Is Minus 31 Degrees Really Necessary? AND the snow????

We are on the 6th day in a row of getting snow, and it's becoming quite tiresome! But not nearly as tiresome as the minus 31 degrees with windchill last night. Grand Forks has even't stopped putting its salty brine mixture on the road to help to melt the ice. . . . because it's freezing into a slick glaze and making things even worse.

It's only January, and we have much, much more of winter to go. Well, at least it's not New York. . . .

My morning task is to brush all this stuff off my car. Strangely, I have to be particularly careful to get it off the roof and hood. If I don't, no matter how much I've let the car run to warm it up, approximately 2 1/2 minutes after I start driving, the snow from the roof, which falls on the hood, and the snow on the hood is sucked into my car through it's intake system, as moisture, and freezes solid on the inside of all my car windows. It's rather disturbing, especially when 2 1/2 minutes takes me from my parking lot to the center of the bridge, and I can't see a thing! I literally scrape away a little peep hole on the inside of my car with an old plastic card/hotel door key.

I was really happy when, after many years, I finally figured out that clearing the snow from the roof and hood would solve this problem.



And just a little view outside my office window:



By the way,the book in my post yesterday is not a blurb book, but a blog2print or sharedbook. It was extremely easy to make, and before Christmas they were running some specials (which I suspect is a very frequent thing.) I sent them a "support" question, and rapidly got an answer that the photos could be sRGB (they prefer RGB) and that the 72 dpi resolution would be fine. So using the photos that were uploaded to the blog works well. It sucks up the dates of the blog you specify, so it's really easy to create a book with very little effort. I really didn't want to spend much time on this, especially before Christmas, and just get a little sampling of posts from the summer. I didn't want to be perfectionistic about it, and since it wasn't very expensive, I was willing to be quite casual about it. So I just rapidly put it together, let Doug give it to me for Christmas, and now I'm really, really glad I did it! I'll appreciate it a lot in the future, when the technology of blogs may be long-gone, as just a little memento of this fun chapter in our lives. I really did approach this as "perfection is the enemy of the good" so it wouldn't become a huge time-consuming project. I'm thinking of doing another book of just my "cranky woman" posts (see label on left in side-bar), although why I would want this is kind of a mystery to me. I guess I just value my quirky side ( I mean, I WOULD value my quirky side, if I had one.)