Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Snow/Ice/Rain/Sleet Day


As predicted, we have another "snowday" today. The kids are home, bummed about missing the pre-Valentine's Day festivities at school, and I am home as well. Sigh... We are so ready for spring around here.
It's wild outside. We got about eight inches of snow last night and now the temperature is exactly 32 degrees (has been for about three hours) and we have buckets of freezing rain. What a sound it makes falling on the ice encrusted snow. The poor trees are dropping limbs all over the place, there's a flood watch downhill in Greenfield, and just look at this dejected little evergreen:



We're hoping the newish sheep shed holds. It's been sagging for a few weeks now and is propped up and jerry-rigged every which way. The combined weight of snow, Ice and rain might just do it in-- in which case, our flock will be re-introduced a little more quickly than we'd planned. (This could be trouble as the humongous Charlie Bucket has it out for Bombadil, and who knows what would happen in the ensuing ram-to-ram chaos. They have not been making nice through the fence, and Charlie has a big ol' bump on the bridge of his nose from knocking into the gate that separates them.) I've been checking on the sheep shed ever half hour. So far, it seems to be holding.

Today I was determined NOT to decend into the stir crazy snowdayness of the past. I set out to do something fun and creative with the kids and so.... soap. Again. The last batch turned out decidedly so-so. I used a mixer to beat the rebatch, and as a result, we have light-as-air floating chai soap. (It does smell great though!) And the Mocha soap looks rather, um... wellllll... The kids have taken to calling it "poop soap". The tea tree soap, while just the right consistency (I didn't use the mixer on it) is full of flax seeds. Yep, this was my bright idea. Dan likes "scratchy" soap and I thought flax seeds would be suitably abrasive. Who knew they'd be THAT abrasive....? On the plus side, I used a cookie cutter to shape the sheets of soap and that worked really well. We got about 10 cute little poop soap hearts!

This time, we played it safe: Vanilla-Chamomile, Orange, and Lemon. And it was a lot of fun! Let's hope this batch turn out a bit better.

The kids are playing chess and working on even more Valentine's Day cards and, aside from the inevitable squabbles, and the puppy's wistful window watching, things are just peachy out here in Ice-o-chusetts.

1 comment:

Jenn said...

Poop soap ... Hm ... well, I'd have to admit that Brendan would probably be more inclined to take a bath if he had some of that! But ... he's an odd one ... :)