February 2011

Ah, the love month. I love it because it’s the last month of the most brutal winter weather here in Fargo. Sure, February does not bring the end of our huge mounds of snow or blizzards or kids trapped in-doors for weeks at a time, but things do get *better by March. It’s cold but not AS cold and it’s snowy but not AS snowy. Look, in all reality, we can get snow storms easily through April here, so we have to hold on to what little glimmer of relief we get with a little warmer temps! This year, due to all the snow we’ve had the weather service is expecting a big flood year. Fargo started calling for volunteers to make sandbags starting on Valentine’s day. Microsoft is giving us two days off work to start with to participate. More will be negotiable when the reality of the flood level is upon us. I’m tired of the arctic cold – I’ve got my sandbagging boots on – LET’S GO! We don’t foresee any sandbagging being necessary on our property – unless things get really crazy – which is always possible.

There's not anything to terribly exciting that happened in February here. I went back to work February 2nd after being home since before Christmas with the addition of Max to our family. I had just started working a compressed week shortly before Christmas so going back to work has meant really getting into the swing of the new schedule. I work four 10-hour days and take Tuesday's off. The schedule enables me to have an extra day at home to get the kids' medical appointments in and have a little more time to do school with them as well. It seems to work really well.

Casey's is enduring his slow time well this year. The spring looks promising as he's been doing estimates pretty intensely and that's usually a good sign of work to come. He has several projects he's excited about and several smaller ones he's been able to work on this winter as well. One week was especially busy for Casey in February as he remodeled the Mrs. Fields in the Fargo mall. It's a small job but the remodel involved squeezing 2-weeks of work into 6 days. It looked awesome when he and EZ get done with it. The project only involved one ER trip! Casey somehow managed to get some medal in his eye, which didn't slow him down one bit until it started to rust. Apparently the rust was more irritating to the iris than a hunk of medal. He had to make 3 or 4 trips into the doctor but all ended up well and good.

The kids were getting a little wild being cooped up inside so they started a gymnastics. All four of the big kids got classes AT THE SAME TIME ON THE SAME DAY! Yeah, unbelievable! I couldn't pass that up! They've enjoyed it.

School has been enjoyable. I'm not sure who learns more - the kids or the parents. It gives us lots of interesting things to talk about though.

Well, we've come to the end of the things I can remember as interesting in the least for February so I'll have to close. I suppose I'd do a better job of remembering what went on if I didn't wait until 2/3 through the next month to write the previous month's summary. Sometimes you just have to let some things slide if you're going to make it through, though. I better get a jump-start on those two birthday posts and the March one too!