I told a couple of you about the Crate & Barrel duvet cover saga. Well, here it is! The colors (at least on my monitor) are pretty accurate. Obviously, it's just laid across my bed. I didn't take the time to actually put it on my comforter. We'll wait until we actually have a queen-size bed. I wished they still had the shams and stuff, but I'll take what I can get.
Madison's church hockey league. This is the Avalanche (Chadd & Nikie's team) playing the Flames. Ryan wanted to see what the gym looked like, so here it is.
I watched Carson up in Chadd's office. It has windows that look out over the gym. Nikie and I stopped at Taco Bell on the way over to Madison and they got everything in her order wrong except her water. :(
It started snowing during the evening and by the time we left Madison the ground was covered. This is what my house looked like before I went to bed. When I woke up this morning, there was less snow because it had blown away. So basically, we had about 2 inches of snow with 4 inch drifts!
The street lights by the shed and dumpsters - that's gotta make you want to see it, huh? See the difference in the light temperatures of those two lights? When I went to sleep I set my alarm for 30 minutes earlier so I could get up and take pictures of the snow before it melted.
Because the temperature dropped during the day, the snow had a layer of ice under it. My sidewalk was pretty slippery!
Me with my front yard in the background. I really wanted to go sledding with Steve and Janelle, who we found sliding down the hill by their house in the dark with head lamps.
Jeff got out early to clear the paths.
Campus around the time kids showed up for their first classes.
It started snowing again later and kept snowing the rest of the day off and on, even though the ground had melted. :(
The kids had fun chasing each other around and throwing snowballs. We even have a 4' snowman in front of the ad building!
Grant and Gaby came for the weekend with Ryan and Jaclyn.
Jaclyn and I partly assembled some of the reception materials for a while on Friday night. It's nice to cross one more thing off "the list."
Snow Sabbath morning!
On my computer
Saturday night, Jaclyn let me open my birthday present early. She got me Knights & Cities to go with Settlers of Catan!!!
We got ourselves set up and slowly walked through learning the expansion. It's a lot of fun. It was just a long first game!
By the end, some of us were going insane!
Grant and Gaby read books after knocking the socks off of us in Friends Scene It.
Becky Patrick and Janelle Baughman threw Ryan and I a wedding shower at the church fellowship hall this morning.
We had helpers!
A card that my student worker Candace made
Maybe one gift for Ryan?
I have a couple more pictures to add to this blog, but my camera's in the car and I'm too tired to walk out there and get it. So check back later!
No, I'm not really that pale . . . but almost! I just grayed out everything but the bruise so wouldn't miss it! Both legs look like this, btw, but this one is worse because of the cut. It was pretty funny that the other morning, they were featuring the Flybar on the Today show! The guy on it was doing flips. He happened to be wearing a helmet, but I don't think that would have helped me much.
I decided to bite the bullet today and just take my MOS Word Expert test. Becky scared me a little saying that she used ALL of the allotted time when she took it, but I did pretty well time-wise. When the dust settled, the only thing that matters is . . .
I went with the Freshman class to Lafayette (Luh-fay-it, in case you don't speak Tennessean) to do outreach. It's about 45 minutes east from Highland. We worked on the Macon County fairgrounds, which is right next to the National Guard Armory.
The damage was very obvious. Lots of houses didn't have roofs or were missing parts of the structure. The trees are snapped off and laying everywhere. I was surprised how many houses had tarps over holes and how much of the wood has been cleaned up though.
This Baptist church didn't really have much damage to the building, but it lost a lot of trees. We turned on the road in front of it to go toward the fairgrounds. Some staff from Madison were out driving around and saw us. They said they had gone to Jackson, TN where ACTS is set up, but weren't able to do much there. They said it was better that we didn't try to go there.
I worked with the Freshman guys mostly, sorting donated food and personal items. They really didn't have any system going, so we just did our best to group things together (soup, fruit, canned dinners, paper towels, shampoo, etc.).
The US, Tennessee (red), and Macon County (white) flags flying across from the armory. If you click on the picture to enlarge it, you can see that the flags are shredded from the high winds. There was a FEMA RV parked outside of the armory. They're just starting to move into the area, even though TEMA has been active since the storms.
Me with the Freshman girls. Only a couple of them worked with us on the food. The rest moved and sorted clothes in another building. They had an emergency animal shelter set up on the grounds too, and brought in about 15 new animals in the time we were there.
In other news, Ryan came to visit for the weekend. He brought me these beautiful roses that I had to go buy a vase for. Luckily, we found them for really cheap and both Jaclyn and I should be able to use the vases at our receptions!
So . . . those who know me well know that I'm a little accident-prone. Well, I had a run-in last night before reffing my volleyball game at rec.
The Gymnix have in their possession one of the coolest toys, in my opinion. It's called a Flybar, a.k.a. pogo stick on steroids. I love getting it out and jumping around the gym. It's quite the workout, since I'm too lazy to loosen some of the rubber bands that control the bounce. It can hold a person up to 250 lbs and the world record jump (height) on a pogo stick was achieved on a Flybar 1200. I think the record is around 7 feet high.
Anyway, I was jumping around making the kids who aren't on Gymnix jealous because they're not allowed to play with the gymnastics toys. I tried to jump off forward and straddle the Flybar on the way down, but didn't get my legs far enough apart and scraped my legs down the pedals (or whatever they're called), which are about 18" off the ground.
This is the result:
I'm just hoping to be able to play my volleyball game tonight!
The moral of the story is that I highly recommend you buying your own Flybar. They retail for around $350.
After going to sleep with sleet, waking up with nothing but a little ice on the cars, and walking to work, it was nice to see it start snowing around 7:30a.
The grass is really crunchy and has ice on it, which is now covered in snow.
The funny thing about this picture is that Brandon wasn't throwing the snowball at Rachel. It went in front of her and hit the person off to the right!As you all probably know already, a cold front came through Arkansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning. We watched the storms on radar and went through two tornado warning periods. The first one was over by about 10:15p. It went just south of us and then came up to the east where it hit that gas plant and caused a huge explosion.
These pictures are all just below "the ridge," about 4 miles from Highland. This is really the only damage I saw. If a tornado touched down here, it was only in a small area.
Looking north (toward Highland).
Used to be a barn, I think
You can see in this picture that the power line poles were pretty bent.
Crews spent a lot of time yesterday trying to repair the power lines. We didn't actually lose power until around 6:00p, when they shut it off to connect the lines.© Free Blogger Templates 'Photoblog II' by Ourblogtemplates.com 2008
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