Ice Days

January 2007 will be remembered as the month of the great American ice storm. Here in central Texas we get hardly any winter (usually). But this is Tuesday evening and the end of the 3rd day we've all been here together at home because it was too dangerous to travel. (Well, Janis went to work on Monday morning at the hospital before the roads iced over, but other than that, we've been here.)

It had been raining already a few days when the cold air hit on Monday. So everything was already soaked and then started to freeze. Once the air got cold enough to get the road surfaces below 32, it was pretty much a done deal that Central Texas was going to shut down. Some people at Maxwell Locke & Ritter went to work on Monday, but not me. Fortunately we now have high speed Internet access here at the house, so I can access and manage our network at the office from home. I spent quite a bit of time on Monday helping others get onto our network servers remotely for the first time or solving other minor problems. It was interesting for a while, but one does get tired of just sitting at the desk on the computer all day.

It actually got worse on Tuesday (today) so that the office was actually closed and nobody went in today. The temperature stayed below freezing all day and the precip continued to fall. Now it's falling frozen rather than freezing on the road, but the base of ice is there and staying there until we warm up.

It seemed that fewer people tried to work today, or maybe had fewer problems, because the demands for my attention today were minimal.

Forecast for tomorrow is for more frozen precip ending around midday. Might get up over freezing briefly tomorrow afternoon, and then we should start to warm up on Thursday.

So its another day at home tomorrow. ACC is closed again tomorrow, so my evening class, which was to start, will have to wait until next week.

Looks like a two-day week at the office. : - ) Boy, I can't wait for the weekend!

Of Friends and Fingerpainting

Several years ago on New Year's Eve, I was at odd ends with no plans. I think that Janis was working that night. On the afternoon of the 31st I got a call from my friend, Mark Roberts, inviting me to their house for New Year's Eve. I was glad to have something to do, and the Roberts are fun to be around. They had three young kids at the time, I think maybe that year they were 9, 7, and 5, but I could be off a few years.


Mark and I travelled to Almaty together in 2002 to teach at CALTC. We have known each other since we moved to Georgetown in 1995. They are a fun family.


I stopped by Walmart on my way over to get some snacks to add to the evening's festivities and happened by the arts and crafts aisle, where I spied the fingerpaints. "Fingerpaints!" I thought. That would be fun. So I grabbed some and some paper along with the snacks. A lot of people wouldn't be happy to see a guy walk in with fingerpainting stuff when they have a bunch of young kids, not wanting the house messed up. But Mark and Therese thought it would be fun. (Therese is an artist in her own right, so she saw the creative potential.)


We did have a good time fingerpainting that night, and the mess was easily cleaned up.


The next year the Roberts hosted New Year's Eve again and this time the invitation featured fingerpainting as one of the evening's activities. It has become a family tradition with them. They fingerpaint every year on New Year's Eve.


The Roberts family moved away from Texas this year to Grand Island, New York. We hear from them occasionally. I was surprised to receive an envelope from them yesterday with these two works of art and a note that said "We think of you every New Year's Eve now as we continue the fingerpainting tradition."


It's kind of special to have created a family tradition for another family, and very special to be remembered fondly for it.


Oh, yes, almost forgot. The second picture is by Tim, whom Mark and Therese adopted from Kazakhstan a couple of years ago. Now they have four fantastic kids!