Wow, these snowed in days sure do fly by.
We left the house this afternoon and went for a nice long walk, just to get out of the house. We stopped at Make Your Mark Coffeehouse in Point Breeze for a warm drink and a treat. It started snowing again around 1pm so our walk was enhanced by big clumpy snowflakes falling around us.
I’m not a coffee drinker but I love hot chocolate. Lately Joe’s been suggesting I try a mocha which I guess is a coffe/chocolate hybrid of sorts. I decided to give it a shot and ordered myself a dark mocha with whipped cream.
I loved this drink. I mean – look at it! It was delicious. Just enough chocolate taste to mask the coffee-ness.
Joe got a French press full of the house blend which I forgot to photograph (woops). I was too distracted by this mint brownie which we shared:
This was our third visit to this little coffee shop and we love it – we were happy to find that it was open despite the conditions outside.
After our drinks and brownie we walked a bit more around the surrounding neighborhoods and eventually came upon this guy which literally made me gasp. An absolutely HUGE snowman on someone’s front lawn!
He had clementines for eyes and his arms were two large wooden salad tongs (I think). A Christmas wreath sat upon his head. Joe’s almost 6 feet tall to give you a bit of scale. He was a nice sight to come upon as we trudged through long stretches of untouched sidewalks.
We got home around 4 pm and I literally don’t know what I’ve done since then. Watching tv, eating, and playing on the internet really makes the time fly…
Just a little while ago, around 8 pm, we got word that once again Joe does not have school tomorrow and I do not have work. Tomorrow will be our FIFTH day of being snowed in, people. Ugh. I said on Facebook that I’m starting to feel like Jack Torrance in The Shining and Pittsburgh is becoming The Overlook Hotel. That’s not far from the truth. I talked to my Mom on the phone tonight and she said our new activity for tomorrow should be surviving 5 days of being snowed in. We’ll see…
But before I worry about tomorrow let me briefly discuss tonight’s new activity.
Amateur palm reading
I found several websites that analyze all the different lines on our palms so we mulled ours over and here’s what we learned about each other:
Betsy
The Online Analysis:
Betsy has a “practical” shaped hand which means she is not a fantasy lover but very practical – she tends to work using a plan. Her heart line is long which is a sign of a true romantic who’s productive, nurturing and devoted. Her life line has a wide sweeping curve which denotes a sunny and highly optimistic outlook. She has a gap between her life and head line which means she is confident and a risk-taker. Her head line is also “creative” which means she has a wild imagination and her mind is always preoccupied.
My Take:
For the most part all of these assessments were pretty accurate, except for the very first one about the shape of my hand. But we weren’t really able to find out much about our shapes, or really determine what my actual “shape” was. As for all the info I got about the rest of my hand, well, they were all on target. I am very creative and I do have a wandering mind with quite an imagination. Who knew all this information was right in the palm of my hand? Har har.
Joe
The Online Analysis:
Joe has a “philosophical” shaped hand which means he has a tendency to over-analyze everything. His heart line runs straight across his hand which means he has a highly idealistic vision of love. His life line closely hugs his thumb which means it draws him to stay at home and be a homebody but it also means that he is lacking in energy and enthusiasm. He has a writer’s fork head line which means he is versatile, curious and inventive.
Joe’s Take:
I have always been a bit skeptical about the whole world or horoscopes, palm readings, etc. but tonight I was surprised by some of the accuracies that my palm reading produced. I do tend to over-analyze things as the overall shape of my hand suggests. I do tend to have a more idealistic version of love (maybe because I have been lucky enough in that department). Also, I do tend to be a homebody most of the time and I wasn’t surprised to find that I have a writer’s fork. So, maybe the results of these palm readings were “accurate” merely because of their broad and general nature, or maybe there is something more going on, but either way I had a nice time looking at Betsy’s little hands tonight trying to figure out what kind of lines she has.
If any of you readers are palm experts and would like to offer any further analysis you’re more than welcome. 
See you soon!
It’s with mixed feelings that I tell you all we’re now beginning our fourth day of being snowed in. Yes, work and school have been canceled again. Of course we’re happy to have the time off, but being stuck inside (for the most part) has created a bit of cabin fever.
Midday yesterday we trekked down to the grocery store through the mess of snow and refilled our fridge and pantry a bit. Later in the afternoon I made jello (success) and oatmeal raisin cookies (fail). I accidentally put baking powder in instead of baking soda. Big mistake, I blame cabin fever. They’re edible, for the most part, but the texture is all wrong and they’re rather hard.
To redeem myself I whipped up a delicious homemade pizza for dinner.
Topping include: scallions, red onion, pineapple, and bacon. We also used sauteed olive oil and garlic as the “sauce.”
And not a single piece of cheesecake yesterday!
Last night it was nearing 9pm and we hadn’t done our new activity yet. Joe wanted to learn a new card game but I thought we could get a little more creative than that. After a bit of brainstorming I had a light bulb idea – it was time for a “think spring” activity. With all this snow and more supposedly on the way, we need all the springy thoughts we can get. The project?
Egg Carton Crafts
You’re probably thinking…. what? Let me elaborate. Apparently there’s lot of interesting crafts you can do with leftover egg cartons, so last night we did two.
The first one was to make a planter out of egg cartons. As part of a wedding gift package we received these Kentucky Bluegrass Seeds that were just dying for the chance to sprout.
We cleared out a section of carton, trimmed it up, and set it on parchment paper in case it leaked.
Joe gingerly filled each cup 3/4 of the way full with potting soil.
Next we both put a good amount of seeds in each cup…
Joe covered them the rest of the way with soil and then watered them. Now they’re sitting on our windowsill begging for sunlight. I’ll keep you posted on their growth.
Our second craft was much more elaborate and colorful, an egg carton flower wreath. A pretty elementary craft, yes, but we were happy to do it. I pulled out my paints and scissors and we got to work.
The first step was to cut a whole bunch of egg carton cups into flower shapes. I worked on this…
As I did that Joe worked on cutting out a ring of foam board to be used as our wreath’s base.
When all the prep work was done it was time to paint. Joe painted all the centers of the flowers white while I picked out some colors.
I noticed Sonny had found a nice hiding spot near me while we worked. Can you find him?
(we usually hold on to boxes for a little while after we receive them because the cats enjoy them so darn much)
Soon we were pumping out an assembly line of brightly colored flowers. Painting and chatting and forgetting about the mounds of white stuff right out our window felt real nice.
When all the flowers were ready we began to attach them to our base. Joe taped his side of flowers down while I pasted them with a glue stick. Both strategies seemed to work quite well.
I decided to hang our wreath above the mantle so we could admire it as we conjur up thoughts of spring and real flowers.
We finished around 10:15 pm and were quite happy with our work.
As I sit here this morning I’m wondering what activity we can do today, another snow day. I’m sure I can think of something, I have enough time!
THINK SPRING!
First off – I wanted to mention that my little sister, Emily, is currently in the midst of a very long voyage from upstate NY to New Zealand where she’s going to be studying abroad for several months (she’s a junior at Cornell and this is an exchange program).
You can follow her on twitter, but if you feel you need to get acquainted with her before you make such a commitment please go here and watch some of the videos we made together. She’ll also be blogging soon which I’ll keep you posted about. She gets to enjoy 2 summers this year. I’m going to try to stifle my jealousy. Here we are at my wedding, she was my Maid of Honor.
Also, are you following us on twitter? Just checking.
We’re just beginning day 3 of being completely snowed in. All of Joe’s classes are canceled today and my work is shut down. Our car is still stuck in its place and our street and the surrounding ones have not been touched.
Yesterday we didn’t leave the house except for Joe’s brief trek out to see if any of the roads were drivable. Sadly they were not and we had to miss Joe’s brother’s Super Bowl party out in the suburbs. And to top it all off I’ve accumulated some nice pressure in my head and nasal area. Lots of sneezing and dripping and icky things.
Our Super Bowl celebration was pretty pathetic. I made pancakes for myself and Joe had leftover red beans & rice from three days ago. We ended up doing our activity at half time and went with something very easy… we didn’t really have many options!
Race to finish a Word Search
But not just any word search – a word search full of some of the most frequently used words on our blog. I generated a tag cloud from our blog and picked 24 of the most used words. They must go with the most recent words because our cloud was really loving CHEESECAKE.
If you have a blog I recommend making a tag cloud, they’re pretty interesting to look at.
I used another website to generate our word searches and printed out two copies.
We each had a red pen, Joe did a countdown, and we were off….
Now, Joe’s usually really good at this type of thing (puzzles) and always wins. I’m happy to report that this was not the case last night. I finished while he still had at least 5 words left…
I gloated, just a little bit.
And yep, I was in my pajamas for the entire day yesterday hence the glasses, whispy hair and bathrobe. That’s what happens when you’re snowed in!
Since our fridge is nearly bare we might have to trudge through the snow down to our Giant Eagle which isn’t too far away. I’m actually a bit sick of cheesecake at this point and our only other options are condiments or cereal without milk. Ugh. And we have to come up with a creative new activity for today as well… Hmm…
We’ll see you soon!
If you saw our post from earlier today you know that we’ve been dealing with 2+ feet of snow here in Pittsburgh. I’ll get to our new activity in a bit but first let me take you through our snow day.
Around 1pm we decided to venture out to see what the rest of our neighborhood looked like, and to find a place for lunch. It was so BRIGHT from all the snow and the streets were filled with people – not cars. Everyone was being very friendly and we ended up helping a couple people dig out their cars. Although they weren’t supposed to be driving!
We walked down Negley Ave. (a usually very busy street) and this was our view to the left:
And to the right. Joe enjoyed spinning and sliding around in the street.
We made it to Walnut St., a nice shopping street that’s also usually very busy. Again lots of people – very few cars. We saw people cross country skiing, snow shoeing, and even wearing full sized skis. It was all a little bit weird.
A view of a side street off of Walnut:
Just a couple places were open but we were in the mood for pizza so we turned up S. Aiken at the end of Walnut and went to the S. Aiken Bar & Grille which was pretty packed with patrons.
We ordered a large white pizza with tomatoes, artichokes, spinach and feta cheesem and Joe ordered a “Carnivore’s Calzone” for good measure (this food was to be our lunch and dinner).
It was all delicious and perfect for a snowy afternoon. We enjoyed watching all the different people walk by out the window – lots of people with sleds and snowboards and lots of happy dogs.
We walked home with a pizza box full of leftovers which got us lots of ooos and ahhhs from people on the street.
We dropped the food off at home and continued on walking to my work where I had to make a couple of cancellation phone calls due to the weather. The grounds of my building hadn’t been touched so we had to trudge through knee high snow and shovel our way to the front door.
This is also where our new activity comes in. After I finished what I had to do for work we decided to start on our project.
Build a Snowman
Yes, we’ve never done this together before, surprisingly. We brought all the necessary accessories and got to work on our 4 tiered man. I didn’t take any pictures of the process but here’s the final product. Our snowman complete with pipe, Davey Crockett hat, charcoal eyes & buttons, and Pittsburgh pride:
He turned out really well and it was a nice way to work up a bit of a sweat. The day could not have been more beautiful with the sun shining down on the snow.
And one more shot which I love, Joe with his shovel on our walk home:
When we got home we dug out our car as best we could, but we still don’t have any intentions of actually driving it for a while. The streets are a mess and we’re perfectly content to stay inside and watch movies, eat leftover pizza & cheesecake and just RELAX!
Off to do some more of that….
We woke up as usual this morning, around 7:15 am. Normally we’d be heading down to the Strip to do our weekly shopping but what we saw out the windows made us gasp – to say the least.There was no way we were going anywhere.
In our combined almost six years in Pittsburgh, neither of us has ever seen this much snow here. We’re from upstate New York, though, so this feels just like home.
I begged Joe to go outside with me and take pictures since we were up already. It was a hard sell but I finally convinced him to do it. We bundled up and out we went…
It was so beautiful and barely touched! Not a car or soul in sight.
Joe demonstrates the difference of depth between the street and around the cars:
Yep, we’re in up to our knees folks!
I did bring out the video camera, too, so you can see our car and our excited little faces.
Look for the snow plow up on 5th Ave. near the middle of the video.
See you soon!
