Some Thoughts on Snow Removal

Living in the greater Chicagoland area, we were hit by Snowpocalypse 2011 on Tuesday night/Wednesday. The official total for O'Hare airport, which is only a few miles away, was 20.2 inches. Due to all of the strong winds, accumulation on our driveway alone ranged from a couple inches to about chest high.


That's my car there, the drift next to it completely covered our garbage cans. The shallowest snow bank was directly in front of the car. The tallest was just past that. Between the garage in the far back and the tall drift in front of the car everything was 2-3 feet deep. All the stuff the plows pushed up on our driveway made the snow about 2.5-3 feet deep at the end of the driveway.

I managed to cut a single path from the garage to the street, clear a single path on the sidewalks, and start to clean out behind my car when the snowblower broke. From that point, it was shovel or be stranded. It took about 3 hours after the snowblower broke for us to clear just enough room to get the cars out onto the street.

While I was throwing shovelful after shovelful of snow over increasingly large piles, I had some thoughts about other methods of snow removal. Let me share them with you.

1. Pour out the rest of the gas for the broken snowblower, light a match and walk away. Possibly effective in the short term, but it wouldn't cover much area.

2. Take my father-in-laws space heater out of his room, plug it in, and set it on one of the drifts. His space heater isn't one of the ones that rattles and blows hot air and will cause a fire if you look at it wrong. His is one that's more like a radiator and creates ambient heat. While this might be somewhat effective, I didn't want to short out the heater, and wouldn't have had enough time for it to melt all the snow.

3. Dig out our little fire pit thingie, start a fire next to a snow drift, and move it around as the drift melted. The two big problems with this right off the bat would be digging out the fire pit and then digging out dry wood (if we have any at this point).

4. Body heat. When I got tired, I just sat down in the snow. While this was kind of comfortable, I was too bundled up for my heat to get through, and I was just compacting the snow instead of melting it.

Anybody have any good, or even not so good, ideas for snow removal?

St. Jude Tike-A-Thon

Logan participated in the St. Jude Research Hospital Trike-A-Thon at this preschool last week. They were late getting the fund-raising packets so we were not able to collect donations before the event, but we are now! Logan completed 12 laps for the Trike-A-Thon and learned all about bike safety and earned his Trike License! He also learned about the incredible kids at St. Jude and how the Trike-A-Thon was going to help them get better!

If you are able to make a donation on his behalf we (and St. Jude's) would greatly appreciate it. I can't image what those parents and children go through and anything we can do to help, I am sure they will be forever grateful for.

Click on the link below to donate:

Adventures in Parenting: What Time is the Right Time, for Star Wars?

The other day, Logan and I were in the basement and after some flipping around of TV channels, Logan said "That's just like Star Wars." I don't know exactly what was "just like Star Wars" about changing channels on the TV. Maybe it was something he saw that flashed by on the screen, who knows.

Then I wondered where Logan had come across Star Wars before. I've never really introduced him to Star Wars. It's not that I've tried to keep him away from Star Wars, but it's not something he's really had much exposure to. I have no problem with him enjoying Star Wars, I was quite the Star Wars nerd back in the day.

So for the past couple days now I've been wondering if it's the right time to introduce Logan to Star Wars. Some of you may have seen this before:



All joking aside, is now the right time to introduce Logan to Star Wars? He's four years old, and primarily, I'm worried about him getting scared and then getting turned off from the movies. I would obviously start with A New Hope. We'll save the prequels for another time, perhaps the next time we have a bonfire.

I don't think there's too much in A New Hope that will scare him. Sure there are a variety of aliens in the bar and there's the monster in the trash compactor in the Death Star, but I can't think of anything that's downright scary.

I think Empire with the wompa, the bounty hunters, Han Solo's torture, etc. will have to wait. Likewise, Jedi, with the rancor, sarlac, and other creatures. But I'm really tempted to sit down with him one of these days and watch A New Hope.

I think I'll play it on the safe side, though, and wait until he's at least five. But I don't know, what do you think?

The Puzzle is Coming Together, a writing post

I’m still chugging along on my current writing project. As of this writing, I’m at 41,408 words, all hand written. I’m setting monthly goals, and so far have been able to make them. For the current writing project, it amounts to writing at least 400 words per day. Some days I make it, some days I don’t. Friday, I didn’t write anything, but have gone over my daily goal most other days this month.

Why am I writing it all out longhand? I don’t know if there’s one really good reason. It started that way, as most of my writing projects tend to. There was something that seemed to work about writing it all on blue paper, folded into quarters and carried around in a pocket or book bag. It made me really think about the story. And I didn’t have to rely on being able to get to the computer, which I don’t always have access to since we have one for the household.

I’m nearing the end of the story, and as things come together, I’m seeing that the picture I originally thought was there is very different from the picture I see now. I have lots of sections written in red pen that completely change some of the story that has come before it and will call for major rewrites later. This is where I’m kind of kicking myself in the butt, because if I had been typing this from the get go, I could easily put those notes in the proper places or even do a little revising now to make the process easier later. As it stands, I have a lot of rewriting and expansion to do during round two. But even that isn’t bothering me too much.

The original word count goal for the first draft was 80,000 words. But I’m thinking that it will really be more like 50,000 with a lot added in later. I know in On Writing Stephen King said that the second draft = first draft - 10%, but that never seems to be the way it works out for me. Usually the first draft is quick and dirty, I’m getting the story down so I don’t forget it and adding the details later.

After this first draft is done, I think I’ll be revisiting my NaNovel from 2009 and writing some short stories. It’s time to get serious about the writing life if I want to see my name in print (outside of when I was on someone’s payroll doing magazine work that is). I think I’m headed in the right direction, but only time will tell.

Adventures in Parenting: I've Created a Monster

That's right, I've created a four-year-old, 42+ pound, snap happy monster. And this really, truly is all my fault. Let me 'splain.

Sometimes to get Logan's attention, or to try to get the point across that X needs to happen now, as in right now, I would snap my fingers. A typical exchange might go thusly:

Me: Logan, it's time for bed. Let's go brush your teeth.
Logan: No.
Me: Let's go now. *snap*

or

Me: Logan, what do you want for lunch?
Logan: ...
Me: *snap* Hey, Logan, what do you want for lunch?

Logan was fascinated with the finger snap, the simple application of pressure of the middle finger upon the thumb causing the middle finger to slam into the palm of the hand. He wanted to learn how do to it. At first he just tried to imitate, rubbing his first two fingers together. Then he asked how to do it, so I would show him how, first showing him with my hand and then putting his fingers in the right position and trying to explain so that a four-year-old would understand where the application of pressure should occur. After a week or two of showing him and him trying to get it on his own, one day we're sitting on the couch and he snapped his fingers.

I congratulated him on learning a new skill. That was a few days ago. Now, the boy is punctuating *snap* everything *snap* he says *snap* with a *snap*. He'll even be in bed snapping his fingers as I try to get him to go to sleep; the two of us in the dark, and his little fingers snapping away.

Needless to say, it's gotten old really quickly, and now I'm working on what so far seems to be the more difficult task of explaining to him that it's not necessary to snap his fingers about everything and that it's rude to snap his fingers in someone else's face. At least we haven't gotten any notes from his preschool teachers yet. And, it's made me seriously pause and consider before snapping my fingers when I'm trying to get his attention.

Arrrrrgggghhhhh!!!!!

That is all.

NaNoWriMo Blahs

It's November once again, and for the past three years, that has meant NaNoWriMo, that mad cap race to produce 50,000 words of fiction in 30 days.

Leading up to NaNoWriMo, I was a little on the fence about whether or not to go for it this year. I have successfully completed NaNoWriMo for the last three years, and I have a number of friends and acquaintences online and in meat space that are participating this year.

With that in mind, I started over with a story that I began writing after NaNo was done last year and only got about 6,000 words into. I'm at about the same point now as when I stopped writing last time. There are differences in each version, mostly minor, but with a couple scenes from the original version that have not appeared in any way in the new version. I have a couple scenes in the new version that are expanded from the old version or did not appear in the old version.

This year, more so than any other year, trying to do NaNoWriMo is like pulling teeth. There are a number of factors that I believe are making it so: we have two children at home a 4 year old and a 1 year old (at least last year the 1 year old was only a few weeks old and was still at that mostly lay around or sleep/eat/poop stage); I've got a full-time job and plenty to keep my busy around the house (no real change there from last year); I have another story that I'm almost 20,000 words into that I'm really liking at this point and I want to work on that more than the NaNo; as I'm writing this year's NaNovel, it just seems so dumb which isn't very motivating; and I'm just damn tired.

Why don't I work on the 20,000-word project for NaNoWriMo you ask? Well, for one I'm taking this one a little slower, and I'm writing the first draft all by hand. I enjoy doing that every once in a while and I'm really enjoying the process right now.

Usually during the first few days of NaNo I'm excited and really want to jump into the project. I'm just not feeling that this year. We'll see how the weekend goes and how the story comes along, but if I'm not feeling much better about the whole thing by Monday, I might bow out this year. That would free up more time for the 20,000-word project, which is really what I'd rather be working on right now.