The Weather and the Wii

The two hot topics in our household today:

1) The weather. It is currently -- at 10am on Monday morning -- 20 degrees below zero in Sioux City. Incredible. Not much wind, thankfully (and surprisingly). But twenty below is wicked all on its own. We were supposed to have blizzard conditions this past weekend, with new snow and strong winds blowing it all over. The wind came, and the snow, too, but the former did not blow the latter as much as predicted. Still it was pretty miserable to be out in.

The guy we bought our used snow blower from is supposed to come by this morning to look at it. It doesn't start when the weather's too cold. That's useful, huh?

We're supposed to get more snow tomorrow and Wednesday, but the temperature is supposed to go up, at least -- a nice, balmy 24 or so. For a while last week, we were wondering if we needed to be concerned about getting home for the holidays, but I don't think that's going to be an issue now.

2) The Wii. We got one. The girls opened it last night. (See my last post for their reaction.) Living in Jersey, we started a tradition of opening our Christmas gifts to each other early, before we left town. It seemed like a pointless exercise to ship those gifts back to Kansas just to open them and ship them home again. Anyway, as I said, it's a tradition now, and the girls wanted to open our immediate family presents here again. So, last night was the night. And the Wii was the star of the show.

We played on it all evening. And the girls have played on it all morning so far. We're definitely going to have to set up some rules about this thing. At least when they play that, they're up and moving around instead of sitting on the sofa playing on the laptop or watching TV.

And this may be a good thing for making friends. Something to help them break the ice. To help Leslie, anyway -- Eastin doesn't often have ice to break with anyone.


With the holidays coming up, I don't know how much writing I'll get done here. (Who knows -- maybe I'll write more . . . ) But I figured I'd take this opportunity to wish all of my "faithful readers" (that's kind of cool to say) a very Merry Christmas. May it be warm and comfortable and joyful and full of love!