So, as I write this, we’re going on Day Three of no school in Marshall. As in, Meg, Calvin and I are all off school. Brooke even canceled their office’s activities for Thursday. We had a Winter Storm warning for Wednesday that even included thunder and lightning that evening.
The town has been mostly dead, though we have seen a few cars go by here and there. Trash/recycle service was canceled, power was knocked out on at least one street (though we weren’t affected), and mail didn’t come yesterday. We did venture out to the YMCA on Wednesday, but their Kid’s Gym staffing was reduced because workers couldn’t get in.
So yeah, we’re on a 5 day weekend, at this rate. And if the post that precedes this one is any indication, it’s been a ridiculously long winter. Meg and Calvin were sledding back on November 26th, so it feels like we’ve been dealing with this for far longer than we’re used to. It’s a good thing Brooke pushed for the YMCA membership this year, as I’ve used the treadmill more in the past month than I’ve been able to be outside. It isn’t even that it’s been that cold (though it’s been really cold…it’s 8 F outside right now…), but the icy conditions, the foot+ of snow that lingers on the sidewalks, etc. all get in the way of outdoor exercise.
That and it’s hard to get in a rhythm at work, where we were supposed to have our first exam on Wednesday. Then it was pushed to today. Now it’s pushed to Monday. I ended up sharing YouTube videos of my lectures to make sure the students keep up with everything so we can stay on track prior to Spring Break in early March.
Yes, “Spring” Break is in less than a month. Letting that sink in, too…
Early last week, they started forecasting snow for this weekend, but depending on which site you looked at or which day you checked, the estimate varied from 2 to 10 inches. Thankfully, most forecasts thought the bad weather would hit on Friday rather than Thursday, making it more likely it would head into the weekend, therefore not disrupting work or school.
It turned out that a Winter Storm Warning went into effect at noon on Friday. With everything heading in, Calvin’s school (and mine…) were called at noon and Meg’s at 1:00. Brooke new the bad weather was coming and “battened down the hatches” at work, so she was ready to come home a little early, too. I went ahead and hit up the Y before picking up Calvin so I wouldn’t feel the need to run on Saturday.
The snow started right around noon on Friday…and kept going…and going…and going… We had maybe 4 inches late-afternoon on Friday before settling in for the night. By morning, we had 8 inches on the ground.
And it kept going from there.
About mid-morning, Meg and Calvin were invited over to a friend’s house to sled and make snowmen. With the depth of the snow, I wasn’t sure how sledding would go, but they packed it down well enough to get a few good runs in. Otherwise, the temperature was in the low-30s, so they still had fun just messing around.
Brooke and I drove out to their house twice, so we got to head around town a bit. Odell was fine, but our street was…bad. Thankfully, the Forester handled it like a champ, though it did struggle in our alley a bit. The slush in the intersections was difficult to get started in if you were moving slowly, and we ran into a few drivers that caused us to come to a complete stop. The second time around, we drove in from the northern end of the alley, and that was the better call. We also ended up helping to push a few cars, getting them moving again.
After coming home, we did lunch and rested a bit before going back out later.
Eventually, we clocked at least 12 inches in the alley, though it continued to snow more as it went along. I don’t know the official tally, but when I looked out the window a bit ago, my driveway was covered….again… I wouldn’t be surprised if we had over 13 inches.
Anyway, the kids went outside again later in the afternoon, so I watched them from the window while playing on the Switch. Much warmer that way… 🙂
The last time Brooke and I saw this much snow, we lived in Iowa. The crazy thing is, we apparently recorded 10.7 inches that day in early February, so this was more by a substantial amount. Granted, the snow drifts up in Iowa were considerably taller than anything we had here, but still.
Hopefully we’ll get more sledding in tomorrow! Who knows if they’ll have school on Monday – probably depends on how many rural roads get cleared tomorrow. Regardless, we had fun today! The kids loved the ridiculous amount of snow!
To be fair, it’s probably worth an update, 3 years later. Back then, we had just picked up the bicycle trainer in hopes that we would use it. We actually did use it a fair amount that year, and a little the winter after. But then I started running quite a bit more and didn’t use it at all last year. These past few seasons, we’ve set it up downstairs, but Brooke only uses it periodically, mostly because it’s cold and boring down there. Brooke found that, earlier in the Fall, she’d stay on the bike longer if she had a magazine available to read while she was doing it, but for the last month with the holidays, it’s been harder and harder to get down there.
Today, we renewed our YMCA membership. Summer 2015 was the last time we used it, back when we thought Meg would do summer camp (note: she hated it). We let it lapse and haven’t looked back, but recently, in an effort to get some more exercise in, we opted to renew it because they run a sign-up deal in January like many other gyms do. Mostly, Brooke’s thinking that she’s more likely to get some exercise in if we set up a routine where the whole family goes: Brooke and I go to work out and the kids get to play in the ball pit play pen area they’ve got set up on the main floor. For my part, though i get plenty of jogging in (more on that in a moment), I’d still like to get more upper-body workouts in, so this gives me an excuse to go a few times a week to lift some weights.
Anyway, Brooke will probably check out some of the organized workouts for adults, and we’re still investigating if the kids are interested in any sessions. We may spring for swimming lessons before this summer, but we haven’t decided quite yet. At the very least, as Calvin is aging out of preschool, he’ll be home this summer and it’ll be a lot easier for me to keep up my jogging if I can drop him off at the Y while I work out or jog on the treadmill.
Speaking of jogging, the picture above is from yesterday when the weather was 63 F. On January 7th. In Missouri.
No, climate change totally isn’t real. Obviously.
I slowed down over the break, but was able to pick it up a bit in the last week. I’m trying to stick to a 20 mi per week average, but in an effort to “catch up,” I pushed it a little more this week.
Anyway, the temperature was awesome and I got to run in the afternoon, which usually goes better for me. I started out with a 7:22/mi average early on, which was a good 20 sec/mi faster than I ran last week, so that already felt great. I kept pushing it as fast as I could, slowing down a little bit toward the end, but still maintaining a 7:26/mi average over 6.2 mi (10k). In the end, I did it in 46:28 min, which is utterly spectacular for me.
Did I say I ran in a T-shirt and shorts? In early January? In Missouri? Seriously.
After I ran, I grilled some brats and hot dogs. Because it was 63 F. In early January. In Missouri.
And they were delicious.
…after I put them on the grill for a few minutes longer because it got dark and it was hard to tell…because…it’s early January…
For the past few years, we have gone hiking for New Year’s Day. This year, a few movies came out in mid-December that we simply haven’t had a chance to watch, largely because we’ve been gone on weekends and the only time our theater in town has a movie at 3:00-ish …is on weekends…
Every since I saw the trailer for this movie, I wanted to see it. You can see pictures that get the idea across (“it’s ‘just’ an animated Spider-man movie”), but you really need to see it in motion to get a sense for how magical it is. It’s animated like a comic book. You see words from time to time on the screen (like Spider-Ham hitting a bad guy with a hammer and seeing the word “BONK” show up above his head). The animation is even “choppy” sometimes, as if you were paging through comics seeing each page a frame at a time. Seriously: the way this movie is animated is unbelievable and perfect.
Second, the voice cast was exceptional. Some of the actors I’ve never heard of (though they were all great), but others like Lily Tomlin, Liev Schreiber, John Mulaney, Mahershala Ali and Nicholas Cage are instantly recognizable. Heck, even Chris Pine is in it for all of 10 seconds.
However, it’s Jake Johnson, Shameik Moore and Hailee Steinfeld that are probably the three “primary” voices heard throughout. Respectively, they’re voicing Peter B. Parker, Miles Morales and Gwen Stacy. Without getting to “into the weeds” of Spider-man lore, there was a separate timeline where Peter Parker died and young Miles Morales took on the mantle of Spider-man with his own similar powers, but not identical (for example, Miles can camouflage himself while Peter could not. Gwen Stacy famously died at the hands of the Green Goblin decades ago, but in an alternate timeline, it was Peter who died and Gwen who was bitten by the radioactive spider, granting her powers instead (and going by Spider-Woman, or Spider-Gwen).
I should also note that Miles is a person of color, the son of a black man and a latina woman. He’s also still in high school. The central part of the Peter Parker character when he was first introduced was that he was “just like you, Dear Reader, with real-life problems like homework and girls and rent and getting a job.” As Peter Parker got older, he moved away from that life, just as we all do. What better way to make Spider-man relevant in the modern world than by thrusting him back into high school in Brooklyn?
Now, with decades of Spider-man lore across multiple comic series, timelines, characters…how could one tie that all together? How about having a villain create a super collider beneath New York with the purpose of trying to bring his family back to him from another dimension…and then accidentally pulling Spider-people together into “our” world instead?
Yeah, it’s kinda dumb…but I can’t think of a better way, so we’re going with it. And honestly, seeing all of those characters together in the same universe was cool. Star Trek has done similar things over the years, so I can’t really complain.
Overall, I loved it. Because I’m not as familiar with the Miles Morales “Ultimate Universe” side of Marvel Comics, some of the events were foreign to me, so it’s nice to be surprised. The movie is produced by Sony, so it also kinda tied together the Tobey MaguireSpider-man movies into this one, which was fun.
The movie was genuinely funny, too. There’s a part in the movie where Miles’ uncle is teaching him how to meet girls by putting his hand on her shoulder, looking into her eyes, and saying “hey” in a sultry way. In the movie, Miles struggles to replicate what his uncle is doing, but it serves as a funny moment. After this happened in the movie, Calvin leaned over, put his hand on my shoulder, and said “hey.” And it was hysterical.
So yeah, day one purchase for me when it becomes available. It was very good and showed what animation can bring to to these movies rather than always relying on live-action Marvel films. Highly recommended.
This post is part of an ongoing series summarizing each State Park in Missouri that our family has attended. We hope to visit each of 54 State Parks before the kids graduate from high school.
Prairie for as far as the eye can see.
We returned from Pittsburg, KS from Taylore’s wedding back in August of 2016 and, at Brooke’s suggestion, we looked for a Missouri State Park near that region that we otherwise wouldn’t visit for a very, very long time. She ran across Prairie State Park, which happened to be just over the Kansas/Missouri border.
In all honesty, it doesn’t seem like there’s all that much to do there. They’ve got multiple hiking trails, including one we went on that, literally, involved walking through a field. There are some backpacking trails that are a bit longer and further out, but again, given the terrain, I’m not sure that it would be all that “hilly” or otherwise difficult to make good time on a long trail. Shade was certainly at a premium out there…
…the boy was very slow…
The “claim to fame,” at least so far as we could tell in our limited time there, was that this open field we were hiking through also contains bison and elk. When we first drove in, the sign informed us that there were free roaming elk and bison moving through the area and, while we didn’t see any, unfortunately, we did see signs of them…
Ew…
…but with multiple buffalo patties around, it was clear that large animals move through the area frequently. They were easily identified by their similarity to their other bovine brethren (and the fact that we saw tons of the elk variety in Colorado and it looks nothing like this).
A nest for something…big…
We also saw multiple spots in the grass that clearly used to bed some kind of large animal. It wasn’t obvious to us whether we were seeing elk or buffalo “beds,” but they must have been recent, as the grass looked like it would pop back up given enough time.
“You may experience bison/elk”…is that a hybrid organism?!
Overall, it was a nice, brief little stop. They’ve got camping, but we didn’t see much of a shower house available: only a single in-ground outhouse near the picnic area. It looked like mostly primitive camp sites and, although they actually looked pretty nice and spacious, only one was reserved for the coming days. I suppose August isn’t exactly prime camping season.
We want to go back and see some bison up close, though! Perhaps another time, when we happen to be down in southwestern Missouri!
This post is part of an ongoing series summarizing each State Park in Missouri that our family has attended. We hope to visit each of 54 State Parks before the kids graduate from high school.
Back in May of 2016, we went camping at Pershing State Park. It was named for Gen. John J. Pershing, who grew up in the area and explored it as a kid. It’s located in the north-central part of the State, so Brooke and I had visited the park back when we were in college, so we thought it’d be cool to check it out with our kids.
The campsite we stayed at was just a short walk to a small pond. Calvin and Meg weren’t particularly great at fishing, but they still had fun! If I remember right, the kids got their lines stuck in branches a few times and didn’t catch anything, but oh well – it killed some time.
The campsites were pretty flat and covered in trees. It was easy enough for them to entertain themselves around the campground. We were there in mid-May, so the temperature was pretty reasonable: chilly at night, nice during the day, not many mosquitoes yet. There was plenty of wood around to make a fire with, and that’s always entertaining to 2- and 5-year-old kids.
We didn’t do a ton of hiking, but Pershing has a pretty cool walking trail through some tall grasses. There wasn’t much wildlife aside from birds we could see, but the kids enjoyed hiding from each other, darting around corners behind brush. The boardwalk pictured above is a short loop within walking distance from the campsite. We did our best not to carry Calvin all that much, but we didn’t have much of a choice unless we wanted to sleep on the trail forever…
There was also a cool observation deck where you could watch for water fowl in the marsh. The kids took their sweet time climbing up to the top, despite the fact it wasn’t even really that tall. Remember, Calvin is among the slowest people on the planet and it was even worse when he was 2…
Overall, we had a great time! It was also a relatively short drive for us, which is always appreciated. I don’t remember there being a playground all that close to our campsite, which would have been nice, but our kids were of the age where they could “make their own fun” so it wasn’t a big deal.
We’d go back! It’s definitely worth the return trip someday!
This post is part of an ongoing series summarizing each State Park in Missouri that our family has attended. We hope to visit each of 54 State Parks before the kids graduate from high school.
So, I last posted about State Parks last May. For real, this time, I’m going to get a few more in the virtual can. It’s on my “Christmas Break list” and Brooke keeps reminding me to work on them.
We last visited Rock Bridge Memorial State Park near Columbia in April 2017, though Meg first visited back in 2012, before Calvin was born. As close as we live, and as often as we’re in Columbia, you’d think we’d go more often, but alas.
The proverbial “rock bridge.”
The park gets its name from an unusual rock formation carved out by a creek over many years. Growing up, we used to be able to actually walk through the bridge, but a few years ago, they removed the wooden walkway. To be fair, they’d have to close the walkway any time the creek flooded, so perhaps it’s for the best.
Meg was a bit smaller back then…
Brooke and I both went to the park growing up, actually. Mom and Dad took my sister and I and we both went on school trips relatively frequently. I never got to go down in the “Devil’s Icebox” cave, but Brooke got to back in high school. I also participated in an orienteering activity there in 8th grade, which Mom fondly remembers.
Some relatively light hiking around the park
The hiking around the park can be as strenuous or as simple as you want, with many trails set up on wooden slats, and other portions being traditional dirt trails. The park is pretty big and has campsites, but I don’t remember ever camping there. My experience is mostly just the hiking around the park, but even with that, I never really went all that far.
That kid…
The aforementioned Devil’s Icebox cave is somewhat popular among amateur spelunkers. Honestly, I’m not sure I’d even gone down as far as these pictures here indicate. The kids found it pretty awesome to be down in a cave by the rushing water. We didn’t get all that wet, but they did go out in the middle of the water out on some slippery rocks.
We’re in a cave!
We may end up camping there at some point, but for the time being, we’ll probably just visit when we get some time in Columbia. It’s a fun and easy park to walk around in so we’ll definitely head back…but we have quite a few other parks to hit, too!
This is the second year I’ve tried my hand at making some Christmas “cookies.” I always call them “cookies,” but there’s really no baking involved. Still, these are treats that my Mom used to make when we were growing up, but when we were gone for college, she slowed down on her cookie making, largely because we weren’t around to help eat them.
Regardless, I missed them and I wanted my kids to get the same treatment, so I started to make them last year when I had off for Christmas break. Thus, here we go again.
The ones pictured up top are almond bark-covered Oreos. I also put some peanut butter between Ritz crackers and dipped those, as well. The fun part about making both of them is that it can be challenging to figure out which is which, as they’re about the same size and shape.
I actually dipped Oreos and pretzels a few years ago back in St. Louis, but ended up burning the almond bark by trying to microwave it. I just couldn’t figure out the right settings to melt the chocolate without having to stir it every 30 seconds. Then last year, I tried it using a double boiler method and believe you me, it works wonders. I suppose it takes a little longer than it does in the microwave, but I have yet to burn anything, so I figure it’s worth it. I used the double boiler for just about everything I made this year.
The holly candy (above) is corn flakes, marshmallow, corn syrup and green food coloring. It isn’t too terribly hard to make, though getting the shape right can be a little tough. I think I did a better job this year of mixing everything, so the candy held together a bit better rather than falling apart a flake at a time.
The chocolate-covered rice krispie treats are also a favorite of mine, though I always forget that they aren’t technically rice krispie treats, in the traditional sense. Sure, they’ve got most of the hallmark ingredients (like, you know, rice krispies…), but they lack marshmallows, which ends up leaving them a bit drier. The topping, though, mixes chocolate and butterscotch chips together (also in the double boiler).
This was my first year trying to make chow mein noodle candy. These are similar to what Brooke’s family has (haystacks), but my family always put marshmallows in there. I ended up adding a few extra noodles to the mix, as I thought they looked a bit over-marshmallow-y (sure, that’s a word…), so we’ll see in the finished product whether I got the mix right. I haven’t tried them yet. Brooke had me make some her way, but we’ll save those for next weekend when we head to Hannibal.
Anyway, it doesn’t take all that much time to make them and I certainly like eating them. If anything, the cleanup takes longer than the “making” part takes.
Meg’s been eyeing these treats for a few days now and I haven’t let her have any. I’m terrible. 🙂
So, it’s Finals Week at school and I’m procrastinating in my grading by posting pictures of this past weekend. Just sayin’.
I put up the Christmas lights the Sunday after Thanksgiving (in the rain, I might add…), but we didn’t turn them on until late last week when it was closer to actually being December. This weekend after we got the tree, I put the LED “flicker” candles in the windows. Every year, I love seeing them up in the attic windows…
We got our tree this past weekend, again under threat of bad weather. Calvin was actually feeling a bit sick, so we made him go with us, but he stayed in the car. Brooke thought we should try and get a straighter tree this year rather than buy a new tree stand (last year’s tree had some “issues” staying upright…), and the tree lot we tend to go to keeps their best ones pre-cut and covered for easy browsing. Meg and Brooke picked the one they liked the best (a Fraser Fir this year) and we hauled it off on the Forester.
By the time we got home, Calvin was feeling a little better. He and Meg hung out for a bit while we waited for the tree to dry off from the rain (again…it’s Precipitation City here in Missouri this year…). After a bit of unloading, I carried the tree in and put the new Christmas lights on it that Brooke picked up on sale at the end of last season. These are bigger “bulb”-style lights, but they’re really just a plastic cover around a small LED. Still, they look nice! The kids helped out with hanging the ornaments…and then we had to rearrange the ornaments after they only hung them in the very front and below the 4′ line of the tree…
In the end, it turned out pretty good! The tree’s about 8′ tall, so the star doesn’t quite fit in the bay window perfectly. We pulled it out a little bit, but it still looks great from the street outside.
This year also saw the addition of a new tree upstairs, also a pick-up from a sale at the end of last Christmas. It’s a 4′ fake tree the kids can keep upstairs to put some of their ornaments on. We actually put it up Thanksgiving weekend to tide Brooke over until it was time to put up the real thing.
We’ve got most of our presents purchased this year already and Brooke’s been busy with the wrapping. She took care of Christmas cards before Thanksgiving for the first time ever, but as I’m in the throes of Finals, I won’t be addressing them until this weekend at the earliest. Still, I think we’re ahead of most folks this season! Since we’ve had at least 5 snowfalls this year (including a small one this morning…), it’s felt like Christmas for weeks now, even though it’s only December 4th.
The house at least looks more like Christmas now, too!
I don’t think I actually saw the original Halloween (1978) until after college. Perhaps I saw it earlier and just didn’t remember it, but I don’t think I actually saw it until relatively late in life. Growing up, I wasn’t really into “slasher movies,” though the Friday the 13th franchise was frequently on TV, so I caught a few of those here and there. I’ve seen parts of A Nightmare on Elm Street, but never the whole thing. The 1980s were the heyday of slasher franchises, so I remember going to the Gerbes in Columbia to check out movies available for rental and seeing all of the covers for lots of movies I’d only later be old enough to actually watch.
The thing I really appreciate about the first Halloween movie is that it a). kicked off the “slasher” genre, and b). contains no blood. Not a drop. There’s tension, there’s violence. But there’s no gore to it. Not that I’m against such things, but I think it sets itself apart from other movies that came out in that era and later that leaned so hard into gross-out territory that it wasn’t really scary so much as it was shocking. Later movies in the Halloween franchise definitely kicked things up a few notches, but they weren’t better for it. In fact, the movies were barely comprehensible, aside from a few examples that weren’t utter train wrecks.
This brings us to Halloween (2018), technically the third movie to bear that name (there was another reboot in 2007 that wasn’t all that bad). This film has a few things going for it that piqued my interest. Firstly, it ignores all of the other movies except the original, which is a crazy thing for a franchise to do. Secondly, it takes place, in real time, 40 years later, so the passage of time is integral to the story being told. Lastly, they got Jamie Lee Curtis back to portray Laurie Strode, but with 40 years of trauma built in that turned her into a secluded “prepper,” who is ready for the return of Michael Meyers.
As the original is probably my favorite horror movie of all time, it isn’t surprising that I liked this one, too. I like the direction it took, the story it told, and the characters involved in telling it. This new iteration was, in some ways a “remake” of the original, which has been the trend in Hollywood to “tell a new story” by “retelling the old one” (Star Wars: The Force Awakens comes to mind). However, I think this one leaned more toward “callback” than “retelling.” Some similar story beats were totally there, like the psychiatrist and sheriff pairing up to find Michael, or the babysitter connected to the main characters being a target on Halloween night, and so on. But I think the writers did a good job of acknowledging the original movie while putting enough twists in the plot to make it a new thing. The fact that I knew certain main characters wouldn’t die (because they’re main characters…), but I still felt tense at the edge of my seat, is a testament to what they were able to craft here.
So yeah, it was good. Was it as good as the original? Probably not. But this movie still didn’t have all that much gore to it. There’s totally violence and, this time, there’s blood in there…but it wasn’t over-done like some horror films will do. It wasn’t as much “shocking” as it was “tense,” and I think that’s about as true to the original as you can get.
