Life at the Academy

I’ve been singing that song all day.   Today is the first day since Sunday that we have actually had some blue skies.  Gustav came to town on Monday and stayed for a few days.  I don’t think it rained much yesterday, but it was still a gloomy day.  The sky is a lovely shade of blue today, mixed in with a few lingering clouds.  It’s that beautiful blue that you can only fully appreciate after several days of rain and clouds.

And with Gustav, we also had the arrival of 6 evacuees from southern LA.  They are friends that I met over 10 years ago when I went to my first La Leche League meeting after Buster was born.  They’ve moved twice since then but we still see each other a couple of times a year.  So, the population of our house went from 4 to 10 for 3 days.  I don’t think our house is made for that many people.  Buster gave up his room with the bunkbeds for them.  He slept on one of the couches.  The hearthroom had wall to wall kids and they all loved it.  The kids played in the sprinkler one day and the rains of Gustav the next.  They watched Star Wars movies, played Wii and Playstation, played board games, had Playmobil spread throughout the living room, and generally wreaked havoc on my house.  Our cats were in shock.  School was not something that was going to happen for those few days.  The public schools were all closed anyway, so why shouldn’t we close?  When they left Wednesday, we were so exhausted.  I split up the basic cleaning the needed to be done and the kids and I had the house looking halfway presentable in an hour or so.  Then we lounged around contemplating taking a nap.  Two days later, and I’m still contemplating that.

Bye, bye Gustav.

And while I’m on that topic, I would love for someone to explain to me why some evacuees are so ungrateful.  Our public schools were out for 3 days so that school buses could be used to evacuate people from southern LA.  Churches and colleges cancelled their schedules to be able to give shelter to those who couldn’t find or afford hotel rooms.  Local firefighters are being sent to help.  Even though we weren’t directly affected by the hurricane except for a little wind and a few days of rain, our lives have been put on hold and many volunteers have been out helping and many more have made donations.  Apparently that isn’t enough.  All we keep hearing is complaints that there was no food on the busses, the shelters were dirty, there aren’t enough diapers/formula/new clothes/toys/etc, the food isn’t good enough, and on and on and on the complaints go.  I’m all for helping people in need.  I can’t tell you how much I donated to specific families and even helped get more items for people in need after other hurricanes.  I sent gift cards to a family in Iowa after the floods there (a disaster that I’m sure most people in LA didn’t even consider donating to).  I have compassion.  However when all you hear is them complaining that they aren’t in a 5 star hotel, it makes you want to stop helping.  They knew a hurricane was coming.  They could have been a bit more prepared and taken necessities with them when they evacuated.  And as for those filthy shelters – I’m sure they were clean when they arrived, so how did they get so filthy?  Okay, that’s the end of my rant.

I used the easy-to-use, free of charge, on-line forms with free e-filing that the state of LA has.  It’s what I used last year, and probably the year or two before that too.  I filed back at the very beginning of March and we were due a refund that was supposed to be direct deposited into our account.  I quickly received our federal refund, but the state one wasn’t showing up.  I checked the status on-line and it kept saying that it hadn’t been processed.  I finally thought to call them the other day and was informed that our return had been “randomly selected” for review.  The fact that we were sent a bill back in January for $20 plus $2 interest from the previous year’s taxes, makes me doubt that there was anything random about it.  The woman on the phone told me that it was past the 12 weeks that they had to review it, so she would send it to a supervisor to be processed.  The refund showed up in our account today with an extra $6.54 added to what I thought we would get.  Did the state actually *pay* us interest?  I don’t know why the amount would differ like that otherwise, especially since everything is rounded off to the nearst dollar.   Of course the state will be getting it all back plus some next month when I have to pay our next installment of estimated state taxes.

I guess it was a good thing that I had already planned on taking today off because it snowed! This is the second time it snowed this year, but the first time it wasn’t enough to stick. Today it stuck and we had over an inch. It was a beautiful thing. I think the kids went through 3 sets of clothes as each time they went out to play in it, they came back in soaking wet. We had a fun snowball fight in which I lost. There was a snow angel in our front yard for a little while, and there is a snowman accompanied by a snowcat, and a snow “stone” in the backyard. It was so much fun – it’s been a few years since we’ve had snow that we could play in down here. And since I discovered that Photobucket now lets you edit your photos in fun ways, you get to see the fun I had on their website.

Doodles was already to go out – in my coat, my boots, and my mittens.

The snow was coming down very heavily for a quite awhile.

Buster put two swords in his stone and managed to pull one out. Does that make him the king now?

Here they are with their snowman. The snow cat is partly squished under Buster’s feet.

The daffodils weren’t so happy with the snow.

So it’s Mardi Gras time here in LA. The kids are always excited to go to the parades and see how many trinkets and beads they can get. It’s really kind of an amazing site – all of these people, especially grownups, fighting for goofy little beads, little stuffed animals, noise makers, etc. The first year we were here, we were amazed at the behavior of people. I was a very large 7 months pregnant at that first parade and we took a friend who was also new to the area and 8 months pregnant with us. There was Boxman with 2 very pregnant women and a 2 year old – I’m sure we were quite the site. What totally shocked me at our first parade, besides the number of beads we ended up with, was that nobody seemed to care when they were plowing over pregnant women to get some beads. I was elbowed in the stomach, nearly knocked over a couple of times, and still they were more concerned with getting their precious beads. It was amazing that our friend and I didn’t go into labor after all of that.

This year, we had a secret weapon. Being kind of short, beads are often snagged midair before they can land in my waiting hands. Boxman has a friend from Chicago that recently moved to Texas. He talked him into coming to visit this past weekend and go to a parade with us. Oh, and this friend happens to be 6′8″ tall. He was grabbing beads out of the air left and right. People around him didn’t stand a chance of catching them. He then placed them around the kids’ necks. By the time the parade was over, Doodles had nearly 100 beads weighing down her neck. Buster had long before tired of their weight and had put most of his in a bag. We also left with a multitude of plastic cups, some candy, and a few small toys. It was a lot of fun.

Oh wait, I didn’t mention how we turned it into a whole math/physics unit – studying the trajectory of the beads as they were flung from the floats, estimating how many beads were on each float.  Or the psychology of it all – watching the people and their behavior when they caught lots of beads vs. fewer beads.   And history of  both the church and Louisiana, and France too while we are at it.  The possibilities go on and on.

Yep, believe it or not, it is snowing here. In Louisiana. It’s happened before but it is a big novelty. Of course the first time it snowed enough to stick, Boxman got out his snow shovel that made the move down here with us from Chicago. The neighbors were all snickering at him as he was shoveling the driveway and sidewalk. Heck, I was even snickering at him. By morning, it was all melted. The second time we had a significant snowfall, we literally rolled it all up into snowmen. It looked as though someone had vacuumed our lawn. The snowmen managed to survive for a few days before we decided to demolish them and get into a snowball fight with the remnants. We have even seen an occasional lone snowflake. Today, it was snowing pretty well. And then the sleet came. And then the rain. The snow did come back, as did the rain and sleet. There is nothing sticking to the ground, it’s just wet. This doesn’t stop the crazy people from driving like the roads are slick. They aren’t, although they probably will be as the sun has set. But we saw a couple of crashes earlier when the roads were no slicker than they are on a regular rainy day. I think people just panic. Me, I’m just enjoying watching the snow fall from the sky.

So we were out enjoying the Sportsmen’s Paradise that we live in this past weekend with some outdoor activities. It was in the 60’s again so it was a beautiful day to be outside. We were on our way home when we were crossing a dam. I had heard about people “sledding” down the hill of this dam on corrugated board boxes (notice that I did not use the incorrect term of cardboard), and in fact the rest of my family had participated in such redneck sledding. I had always managed to avoid it. I just couldn’t imagine it being worth the bother. However, here we were, crossing the dam with a bunch of large boxes in the back of the van that had never quite gotten dropped off at the recycling place. I felt compelled to stop and do it – we had been having such a great day and this seemed like a good spur of the moment type activity that memories are made of. Yep. It was.

I was laughing so hard sliding down, that I couldn’t catch my breath after going down with Doodles.

And then that climb back up the hill was a killer.

All three of them went down together….

Resulting in Boxman doing a backward roll off of the box, while Buster was airborn trying to catch up with them after he fell off.

And then they make Buster carry the box back up the hill.

It was a long way down that hill.

Buster was apparently going faster than his box was.

We used to refer to this as “assume the position” when Buster was potty training. But oops, this is Boxman…

I must admit that it was so much fun that we will probably be stopping off to do that more often. Go figure. Who needs snow – we came home warm and dry.

We went ice skating last weekend.  We went ice skating at an outdoor rink in Louisiana last weekend.  It was 70 degrees outside.

It started out fun, the ice wasn’t *that* bad.

They were all skating while I was clicking away on the camera.

Then, as you can see in the background of this picture, the ice started to melt a bit more. That isn’t the glassy finish of ice in the background, that’s a huge puddle.

Eventually, the made everyone clear the rink so they could “resurface the ice.”

This really meant “get as much water off of the ice as possible.” Have you ever seen someone squeegying the water off of an ice rink?

And the zamboni actually removed this much water, twice.

Ah, yes, another wonderful winter day in Louisiana.