more the word here, though actually I never hear it applied to the level of school our kids are at.  "School" itself is used differently - if an American asks what school you went to, he/she is most likely referring to your place of further education...

Anyway, the kids have a week off, and we have had a pleasant day at home - a bit of craftiness, a bit of puzzling (the Girl's latest passion), a fair amount of Hexbugs (the Boy has built up quite a Hexbug empire since his birthday), and as much screen-time as anyone could get away with.  From tomorrow the Man will be taking time off, too.  Hopefully he won't have to spend it all filling out interminable tax returns.

Robert's your father's brother...

The common language still divides - but not necessarily us from them.  Sometimes them from each other.

Today I took the Girl round to her friend's house, and the friend's dad ushered us inside, eager to seek our bona fide British advice on a couple of linguistic issues.  First:

"OK. 'Bob's your uncle!'...what is the correct response to that?  As a British person?  Because I was just speaking to another American on the phone and I said, 'And Bob's your uncle!' and he said, 'And Tilly's your aunt - that's what British people always say.'  But do they?"

I replied that I had never heard a British person say that.

"Yess!"  said the friend's dad in triumph.  "And here's another one.  What do British people call a person who works in a store, you know, the one who takes your money?"

"Err - a cashier?"  I suggested.

"How about something like...a clerk?"

"Well, if we did, we would pronounce it clark,"I explained.

"I told you so," said his wife, appearing from inside the house. 

"Nnnggg,"  growled the dad, "I was sure she was wrong about 'clark'.  Nnnggg."

What other Britishisms do you suggest I share, to further fuel this rivalry?

Still wild about Harry

Another Sunday, another ski-day.  It was positively warm and spring-like on the mountain today, under blue skies and sunshine.  The snow was "garbage" (my instructor's word for it) - heavy and wet, where it wasn't crunching ice or piled up like spilt sugar.  It made for challenging skiing again, and I took a couple of falls when the "snow snakes" (my instructor's term again) got me.  Yet it was quite fun, in a way, negotiating the tricky conditions.

And now we're all home again enjoying our own version of apres-ski entertainment - snoozing over books, drawing manga and/or listening to yet another Harry Potter audiobook.  You'd think we'd have heard them all by now - and you would be so very right.  We have heard all of them multiple times.  Jim Dale (narrator of the US audiobooks) is practically a member of the family - an old uncle in the back room who never shuts up. 

Despite the never-ending HP narration, there still seem to be parts of the story that are new to me - apparently during the 99-disc marathon I have managed to miss the odd chapter.  The Boy, on the other hand, can pretty much recite every book word-for-word. [He can, confirms the Girl, I've heard him do it. :)]

Saturday night reader

Some days just trickle by, and this was one of those.  The Boy got taken by his buddy to play mini-golf in the afternoon at, of all places, Crossgates Mall - apparently there's now a 36-hole indoor course where H&M used to be.  The Girl went to a friend's house to hang out, and the Man and I made it up to Thacher Park and Thompson's Lake, where it was grey and chilly and trying to snow in the half-hearted way we've come to expect this winter.

Tonight - hmm.  Curl up with a good book, I think.  I have several on the go, including Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James.  Meanwhile the Man's revisiting Pride & Prejudice for the billionth time.  What's everyone else reading at the moment?

Mitt fan

No, not that Mitt.  I'm talking knit mitts.

Last Saturday I spent the morning at my favourite yarn store, The Spinning Room in Altamont, taking the "Winding Way Mitts" class (scroll down here to see the mitts).

Ooh, what a wonderful place that store is - a feast for eyes and fingers, so much woolly loveliness.  But I didn't have time to wander about drooling at the colours and stroking skeins of yarn.  For two hours I was focused on keeping the right number of stitches on a set of tiny double-pointed needles - task enough in itself, even without the addition of the charted cable pattern...

I like knitting.  It's not the least bit relaxing (hang on, hang on I'm counting... oh, where the hell did those three stitches go?!) but when it does work it really is a sort of magic.  Thank you, Spinning Room, for further instructing me in these mysterious arts.

Best of ten

The Boy woke up in the middle of our bed this morning (hang on, how did that happen?) and announced, "Now I'm ten."

And indeed he is, unbelievable though that may seem to his parents.

He asked me to come into school this afternoon and bring treats for his classmates:  he insisted on fun-dips (coloured sugar in a  bag) - the last thing on Earth I'd want to eat, but the Boy was the toast of the class for his excellent choice.  Blue tongues all round - wah-hey!  He was allowed to stand on a chair while everyone sang "Happy Birthday" (the novelty "milk-a-cow" variation), and then allowed to go home ten minutes earlier than everyone else.

Present-wise he has done rather well - a good mix of construction toys, books, DVDs odds and ends and some electronic delight.  Thank you to all gift-givers.

Oh yeah. There was chocolate cake as well.

Owl be seeing you

Wisecracks accepted.

Washed out

The falls at the Huyck Preserve were looking quite dramatic (and strangely monochrome) the other day when we went for our slippery walk.  Not nearly as dramatic as they must have looked back in August when Tropical Storm Irene hit - you can read here (scroll to page 11 for pictures) how the powerful flooding eroded the banks and washed away infrastructure.

The path to the falls higher up the trail is still closed - it may be some time, I suppose, before funds are raised to enable a rebuild.

My funny Valentine

And they say Romance is dead...

I received a Valentine's card in the mail today, from a not-at-all secret and rather surprising source.  The message read:

Roses are red, 

Violets are blue, 

[Your hairdressers] send their Love to you!!

under a photo of them all wearing pink sweaters.

Is it just me, or is that a bit strange?  I mean, I do like my hairdresser, but not really so much that I want a photograph of her and her work colleagues.  It's not even like it's a money-off coupon or anything - it's just a card.  I can't imagine getting such a thing from The Cutting Room in Linton, never mind Boyz2Men.

Oh well.  As the Man has pointed out to me, since I shouldn't assume I'll be getting any other Valentines this year maybe I should simply be grateful for the nice sentiment.

Cold enough for snow

Not that it did snow, of course - this being the winter that just won't happen.  But up at Willard they were making snow like crazy, taking advantage of temperatures well below freezing.  Every cannon was blowing snow all over the place, and very unpleasant it was to ski through, too.  Cold and stinging and messing up your glasses so that you skied off course and nearly fell over - well, maybe that was just me.

Odd piles of soft or wet snow accumulated here and there, in contrast to patches of bald ice elsewhere.  All in all, I found it more challenging skiing today than usual.  But we all had a good time and skied a lot - the Man, the Girl and her ski-buddy were on the slopes until the bitter (bitterly cold, anyway) end and ours was one of the last cars left in the parking lot.

Hazardous Huyck

The Boy was out with his buddy today, and the Girl quickly managed to make her own social arrangements when we threatened her with a hike.  So it was just the Man and me taking a wintery stroll at the Huyck Preserve this afternoon.

For yes!  We found us some winter!  There had been a little snow earlier, which gave everything a fresh white look.  The lake was frozen solid enough for hockey (no, not us playing - but we enjoyed watching a group knocking a puck around out on the ice). 

However, to get as far as the lake we had to negotiate some dangerous trails.  We've seen the Huyck snowier, but never as icy.  Due, I suppose, to recent melting and re-freezing, the paths were slick with the stuff.  The Man fell once, but I was down at least six times. To be honest, it wasn't so much a stroll as a slither, most of the way.  I enjoyed being out, but was relieved to make it back to the car with nothing worse than bruises.

Memory tricks

It's sooo not just the taking part that counts...

The Amnesiacs were back in action tonight in another contest of trivial wits.  One man down (due to ill health), how would we fare in a field of six teams (hmm, bigger turnout than usual)?

Well... We romped home - yay!  Perfect 10 on Art History!  We did well on World Religions, too, and even managed to score respectably on the vexing Vexillology round.  Overall we only dropped about four points (one of those for not knowing whether or not Avril Lavigne had broken up with Brody Jenner - what's your answer? Or, do you know the two countries in the 1936 Olympics that had the same flag?), and on top of that we bagged a bonus five points for getting the nearest guess on the number of lovehearts in a tupperware container.

Personally I was rather pleased with my - surprising - recall of Old Testament details.  Such feats of memory slightly made up for the fact that earlier in the day, out shopping, I'd been warmly greeted by someone I knew I should have recognised but could not for the life of me remember...  Apparently I'm not called an Amnesiac for nothing.  Maybe my hairdresser is onto something after all?

Hair piece

I had my hair cut again this week.  My hairdresser has persuaded me that I probably should get it done a bit more often than once-every-six-months-when-I've-started-looking-like-a-witch (not her exact words, but that's what I infer).

I like my hairdresser, and she does a good job of cutting my hair.  She is, however, a teeny-tiny bit patronising, as only someone at least half my age can be.  She doesn't quite pat me on the head and call me "dear", but she gets perilously close to it sometimes.  The other day she warned me solicitously not to trip over a very obvious foot-rest.  "I'm only forty-bloomin'-five,"  I felt like saying, "I'm in my prime, not my dotage!"

She means well, of course.  And thinking back to my student days, I do recall that all my tutors were hopelessly ancient and past-it - and probably none of them much over 40.  As I realise now, they weren't old at all - I was just idiotically young.

But naturally, much as I may want to, I never do tell my hairdresser that she's being condescending.  After all, she's the one with the scissors and therefore all the power.

A bit of a hoot

"So," asked the Man the other night, home from work and busy fixing himself a snack, "What have you been doing all day?"

"This!" I replied, and waited for him to look my way...

It's an ongoing project (and no, not intended as an accessory to go with a knitted ruff).  Watch this space, there'll be more...

Ruff and ready

As I mentioned in passing the other day, the Man received a knitted item for his birthday.

While he did thank me very kindly for my time and effort in making it, even I have to agree that actually he looks pretty silly in it.  It's a neckwarmer - supposedly to keep him cosy on ski days.  However, on him it somehow ends up looking like a 17th Century ruff. 

Very Shakespeare.  Not very Man.

But luckily all my knit 2 purl 2 ribbing and fancy cabling has not been for nought.  The Girl has taken a fancy to the thing - and, forsooth, she manages to carry it off. 

Winging it

The Boy enjoys skiing, but is not an enthusiastic ski student.  Having discovered last year that he can get down just about any slope in a firm wedge, so far as he's concerned that's his method, it works and he's sticking with it.  Who needs instruction?

So he's not developing into the most elegant skier on the piste - but he really can get down almost anything. Yesterday he descended the full Colonel, including the nearly vertical "black diamond" bit at the top, and he made it all the way without falling once. Wow.

Speaking of reluctant students (adds the Man), the Girl cheerfully admits that Math goes in one ear and out the other because she "can't see the point" of it. So she can't fully appreciate the enormity of the fact that an estimated 1.25 billion buffalo wings were consumed during yesterday's Superbowl. Nor can she calculate how many chickens (assuming six wings per chicken, as my omnivore friends advise) were involved. To say nothing of all the buffalo.

Ski special

Although I did manage a few runs down Joe's Special (one of the slightly harder slopes) at Willard last winter, so far this year I've been wary.  Until today. And though I say it myself, I did rather well - several times - in spite of the icy conditions that made the descent quite fast.  Of course, what to me felt like hurtling may to others have looked more like ambling, but still...  What is more, I was enjoying myself - just scared enough, without heart-actually-in-mouth.

It probably is true what they say about comfort zones - that all the really good stuff happens outside them.

Not too far outside them, of course.  I also just about made it down the lower three quarters of the Colonel today, briefly losing a ski along the way.  Hmm, not quite so much fun.  But at least I'm still in one piece.

The parking lot emptied particularly promptly after the lessons today.  Something to do with a sporting event that everyone had to rush home to watch - the Superdish, is it?  Go Giants!  Go Patriots!  Honestly, I don't care which of you wins.

It's a cop out

It's never a great idea to start thinking about what you're going to write in the blog when it's already quarter to bedtime, and you've just been having a little doze through a DVD (The Golden Compass) with the kids.  Even less of a good plan when anyway you've had one of those perfectly fine but not-much-to-write-about sort of days.

So I'm copping out and handing over to you:  if you happened to have been there, who won Linton Infants School Quiz and Chips on Friday night, what was the clinching question and who (if anyone) managed to walk home in a straight line?  And to everyone in general - got any snow where you are?  A little or a lot?  Fancy sending some to us? 

Snow-blower

It's the Man's birthday today.  39 again - how time stands still!  I don't know where the years don't go.

Birthday preparations had been somewhat hampered by the fact that every time I started pointing the car store-ward this week I'd get a call from the Middle School inviting me to come and fetch my poorly daughter.  And today of course I had her at home with me all day (where she seems to have been getting better).  Ah well.  For now we've focused on home-made celebrating instead - a card, a knitted item and a home-baked loaf, and a powerpoint presentation in praise of Dad.

And a cake, of course.  This year the decorative theme was our odd "winter", represented by a snowman (wishful thinking) under a parasol.  Only when it was time for the Man to blow the candles out did I regret the addition of the dredged icing-sugar "snow" - which ended up in drifts all over the table. 

Fractious over fractions

The Girl hasn't been quite right for the last few days, and I've been called in to pick her up early from school.  She starts out fine - indeed, full of beans and chat - but runs out of steam.  And she has an awful honking cough - as she says herself, she sounds just like a Canada goose.  Poor Girl.  The doctor thinks it's something viral.  I plan to keep her off school altogether tomorrow and hope a good rest will sort her out.

The Boy is wishing it could be him having the day off, as he's keen to avoid a science test.  After running through some of his work with him tonight, I can't say I blame him.  It seems to be all about buoyant forces, hydrometers and calibration and other words that our poor lad can't even spell.

He also had some Math homework which involved adding and subtracting combinations of whole numbers and fractions.  He claims this is a "waste of my time" as it will not be a skill useful to him in later life.  What does anyone else think?

Community store

The weather took an even more unseasonal turn today, hittting 61F in the middle of the day.  Maybe it's the spring-like weather that is prompting me to keep turning out closets and cupboards.  Anyway,  lately I'd managed to assemble a good bag or three of pass-on-able materials and today went looking for a place to pass them on to.

I'd heard about a "community store" that opened a few months ago.  It's in fact a place where people in need can go and pick out free resources (clothes, housewares, books etc), but it's laid out so that the recipients can choose what they need as if shopping in a real store - adding a little dignity to the experience.  I sought it out in downtown Albany.  It's in an upstairs room in the Sheridan Hollow Drop-In Center, which is run by the Interfaith Partnership for the Homeless.

Annoyingly, I forgot to bring my camera, otherwise I'd I've taken a photo for you - but there's one here, plus some more information about the store and how it operates.  It's really a good place, and happily it sounds like it's doing well - people are glad to donate stuff they no longer need; other people who can use that stuff are glad to receive it; things are getting re-used that otherwise might not.  All in all, what's not to like?