Ugh. Walking a total of two blocks was exhausting. And they're out of black tea and grits! Otherwise it's nice here.

Pig performs in dog shows. Adorable pictures. [link]

Let out early! (Unofficially.) First, doctor's appt.)

I tightened up the dates for the Onerous Task Day since it seemed like we could use it more often.

Next Onerous Task Day: Thursday, 2/10/2011

Ooh, it's possible I'll actually be home for that one and get tasks dOne! Exciting!

My onerous task for the day will be shoveling. I am going to get to it here when I'm done with this cig.

It may take me as long to gear up for the shoveling as the actual digging. It's COLD out there.

she sounded quite upset and a bit frightened about the violence.

Ugh. And just when I was relieved that my good friend there had gotten the internet back and could check in. Things were pretty quiet in her neighborhood. She said:

Overall these events only served to galvanize the community - both my neighborhood and my coworkers. Our next door neighbor stood with other men in the neighborhood protecting us with improvised sticks-and-stones type weapons and invited my roommate and I to hole-up with his family if we got scared. This scene was the same in every neighborhood of my friends as well.

Which is comforting. The uptick in violence is not though!

Oh! She just posted that they have a flight out to the US on Friday. phew. (I think they were planning a trip to here in a couple of weeks anyway but are getting here sooner than planned.)

I'm sure they don't have enough -- and didn't I see somewhere that the teams have their own sand trucks now?

Yes, and yes. Also, it's not been this cold here in a decade.

I came into the office today because we have 4WD and take 1 heavily traveled road into downtown. Our neighborhood roads are solid ice though. Most of my coworkers in the burbs can't get out of their driveways. Then there are the unexpected issues people have. Keyless lock trunks being frozen shut. We don't really have the experience with it to get the hang of what it takes to be prepared.

It took the band leader nearly a couple of hours to get here, not because the roads were so bad, but because everyone was driving so slow. Like, 15 on a 65. Which is its own form of dangerous. He was all, "I appreciate your commitment to road safety, but I suspect you might be able to maintain those standards even at, say, 30 mph."

So they are heading out now, but I am not. Even with being off work tonight, they got started three hours after schedule, so I doubt they'd have gotten to me anyway.

It is now all the way up to a balmy 5 degrees, wind chill of -12. When I woke up this morning it was -8, so we're making progress! I need to go out for round two of birdfeeding, which I'll be at all day today, but I have to work myself up to it.

We did the thing where you throw a cup of boiling water in the air and make snow. It was pretty impressive.

Banana muffins were delicious, though, so I'm counting today's snow day as already a win.