Snowmageddon 2.0

Doug and I headed over to Home Depot to get some paint for our dining room on Wednesday the 10th. After several days snowed inside with nothing to do, I finally decided on a color for the dining room. My friend Cassie recommended an application on Sherwin William's website. It helped tons! We bought two buckets of RED Behr paint with the primer already included.

The icicles at my parents house were huge! This isn't even the biggest one, it was the only 

one that I could reach with all of the snow on the back deck!

 We knew that the second part of the storm was coming, but we were hoping to make it back home in time. We went to go pick up the paint and when we left the store the roads were completely covered and slick. Luckily, my parents only live about a mile away from that Home Depot, so we went to their house instead of trying to brave the roads all the way home. It was nice to have a change of scenery after being snowed in at our house for several days with only each other for entertainment, but we were ready to get home and sleep in our own bed after a couple days.

We headed back home Friday morning and couldn't even make it into our garage with the additional accumulation and snow drifts. After about an hour of shoveling snow and a slight detour of making an igloo, we finally made it inside.

Our igloo! Doug and I are really just big kids!

Once we got inside, we got right to work painting the dining room. Red paint is REALLY hard to work with it, but I really liked the color and Doug said yes, so we went for it.

Here are some pictures of us painting...

  

The room after the first coat of paint.
 

Doug and I were both pretty skeptical after the first coat of red paint. It didn't really look that good and it was discouraging after all the work that we had put into it. We had bought plenty of paint, so we did a second coat... and third the next day to make sure that the walls would have a solid, even coverage.

Sherwin Williams projected results:

Actual Results:

Note: We didn't actually use the Sherwin Williams paint that I put on the wall 

in the Visualizer, but I picked one that looked close at Home Depot.

I like it. I think it totally transforms the room! I want to paint Doug's office across the entry hall a dark blue (I think) during my upcoming spring break. We'll see if he agrees to the color.

Snowmageddon 1.0

The snow storm the area received on February 5th resulted in Doug and I being off work for 7 days + 2 weekends for a total of 11 days! We didn't return to work/school until February 16th... just in time for my birthday! I was pretty ready to come back anyway. We stayed snowed in our house until February 9th when we decided to venture out for burgers at Red Robin. The roads were awful... in hindsight we shouldn't have been driving, but we really just needed to get out of the house.

About halfway there, Doug's car ran out of wiper fluid and we could barely see out of the windshield so we stopped by the new Wegmans to get wiper fluid and some other essentials.


You can barely see because the windshield was all gunked up, but the roads were BAD! This is a pretty major road that we're on in this picture.


This is Doug walking by a huge pile of snow in the parking lot. He's 6'2 and it towered over him.


We finally made it... the burgers were excellent as usual!

I heart SNOW!

So in case you haven't heard, we've gotten some snow here in Northern Virginia.



Doug shoveled the driveway this morning.



I helped... by modeling this huge hat!


Next, I decided that Darwin might want to try out the snow.


He thought about it...


...but decided against it.


Then I came inside and made some of these...


They're really quite easy when you have a just add water mix...


I'm already off school Monday and Tuesday this next week... now I just need to find something to keep myself busy.

* * * S * N * O * W * * *

Snow in Virginia makes a happy teacher! We got school off on Wednesday because of some snow and now Friday for an impending snow storm!



:)

Snowed in...

DOUG IS OFFICIALLY HOME! Yay!!!!

This last weekend, the east coast got quite the storm. Doug and I came home late Friday night from a Christmas party at my parents' ward and went to bed early. The next morning, we woke up with several inches of snow on the ground. That in itself would have been exciting because it was the first snow to really stick this season... But it CONTINUED to snow for the rest of the day, pretty heavily at times. I heard somewhere that we accumulated 30 inches of snow, but I personally did not measure it.

Winter Wonderland! The view when we opened the garage for the first time.

 
Saturday afternoon, they canceled school for Monday and Tuesday, so it meant that there would be no more school before winter break!! Good thing I gave my kiddos all of their homework in advance, just in case the storm was bad! ;) Church was canceled on Sunday, so we basically stayed in and hung out all day. We barely ran out of milk the day before, so everything I cooked over the weekend needed to use powdered milk. Yuck! (I grew up on the stuff, so it brought me back...) Luckily, we had plenty of TP and other essentials to get us through the big storm.

The best sledding hill in the neighborhood is right next to our house. We 

could hear kids screaming as they went down it the whole day.

I was hoping the Doug would get the day off on Monday, but when he called the hotline it was an optional vacation day or something like that which basically meant he didn't need to go in, but he would have to take a vacation day if he didn't. He wanted to use his vacation days for later, so we managed for get him out the door before the sun rises as usual. He drove regular the hour and a half to work and told me later that the roads weren't all that bad and traffic was light. A lot of people took the day off, so he was able to get more projects... which is a good thing because the newbies don't get to do interesting things very often.

Monday and Tuesday I was home alone, with not much to do. The roads are/were yuck and it takes like 3 tries to back out of the garage with the piles of snow on either side, so I opted to stay in. So far I've watched about 24 episodes of Gilmore Girls, organized all of the baby clothes that my sister gave me (just to get rid of mind you, I'm not announcing anything :P), cleaned the house, and then decided to wash the cats (never a good idea). So, basically I haven't left the house since Friday night and it is now Tuesday evening...

Darwin looking oh so thrilled after me giving him a bath and then blow drying him to make sure he didn't get too cold.

The kitties keeping me company while I organize the baby clothes.

An aerial shot of all of the Tupperware containers full of baby clothes that my sister has sent my way. I guess I'll be able to use it all one day (unless I have all boys or something...)