Baby, It's Cold Outside (For Arizona, Anyway)

I'll try to crank out a few quick blog posts before our road trip in a couple of days (yay!). Overall, it has been a quiet few weeks...and by "quiet," I mean "nothing out of the ordinary to report." School, work, preschool, piano lessons, Lorelai's softball practices, church stuff...most of these things are par for the course for us. But we have been keeping our heads above water and are enjoying the relative "lull" in our lives post-holiday. Nathan and I have even been able to get caught up on some of our TV watching!

One thing is definitely worth mentioning, though...it has been a pretty cold few weeks around here! I realize many of my readers will start snickering at this, saying, "COLD? You live in Arizona...you don't know what real cold is!" Maybe you're right. But it's my blog, not yours, so your snide remarks will never be heard, while my lovely shots of the frozen water fountain at the neighborhood clubhouse will be what people remember:

It's such a rare thing to see actual frozen water here in Arizona that I had to snap a picture or two...then quickly hurry inside the warm gym for my workout!

The cold weather keeps coming and going; we've had several nights below freezing, followed by several days of lovely 70-degree-plus weather, then back to the cold (in fact, that's the forecast for this week as well!). In fact, about a month ago, we had about three straight nights of hard freeze (20 degrees or below)...such a thing is nearly unheard of in this part of the country. Luckily, our water pipes didn't freeze, as they did in our rental home two years ago during the last hard freeze of this type.

Some days we've been able to walk to the playground in T-shirts; then, days later, we're back to huddling in front of the fireplace dreaming of hot soup for dinner. It's been a "moody" type of winter; and it's also the time of year I'm most grateful for the warm fireplace in our home!

In fact, the highlight of the chilly weather came last Monday, February 11, 2013. A day that will long live in my memory, since it's only about the third time in my nearly ten years here that actual snow fell on our house!

Of course, since this was Arizona, the snow didn't linger long; it left a fine film on top of everything for maybe an hour, then all slowly melted as the night came on. Oh well...it was still wonderful to see flakes in the air again...I really miss that sometimes! It was nice of Mother Nature to let the snow fall during the day, when we could see and enjoy it!

The girls were very impressed by the snow as well. However, after just a couple of minutes outside, they had the same general reaction as they did atop Mount Lemmon earlier this year: "Hey, this snow stuff is cold! And wet! Me no likey!!" They preferred to watch it fall from the inside after that. Luckily, they had their AWESOME cardboard spaceship to play in!

Ahh, the things parents will buy when it's cold outside and the kids are bored. The girls had lots of fun coloring the ship, and it will hopefully provide many opportunities for play-acting in the weeks to come.

As for myself, I have enjoyed the cold weather very much. Between growing up in Colorado, attending college in Utah, and serving a mission in Russia, I love cold weather and everything it entails...layers of warm clothing, chilly nights in front of a fire, hot cocoa, tromping through snow. The advantage when it snows in Arizona? I don't have to shovel the driveway the next morning!

Well, President's Day has now come and gone, so if the past is any example, we should start thawing out soon and beginning our spring. However, it is supposed to get wet and rainy again in just a day or two...just in time for us to escape Arizona for a short California vacation! We'll see if we can catch a bit of sun on the beach and not worry about frozen pipes.