our version of black friday

Today, at school I was teaching a lesson on "proverbs". No, not the book of the Bible but rather an assortment of phrases like, "His bark is worse than his bite" or "Don't count your chickens before they've hatched", etc. They were having a little bit of trouble understanding the phrase "The early bird gets the worm", so I used the concept of Black Friday in America as an illustration (crazed shoppers being the 'bird', a free ipod bring the 'worm'). It immediately clicked with them and they were horrified by the notion of black Friday in the process. I told them, "Yeah, it's horrible. I hate it. Sometimes people die because they get trampled in front of Wal-Mart at 4 in the morning and. Plus, one time, my dad made my sister and I get up at 5 am in the freezing cold and stand in line for an hour outside of Ace Hardware just to buy an assortment of tools which we didn't even know the names of. He sent my mom to another hardware store, too. Where was he?.....I don't remember. Oh yeah, he was hunting". They don't know what Ace Hardware is and they probably didn't care about my anecdote but realizing that I didn't have to experience that this year made me happy.

Yes, my black Friday was spent in much better ways this year. Kayla was still at my place. I slept 10 full hours each night that she was here (4 nights total). That is a lot of sleep and it was much needed. Since Kayla woke up earlier than me on this particular day, she walked into the kitchen by herself. As there is a huge window in my kitchen, she thought to herself before opening the door, "I really hope it snowed in the middle of the night". When she opened the door, this is what she saw:

Yes, it snowed in the middle of the night.

When she heard me stirring around in my room, she called out from the kitchen, "You're gonna like what you see when you look out the window!". I looked out my bedroom window immediately and got so excited, only to hear Kayla say, "No! You were supposed to look out the kitchen window so I could see your reaction!". Whoops. I got dressed pretty quickly and we walked to the grocery store (which has a mini cafe inside) so Kayla could get some coffee. (Since I don't drink coffee, my visitors have to do things like walk 10+ minutes to the store each morning in order to feel awake).

The following photos were taken on the way to and on the way home from the grocery store.

And let me just say that it hasn't stopped snowing since then...and that was a week ago.