Roll Call, 2/12

**inmom** · 02-12-2019, 10:51 AM

Anyone doing anything for Valentine's Day with their kiddos? One local homeschool group does a party and valentine exchange, but the rest do not. If the weather is nice , DH will actually take me out for lunch, in the middle of a work day!!

Homeschool math and physics classes are progressing along for the second semester, Had to cancel a class today due to the weather (see below), but we'll still fit them all in.

Just another typical winter weather day here in NW Indiana. Not polar vortex, not a bunch of snow, just a nice, heavy glazing of ice.
Ice 1.JPG Ice 2.JPG Ice 3.JPG

**RTB** · 02-12-2019, 06:24 PM

We are starting with the wonky spring weather that is typical this time of year here - cloudy, sunny, warm, then snowing. The breezes are staring and the wind will hit in a couple of weeks.

Life carries on around here. School is school.

I've been poking around my garden and I think my artichokes may have died in the extended cold spell we had this winter. I have my fingers crossed they will peak through when it warms a bit. Bulb flowers and the rhubarb are starting the break the surface. We have a little pruning on one of the apple trees and we need to trellis a new grape vine (that is finally large enough). I've decided against a larger garden this year. I have garden burnout. I'll do lettuce and peas in the spring. Then in summer I'm only going to plant tomatoes, okra, cucumbers, and calendula flowers (for making skin cream). I still have all the perennials - but they seem to require less attention in the heat than the annuals do.

Your pictures are lovely Inmom! When does winter in where you live?

**NZ_Mama** · 02-12-2019, 09:00 PM

For us Valentines day is Little Hearts Day or Congenital Heart Defects Awareness Day for DD5 who was born with a heart defect and all the other heart kids and grown up heart kids out there with an invisible disability.

We are having a warm spell of weather at the moment so have been going swimming a lot.

DD10 and I are rather tired as we spent a few hours this morning volunteering at the local therapy horse riding place.

I am also better on the perennials than the annuals RTB. Any tips for grape vine training or pruning? I have two that are about three years old now. One I have some how managed to fluke getting it trained into a fan shape and it fruits well and seems to tolerate my random pruning of it. The other I have not got trained well yet as I really have no idea what I am doing, and it does not fruit well. Presumably I am pruning off the wrong wood or at the wrong time.

**MapleHillAcademy** · 02-13-2019, 02:57 AM

Inmom, you can keep all that ice glaze. I'm rather enjoying our mild winter weather but I will be cussing it when the bugs all come out by the thousands in late spring into summer. I actually heard frogs a couple of evenings last week and then we had a hard freeze again Friday, Saturday and Sunday. It's been raining since Monday but I haven't heard any more frogs...

Last Thursday was tons of fun for us weather-wise. We had a high for the day in the mid to upper 70s then once the sun went down, the temperatures dropped like a rock. I went into town to get some things from the store around 9pm. The temperature was hovering around 25 already when I got to the store. When I got out of the store around 9:30pm, I could get the key into the door lock but it would not turn no matter what I tried. Called dh to come save me (had to go in the store to use the phone because I didn't bring mine because it was just suppose to be a quick trip to town and back) and he couldn't get the key to turn either. The temp was about 19 by this point but the wind chill was around single digits. We ended up leaving it in the parking lot over night, came back the next day when the temperatures were back up above freezing and the lock worked like nothing had ever been wrong with it... I was not amused, lol. Then Saturday morning, the exact same thing happened with the lock on our back door. It was dry all last week and we could get the keys in the locks but they would not turn. I don't know what the heck was going on but it didn't improve my opinion of winter weather at all. lol

Still working on getting new vinyl plank flooring installed in the living room. I'm doing it myself so it's just a little work here and there until I get it all done. I've been working on it for about a week and a half now I think and I've gotten just over half the room done right now. I already love it, so much easier to keep clean than the carpet we ripped out and all of us are breathing easier with the carpet gone. The dogs keep giving me the evil eye though, they aren't too fond of the new slick floor lol!

We should find out more next week about dh and his brain shunt when we go back to the university hospital doctors. He's tolerating the medications for reducing CSF pressure but just barely and they aren't really helping all that much. It is definitely not any kind of long term solution so we are really hoping they will agree to move forward with scheduling another therapeutic spinal tap and then scheduling all the pre-op appointments for having the brain shunt placed.

**inmom** · 02-13-2019, 09:27 AM

Your pictures are lovely Inmom! When does winter in where you live?

Apparently winter never ends here! Actually, mid-March is when spring typically starts weather-wise, but we've had snow as late as mid-April, with leaves on the trees and tulips and daffodils already blooming. It's visually odd to see flowers with snow on them.

When I got out of the store around 9:30pm, I could get the key into the door lock but it would not turn no matter what I tried. Called dh to come save me (had to go in the store to use the phone because I didn't bring mine because it was just suppose to be a quick trip to town and back) and he couldn't get the key to turn either. The temp was about 19 by this point but the wind chill was around single digits. We ended up leaving it in the parking lot over night, came back the next day when the temperatures were back up above freezing and the lock worked like nothing had ever been wrong with it... I was not amused, lol. Then Saturday morning, the exact same thing happened with the lock on our back door. It was dry all last week and we could get the keys in the locks but they would not turn. I don't know what the heck was going on but it didn't improve my opinion of winter weather at all. lol

Last week I had the same issue. I could not get the driver's side door of our truck to open at all, let alone the lock to work. Luckily, I could get in the passenger side. However, since I was also shopping and the truck is not an extended cab at all, I was sliding back and forth across the seat, trying to avoid squishing the bread I had purchased at the store.

We should find out more next week about dh and his brain shunt when we go back to the university hospital doctors. He's tolerating the medications for reducing CSF pressure but just barely and they aren't really helping all that much. It is definitely not any kind of long term solution so we are really hoping they will agree to move forward with scheduling another therapeutic spinal tap and then scheduling all the pre-op appointments for having the brain shunt placed.

I hope your dh can find solutions soon. Keep us updated on any progress.

For us Valentines day is Little Hearts Day or Congenital Heart Defects Awareness Day for DD5 who was born with a heart defect and all the other heart kids and grown up heart kids out there with an invisible disability

That sounds absolutely terrific. What a great thing to make others aware about!

**inmom** · 02-13-2019, 10:12 AM

Here is a picture from this morning, with the sun coming up and shining through the trees which still have a layer of ice on them from yesterday. It's hard to see in the photo, but there is almost a prismatic range of colors in the ice--small little rainbows.

At least one positive of winter is that it CAN be stunningly beautiful some days.

Ice 4.JPG

**alexsmom** · 02-13-2019, 11:07 AM

Gorgeous pictures Inmom!

Wow I didnt know locks could freeze! There ought to be anti-freeze lube, or lock heaters, or something!

We are pretty low key about Valentines day here - I felt some guilty twinges as DS6’s edutainment show was talking about “Love Day”, and I realised I had no plans either for the boys or DH. Thursdays are my hectic, exhausting day, and I have “Sausage inna bun” as the dinner scheduled. (Crescent rolls wrapped around a savory sausage... 15 minutes in the oven is about all I can manage by the end of the day.)

Good luck MHA with the flooring! I admire you for taking it on yourself. Im eager to finish pulling out our carpet and replacing it with probably vinyl planks, too. (Two years ago, we pulled out the downstairs carpet and put in tile... I love that its not carpet now, but it makes me antsy to get rid of the rest of the carpet.)
And I hope your hubby gets some relief and a treatment plan that helps long-term!

**inmom** · 02-13-2019, 01:23 PM

Originally Posted by alexsmom

Wow I didnt know locks could freeze! There ought to be anti-freeze lube, or lock heaters, or something!

There are lock de-icers/lubricants. I'm just too cheap to buy it, given I'd rarely use it. (And I'm too lazy to go get it....)

**RTB** · 02-13-2019, 02:35 PM

Originally Posted by NZ_Mama

I am also better on the perennials than the annuals RTB. Any tips for grape vine training or pruning? I have two that are about three years old now. One I have some how managed to fluke getting it trained into a fan shape and it fruits well and seems to tolerate my random pruning of it. The other I have not got trained well yet as I really have no idea what I am doing, and it does not fruit well. Presumably I am pruning off the wrong wood or at the wrong time.

My vines are also young, so I was planning on letting the be this year - sorry no advice

Oh I forgot about the Valentine's question. Not a big deal around her. I picked up some heart shaped cookies at Trader Joe's for the kids, and they are planning to take cupcakes to swim team.

**MapleHillAcademy** · 02-14-2019, 12:27 AM

Yeah, there was no actual ice on the doors or the locks either time, just something about the freezing temps or maybe some trapped water inside, and we could get the keys in but it felt like the tumblers in the lock had been stripped and the key would not turn but the next day, once it warmed up, it was fine and worked just fine again. Never honestly had that happen before and we've lived in some pretty cold places.

When we lived in Kansas, I was out doing last minute Christmas shopping on Christmas Eve morning one year. I got to the store and it cold and rainy but no ice yet. When I came back out of the store, less than an hour later, the entire driver's side of my car was covered in a quarter inch of ice from freezing rain. I had to go around to the passenger side, open that door and then force the driver door open from the inside. By noon, it was snowing and we had 2 feet of snow by Christmas morning, our first white Christmas any of us had ever experienced. By the time it stopped snowing 5 days later, we had over 5 feet of snow total. That was our first winter in Kansas. Have I mentioned I'm originally from the desert Southwest and I'm not overly fond of snow and ice?

Thanks everyone for the well wishes for dh. We are really hoping that by the end of this year, he will be getting some consistent relief and able to do more of the things he wants to do. Right now, he is so limited by pain that it's really hard on him physically and emotionally.

AM, I have wanted to rip all the carpet out of this house, oh since we moved in 8 years ago. LOL! We got it out of all the bedrooms except the master and when I finish the living room, it will just be the master bedroom and the master closet that have carpet (and it will come out too when some of our other projects get finished). We do a lot of work on the house ourselves but between dh's medical problems and my own medical problems, progress is just really, really, REALLY slow sometimes. We have been working on renovating the kitchen for almost 2 years now and it is finally getting close to done. We just found out recently that some of my medical issues are due to hereditary thyroid disease so hopefully once we get my medication for that squared away and balanced, I will be able to get more done and faster.