February: a Snowy Hellscape

Michigan doesn't play.

Holy Mother of God was this ever a crapshow of a winter.

I mean, right out of the gate, February came in raging - on the tail end of the biggest blizzard this state has seen in years, we saw a temperature drop that rivaled those from the winter of 2015.  It was a solid week-off of work, to be sure - and no one's complaining about that on this end - but it was still some pretty nasty weather to deal with (shoveling, etc. - especially being as sick as I was.)

Alas, this one stormy week of nonsense was only the tip of the ol' iceberg.  Two more weeks would follow, each with multiple snow and/or ice days (though, thankfully, no more 'cold days' - those are rough.)  Consequently, the girls and I spent a LOT of time bundled up indoors and not going to our respective schools.

Snowmaggedon aside, this month featured several weekends in a row where we had scheduled engagements - something we don't generally get a lot of in February.  A few different parties and get-togethers, Abby's gymnastics exhibition, a few Girl Scout outings and events - just enough to keep our minds off the usual drudgery of a brutal Michigan winter.

So yeah. . . here's a quick look at the Hough's February '19.  Enjoy, folks. . .

Killing time indoors with a bunch of Our Generation stuff. . .

After spending nearly two months of sorting through my vinyl collection, testing which LPs sounded too rough to keep and which ones I otherwise no longer wanted, I came out with a pretty big stack of used stuff I was ready to sell.  Over the last two years, I've done this about a dozen times before, each time taking in five or six albums to Radio Wasteland, and each time getting about $30 in store credit, and then buying one or two new LPs that I'd much rather have.  It's way of trimming fat and saving shelf space, but also of rounding out my collection and increasing it's overall worth.  This month, I ended up getting nearly $50 in store credit, and bought a few limited edition, colored-LP repressings, such as this live album from Chicago. . .

And this score.  Aside from these two, I picked up six Irish LPs (Clancy Brothers, etc. - in preparation for St. Patrick's Day) and a handful of Best Of's. . . both vintage and new.  Not too shabby, if I do say so myself.

SuperBowl Sunday found the Houghs watching the game with our usual group of seven or eight families, this time over at the Johnson residence.  Morgan, Pete and I claimed the couch.

This was pretty good.  I'm always skeptical when it comes to this label, but they came through with this one.

I've seen this in stores for $30, and always thought it looked cool, but couldn't justify spending that much on something I can play for free on the ol' Internet (despite the awesomeness factor of it's aesthetics and packaging.)  When a recent Slickdeals.net posting featured this on sale for $10, I decided to finally pull the trigger.  Now I look forward to countless bouts of dysentery in the near future.

Out on a lunch date with Mom.

Abby, in the zone.

Gotta love Michigan winters. . .

  

I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before or not, but the Houghs are returning to Florida in June for nine days - gonna take the kids and do the whole Disney World/Universal Studios vacation, be good parents, that sorta thing.  We recently reassessed our luggage situation and realized that we needed to pick up a few additional pieces:  a stow-able carry-on for each kid (for their clothes and personal stuff), and a large, heavy-duty suitcase we can check at the gate for some of our clothes/shoes, the family's toiletries, as well as souvenirs and additional crap we pick up on vacation.  We started taking the kids around with us to look at suitcases, and it was just as much fun as you could imagine.  At Marshall's, Abby found a decent carry-on piece. . . though we ended up buying a better-rated one from a more reputable brand that looked nearly identical online.

Alayna decided to throw a tween-tantrum when we told her that she couldn't buy a huge white suitcase because it wouldn't fit in the overhead compartment (we nabbed ourselves a super-nice condo through airbnb with a washer and dryer, so the girls don't need to take a full-size suitcase filled with clothing, despite what they may think.)  Just look at her face in this pic. . . God, I hate children.

After picking up Abby's new glasses from Midland Eye Associates (the second time we've had to brave a blizzard in order to do so), the girls and I barely made it back into the driveway - had to gun it just to get out of the street.  Just check out my tire tracks, there. . . frickin' ridiculous.

Abby's fancy new specs. . . that she barely wears.

Later that day.  The driveway and walkways shoveled.  In your face, Winter.

More sledding down the driveway.  It's been that kinda winter, folks.

Girls and glasses.

The third week of the month, we got slammed - yet again - with a third blizzard:  there were four in a system that was moving sluggishly across the Midwest, so by this point in time we were all pretty sick of Michigan's bullshit.

Snowing.  Still.

You can't really tell from the picture, but the snow's well over a foot-deep here - it was up to the second step, leading into the house.

After a couple hours, the driveway, sidewalk, and walkways have been shoveled out.  Again.

Lately our mail carrier has been leaving our mail on the front door.  Can't say I blame him - he'd need twelve-foot arms to reach our mailbox.

 

The plus side of having so much frickin' snow dump on us all at once is that you can create some pretty impressive snow structures.  The girls dug out an igloo as I piled up snow around the outside.

Earlier on in the process. . .

I turned one of their Suicide Sleds upside down and wedged it in to serve as a ceiling.

This kept them busy for a long, long time. . .

The kids' hang-out section of our basement.  Kids are the worst.

Can your kid recite every, last book of the Christian Bible, IN ORDER?  'Cause ours can.

Abby's favorite past time (aside from standing on her head.)

Dr. Hough breaks out another science experiment. . .

(No idea what she's up to, here. . . I was at work.)

Alayna's devoured nearly ten Rick Riordan books over the last few months: the Percy Jackson series, the Heroes of Olympus series, and now she's on to the Trials of Apollo series (each series contains five books, and each book in a series is between 300 - 500 pages.)  This kid reads like it's nobody's business, and unless you stop her, she'll keep going for hours (seriously, we've tested it.)  I'm not complaining, though - her knowledge of Greco-Roman mythology and lore is pretty impressive.

During a lesson on Westward Expansion, one day I let my students try their hand at the old school classic, Oregon Trail (see the picture I included earlier in this post, folks - it's too good a game to pass up.)  On our Google Classroom, I posted the link to a website where they could play the game for free, and gave them an accompanying handout to complete.  While they played through the game and answered content-related questions that went along with the game, I played my own game via my Promethean Board as a means of modeling the activity for them.  I named my party after a few of my coworkers.  It didn't go well.

A couple new LPs, all ready to roll for St. Patrick's Day. . .

And, to round out the wintery month of February, we have here - once again - the Girl Scouts.  Kris and Courtney's troop, actually, this time as a scenic water treatment plant (where they turn poop and pee into drinking water. . . or something.)  When I asked Abby how the outing was, later that evening, she told me it smelled like 'a bathroom at school.'  Who in their right mind takes a group of kids to a shit factory?  My wife does, folks.  My wife does.

- Brian

Ice Challenge '19: Where Chairs Not Dare to Tread

Hi gang.

By now, you folks are well-aware that our daughter, Abby, has been involved in gymnastics for the last year or so.  This only makes sense, seeing how she's always been a natural-born daredevil, doing handstands and cartwheels, crashing into stationary objects and incurring all sorts of bruises and scrapes for years. 

She's always enjoyed gymnastics (more or less because of Netflix's treasure trove of kid-friendly, American Girl movies based on the sport), but she's really gotten into gymnastics since she's been enrolled in the Midland Gymnastic Center, and over the last year we've gotten to watch her once a week tumbling, flipping, and doing all sorts of stuff on bars and matts and beams.

Today was her annual exhibition, which was perplexingly titled Ice Challenge 2019.  We invited several of the grandparents to come out to this, assuming that the Midland Gymnastic Center could accommodate multiple family members for each student participating.  The complex doesn't have much as far as spectator space goes, but we assumed they had somewhat of a game plan - it's not like they'd expect a hundred or so adults to stand around shoulder-to-shoulder, crammed together like they're at a punk concert or something, right?

Fool me once, Midland Gymnastic Center. . .

Umm. . . how about, 'NO.'

They had only set up about two dozen chairs on the ground level, with about ten additional chairs available in the usual parent viewing spot located on the second floor (which overlooks the gymnasium - generally where we watch Abby during practice sessions.)  While adults were jostling for position over these chairs - which were located in the far corner of the gym - I staked out a position on the edge of the hallway that provided a decent vantage position that enabled me to shoot any area of the gym floor without issue.  We still had to stand for an hour-and-a-half, crammed together among strangers, but at least we got some decent pictures.

Anyway, I ended up editing a bunch of pictures I took for some friends of ours, but I didn't get around to editing the pics of our child, so I apologize in advance for the less-than-ideal lighting and graininess (the lighting especially - I hate shooting inside gymnasiums.)  I'm also not captioning these up as much, seeing how they're all pretty self-explanatory.

Check it out, folks. . .

The Midland Gymnastics Center.  This place consistently smells of sweat and stinky feet.

Gymnasts.  There were a few different groups participating during our time slot today (they held exhibitions all day, in order to cut down on audience congestion.)

Abby (in the black and pink long-sleeve leotard), doing some warm-up stretches with her class.

I can do, like, twelve push-ups myself now.  In a row.  I'm pretty proud of this.

Some cartwheels.  The different groups spent some time just going back and forth across this large, carpeted area, switching between various round offs, cartwheels, flips, backbends, summersaults, etc.

Waiting for her turn on whatever the hell this thing is called. . .

Ah, yes. . . it's The Boulder.  I should've known.

On to the next area of the gym (the groups rotated so they weren't all crammed together into one place. . . like their parents and grandparents were.)

Kris gave Alayna her phone in order for Alayna to sneak out closer in order to get some video, but Alayna recorded a lot of video, so the file sizes are too large to upload here.  Again, sorry about that - yell at Blogger, not me.  You can see Abby falling into the foam pit in the background, here.

You can barely see here there in the back, doing some flippity-stuff on the bars (I wish I would've brought a telephoto lens with me.)

Now on to the beams. . . or whatever they're called.

Gotta love the dramatic poses. . .

At the end of the exhibition, they had each girl come up to accept a medal and take a turn posing like this so that their families could take a picture of them.  Most kids held the pose for a few seconds so that folks could have time to snap a few with their phones.  Abby (of course) threw up this pose and immediately turned around to return to her spot on the carpet in about a second. . . pictures and cameras be damned.  Miraculously, my dad was able to capture this at the exact moment she was in the correct pose - there was, like, a nanosecond of room for error with this.

Medals for participation.  Welcome to Midland.

Hopefully next year, if Abby's still into this whole gymnastics thing, Midland Gymnastics can try and order a few more dozen f***ing chairs for people.  My back is killing me.

- Brian