We are finally melting out of the storm here in Oklahoma.

Our ice is down to about an inch and a half on all the undisturbed surfaces, and that inch and a half is spongy so it isn't dangerous to walk on as long as you are careful. We are even getting mail on a daily basis again.

The ice storm has been really bad. We ended up with about three inches of precipitation. About half of it was ice pellets, but some of it fell as freezing rain which just made for a very slick layer of ice. The kids couldn't even do much sledding. It took forever for them to get the roads cleared. The ice was so thick that the snow plows could not clear it from the roads, they ended up getting out the road graders. They were able to pry the ice off the road and the snow plow following the road grader pushed the piles of ice blocks off to the side. All of the main roads are now fringed by hills of dirty ice-blocks. They didn't even try to get to the side roads until Friday so there wasn't any question of opening school. That said, we were very lucky as the areas South and Northeast of us got about an inch of ice on the trees which then fell onto the power lines and many of those people are still without power.

I finished my return to full time teaching a week ago Friday. We had a weekend away planned and then . . . . I was greatly looking forward to having my house back to myself. The first of the storms came in on Friday. Saturday we canceled our trip to the lovely cabin on Lake Keystone. By Monday it was clear we were going to be home for a long time. We were out of school for the whole week and my lovely week alone turned into a week with my husband. Oh joy.

The teaching job was a real stretch. I am a pretty good science teacher but math is something else again. The good news is that they were able to hire a teacher who is certified at semester. She is about Anna's age and just out of school. She can't be any worse than the English and History teachers they hired. She is getting a different classroom (with a DVD-VCR!!) and she won't have my science class so it should be easier for her. My classroom is going to the new chemistry teacher also straight out of college. The athletic director-environmental science teacher dropped dead in our first snow storm and they did this major reorganization of the science department and hired a replacement for him. She is getting a new DVD-VCR also. I am trying not to be irked. Periodically, my students would inquire whether we could watch a movie for some special occasion - such as say . . . . "Wednesday." I would say something about had they seen my lovely VCR? They would look at the television and recoil in horror when they noticed that if had no equipment attached to it. Needless to say, I didn't rank too high up on the totem pole there. Oh well - I'm gone and they are still there!

Anna was home for about five weeks at Christmas time. She worked in the same pharmacy in Claremore that she worked in last summer. It was a long commute but she liked that store a lot better than the one down the street. Something about fewer needles sales I believe. She left Thursday morning right before the storm.

After it became clear last Saturday that we weren't going to be able to get out to Lake Keystone, Paul decided that he was going to stress about the age of our mini-van. After all, it had almost 100,000 miles on it, the air conditioner didn't work too well, the roof was going to need repainting for the third time and worst of all it had begun to leak oil. He headed off on the ice for the post office to mail some packages and about the time I got worried about him he called from the car dealership to say he was "looking" at vans. Apparently, he had decided that since the van had two inches of ice on the roof and it was twenty degrees outside all of its bad characteristics would be undetectable.

He called back some time later to tell me that he was buying a gold dodge mini-van to replace my car. He was the only customer at the car dealership which hadn't sold a car for two days. They were making him a good deal. They took the blue van as a trade in without even looking at it. He came home to get me to sign papers. He gave me a little lecture about not describing the blue van to the car salesmen. We slid over to the car dealership and they seemed quite bemused that we had no interest in taking the new van home that day. There was no way we could have gotten it up the hill on our driveway. We took the blue van over on Tuesday and brought the new van home. I finally drove it today. It is really nice. It even has a DVD player so Paul and I will be able to watch movies while we are camping if we want to.

I have about six weeks of work to do before I will be caught up around here. I was able to get the house plants inside from the front porch last fall but they have been neglected and it will take me some time to get them all watered and pruned. I took several plants to school and those look better than the ones that stayed home. I got the amaryllis in before the snows first hit but they are all in the basement waiting to be planted. All the frogs are well and happy and waiting for their tanks to be cleaned. The birds and the squirrels are happy I am back home so I can feed them more often. The possums are no where to be seen. I have lots of things to sew and of course there is the neglected diet to get back to. Oh well.