Stupid Groundhog.

February 5, 2010-- 4:30 AM. The phone rings. School (and therefore seminary) has been canceled. There's no snow yet, but it's supposed to hit. And it when it hits, it's gonna be BAD.
4:45 AM. I happily go back to bed after making phone calls to seminary students, anticipating lots of snow when I wake up in a couple of hours.
6:30 AM. I wake up disappointed. I go running.
10 AM. It starts rain/slushing. I hurry to finish errands before the storm hits.
4 PM. Still raining, although apparently it's snowing in parts of town.
Bedtime. It's finally snowing! Yay!

I wake up the next morning, February 6th, to this:


This is the view from my west-facing front window. Isn't it pretty? I have a driveway somewhere down in that mess, though, so I decide to shovel it out.


February snow is HEAVY!! At least I have power and heat, unlike some Morgantown residents. Note to self: be grateful for trees planted far from power lines. Here's the half-way point in the morning shoveling, about 45 minutes into the job:

Let me just point out here that while my driveway LOOKS flat, it isn't at the bottom near the street. Let me also point out that the neighbor had plowed the street. I'm grateful for that, but he created a berm of that nasty, heavy, bouldery kind of snow that I had to clear away. After an hour and a half (note that the snow is still falling this whole time), my driveway looked like this:

Better, but I knew there'd be more shoveling later. Those are my footprints back from the street to my garage to put the shovel away and go in the house.

But at least the snow is pretty! I tried to clear some snow off some weighed-down branches (didn't work so well), and in the process I found that tree branches had created a little snow fort. I tried to get a picture, but it didn't work out so well. Here's a picture off my back deck instead:

I feel very grateful. The snow is beautiful, and I had the strength to shovel it out of the way. I don't have to drive anywhere until Monday (church has already been canceled). I have heat and power, and I have ice cream to eat while looking out the window at the snow. I have an awesome sledding hill in my backyard. (No sled, though. Gotta work on that.)

Now can I start hibernating?

Okay, if I have to go, at least I have my toy

Thursday afternoon was the day for the cats' regular vet check-up and shots. I hate getting them in their carrier. I can usually take one sleepy cat off-guard and get her in the carrier. The problem is that there are TWO cats, and the chances of BOTH cats being sleepy and in separate rooms (and therefore not realizing what I'm up to) are pretty slim. Add that to the fact that the cat carrier is usually stored in an upstairs closet and only comes out when it's time for a little road trip.

So this year I thought I'd be tricky. I got the carrier out two days early and set it on the floor in the living room. I was hoping that the cats would think it would be a new place to play. Tuesday night after work, I walked into the room and saw Alice hiding inside it. Yes!

Wednesday night, I walked into the living room and saw this:



Even better! The cats only put their favorite toy in places where they've been sleeping. So, I figured Thursday's vet trip would be a piece of cake. Okay, so it wasn't, but at least while the cats were stressed out in the vet's office, they had their favorite toy.

So, as usual, this got me thinking in terms of analogies. Did having the toy there make the trip to the vet any easier? Short of either cat learning to talk, I don't think I'll ever know. It was kind of a safety item, though-- something that reminded them that life could be okay eventually.

What are my safety items? Or my safety routines? What do I do to establish normalcy when life is scary or stressful? When I was packing up my house in Iowa to move here, I slept in a sleeping bag on a foam eggshell mattress for a couple of nights after my bed got loaded in the moving truck. It wasn't ideal, but it was my bed. I put it in the same spot my bed used to be (roughly), and the cats slept on the exact corner they always sleep on when the bed's there. I took a picture because I thought it was funny. (Sorry, no electronic version of the picture, and I can't figure out my scanner.)

Now it's got me thinking about how much I want my life to be regular and predictable and what I do to make it feel that way. I think we all crave routines. I think I crave them even more because I don't have some of the routines I used to always rely on. Dinner time, for example, happens much later than I would like because I teach evening classes. Teaching seminary requires me to sleep less than I would like. I have a feeling that if I were in the middle of a tornado aftermath, with my house in shambles around me, I would still be trying to find some kind of routine-- maybe I would be stacking remants of books together or trying to set up furniture fragments and items sort of where they used to be.

What would be my comfort item in the carrier? Chocolate? Nah, too easy and predictable. Scriptures? Well, yeah. My favorite pillow? The throw I always use for naps?

What are YOUR comfort items?

Time for a(nother) tea party, please!

Today has been grey and yucky, and it started with me NOT getting the phone call that school had been canceled. That meant I got up at 4:30 to teach seminary-- well, okay, I overslept my alarm by 20 minutes-- got ready, drove SLOWLY through the snow to the Institute building, and then no kids came. So I drove back home, shoveled my driveway, and wished I'd been able to sleep in.

Last night I was browsing through a Victoria magazine and the front cover had pretty tea party goodies on it. I thought, "That's what I need: a tea party!" Not that I drink tea. I just want pretty table settings and cute little treats and an excuse for wearing hats. And getting friends together for a little while.

Kinda like this . . .

Whoops, that was my birthday party from the summer. I can THINK about summer, though, right? And know that it will eventually come back? The snow WILL go away, it WILL!!

Meanwhile, we return you to our regularly scheduled program:

Brit likes to help me prepare seminary lessons. She's a very spiritual kitty. She also knows if she sits in the middle of everything, I have to pick her up and move her. (Note: I did NOT pose this shot, I promise.)

Roses in December

It's icky and grey outside today, so I thought we could all use a rose:

I had other pictures, but I mistakenly deleted them from my camera without verifying they were loaded to the computer. Oops. This was the first bush to bloom of the ones I planted in April. The BEST bush, though, was the one with candy cane striped roses.

But now the bushes are all covered up with snow. I followed the rose care directions and covered the canes with dirt and then wrapped up the branches with burlap. I hope they don't freeze. I want more roses next year!

On another note, what IS it about West Virginia that makes everybody freak out when a snowstorm is announced? Total run on the grocery stores. Okay, yes, we got eight or nine inches this time, but usually we get all of an inch. Why the panic? And why don't people shovel their driveways? The roads that got cleared (thank you, nice neighbor up the hill!) are dry pavement now. People who didn't shovel their driveways couldn't get out because of slush and then frozen slush overnight. Some Iowans need to come give these folks some road-clearing lessons, I think.

Enough with the ranting. Merry Christmas!

Christmas trees are big story books

Monday night I put up my Christmas tree for Family Home Evening. Every time I put up the tree-- and all the other decorations-- I'm reminded that really my Christmas tree is like a three-dimensional scrapbook of my life. I can't put up ornaments without thinking of the stories behind them. Unlike really pretty designer Christmas trees that have a theme or color scheme, my tree has no theme. Or rather, the theme is "memories from Sheila's life." I suppose most Christmas trees are like that. Anyhow, here are a few of my favorite stories represented on my Christmas tree:

I have four of those styrofoam balls covered in silk. Those silk-covered balls are then covered in crocheted white lace and have silk poinsettias on top. They were made by Cleo Mickelson, a wonderful woman I visit taught in Priest River, Idaho many years ago. (I don't think she's alive now.) After she had a stroke, she got her hand mobility back by continuing to crochet. These ornaments are also preferred cat toys, so I hang them VERY HIGH on the tree.

One year a family in my ward in Priest River decided to do "the twelve days of Christmas" for me. Every night a gift was left on my porch (including decorating my patio door window with laminated Christmas designs-- those go up every year, too). One decoration was a set of "stained glass" ornaments where you melt the little colored crystals in the oven to look like glass. Those ornaments remind me how fun it is to serve others for Christmas.

A friend at BYU had a "hanukkah party." We made shrinky dink Christmas ornaments. I have a "ten commandments" and a little square dealie with some kind of pseudo-Hebrew lettering on it. Still not sure what it's supposed to be, but it makes me smile.

I do have some of the generic colored glass balls, some blue, some red. A college roommate and I split the ornaments between us when we went our separate ways after graduation. We each took half of each color. Kinda nice to remember what Christmas was like as a poor college student.

A little glass angel. I volunteered at the Provo temple during my Masters degree, working in the youth center on Saturday mornings when families came to be sealed. Basically, I played with kids, got them dressed in white, and got to watch them be sealed to their parents. Awesome. The ornament came from a temple workers Christmas luncheon.

Bubble lights-- I need more strings of these, by the way. A family I knew in Point Clair (Montreal) had bubble lights on their tree. I have them on my tree to remind me of that family because they had so many fun Christmas tree decorating traditions. I'm nowhere near the 14 strings of white lights they'd put up every year, though.

Speaking of the mission, I have a little violin tied to a branch. We taught a wonderful woman named Diane, and one Sunday in investigator class we watched the video "The Touch of the Master's Hand." She was visibly moved by that video. When I went home from my mission (just before Christmas), she gave me the violin ornament and told me to always think of the poem.

Several tatted snowflakes. Two are from Grandma Benson. I have absolutely no memories of Grandma Benson at Christmas since she was always in Utah and we were always in California, but I like the idea of having something of hers on my tree. I also have two little cloth ornaments she sewed and put sequins on: a reindeer and a Santa sleigh (complete with a little plastic Santa head, which actually is a little creepy now that I think about it).

One more tatted ornament: a wreath with a candle in the middle, woven through with a red ribbon. My favorite mission companion made it for me. Coming the day after we'd had a car wreck, it meant even more.

Now I kind of wish that I'd saved some childhood ornaments from when I went through my parents' Christmas decorations when it was time to sell the house. I should've kept the elf playing the banjo . . . and one of the canaries that ties to the branch by its feet. I'm not saying parents should keep the salt-paste clay ornaments you make in first grade and keep even thirty years later after they've cracked in half, but I think the memories are more important than the tree looking like it belongs in a decorator magazine. My Christmas tree reminds me of what's most important in my life. Looking at it makes me happy. I hope yours makes you happy, too.

What Not to Wear

Let's start this entry with a few Snuggie pictures that didn't make it into the official advertising materials. (Gee, I can't imagine why . . .)

First, two-headed Snuggie:



Next, Roman orator Snuggie:

And my personal favorite, "Ghost with No Hands" Snuggie:

Seriously, who wouldn't want one of these things? Look at the entertainment value! Now it's time for a fashion quiz. In which places would the above-shown Snuggie be appropriate attire?

a. my office

b. the seminary building, while teaching

c. the airport

d. on the Rail Trail, while jogging

e. my kitchen

f. at the bus stop

Would the world be a happier, more peaceful place if we all wore Snuggies? How about Snuggies along with footie pajamas? At least we'd be comfy and warm, right? Doesn't that count for something?

steel drum videos!

Friday was my last steel drum class. I left early last week, so I missed the announcement that friends and family could come watch. I'd been hoping we'd have a recital, but we only learned two songs, so it would have been a very short recital (as in under ten minutes). Instead, I borrowed a friend's flip video to document the fun.

First, here are all the different kinds of drums:

Then come the double pans, which are what I played. Sorry about the "Blair Witch Project" filming quality on these videos.

This was a fun class to take. I would do this again-- provided we could move a little faster through the music. One of the lead drummers had absolutely NO sense of rhythm, so that slowed us down, and another lead drummer had almost no memory for what we'd learned the week before. Amazingly, we pretty much pulled together at the end for our "performance." That always seems to happen. I wonder why.

Some of you may be thinking, "Hey, where's the footage of actual PLAYING?" I tried to upload the video three times. It never worked. I think there was too much for the system to handle. So, sorry. I really did play these drums, honest!