A blizzard and Free Internet!

The blizzard.
Yesterday Greeley was put under a Winter Storm Warning. Based on past expereinces with winter in Greeley I was not convinced. So many times snow was forecasted and nothing came. So when I went to bed last night I did not expect to see anything when I woke up. Every time there has been snow in the forecast I always get really excited and find myself looking out the window whenever I wake up through out the night, (which by the way has been way too often lately, anyone else not sleeping well this month?) Well, I woke up a lot last night and there was never any snow. Then when I got up at 6:30 it was snowing and it hasn't stopped since! There is at least 8 inches of snow on the ground. Its so pretty! I love it!
So since it had just started snowing we figured we still had school today and got ready. As I was driving to school I heard on the radio that pretty much all school districts from South of Denver up were closed except our district. But it gets better it turns out that our district was the only district with school in all of Weld County which is the biggest county in Colorado, and ours! By the time I got to school it was really coming down. So I get ready for my classes and then the dreaded happens. My name is called over the intercom. I end up having to sub in a 4th grade class. So I get to class and get the day started. Then at 10:50 its announced that school will be closing early, at 1:30. Hooray! I was so glad that I did not have to stay there all day. It seemed really silly to me that we even had school because the winter warning was in effect from last night until 6:00 am Friday. I personally think we will have school tomorrow but would love to be wrong.
Once I got home from school I decided to take some pictures of the snow and go play in it. It is so deep around our apartment! I love it! I had on my boots and snow pants and was off. I do not remember the last time I really played in snow. It was great!

The door to our apartment.



Aprillee in the very deep snow.



Making my snow angel, the snow is really deep and it was really hard to push the snow around.



It was so so so fun!



The tree out front. The branches were really sagging a lot because of the weight of the snow.



Mark loves it when the snow stays on the trees like this. He didn't come out and play because he didn't have boots. I had a lot of fun though. Having boots and snow pants makes all the difference.

The other fun news is that our free wireless Internet is back!! Since we got home from school early today I called the library to see if they were open so I could pick up some movies to watch. The library was already closed because of the blizzard so I was wondering what I was going to do with all this free time. I decided I would just call our managers to check to see if the Free Internet was really gone. So I called and she informed me that it was still available here and it was working in her apartment so it should be working in mine. This was such great news. She said to check our computer and if it wasn't working then call her back and her husband would go check. So I did and I called back because it was not available and he pushed a button and now our free Internet is back! YES!! She said that if it stops working again to please call so they can fix it. I am so happy. Its silly that we didn't call earlier this month when it first went out. Mark stopped by the office once but they were at lunch. I guess we were just lazy. Too bad for us. I love having free Internet. Its so hard to not have Internet in your house when you are so used to it. Hopefully it sticks around.

No longer

One of our favorite things about our apartment when we moved in was that we got free wireless Internet. Well, much to our dismay we no longer have the free wireless Internet so I do not think I will be posting very much. We never got a phone line when we moved in because we knew we were getting cell phones and with the free wireless we just didn't see the need. Now, we could easily call a company and get something set up but we are not sure we want to because we are not entirely sure we will be here after this school year. Should a school offer Mark a job then great we are here and then we will get Internet I think...until then its the library for us! I do love libraries but I do not want to go every day. Unfortunately for us our schools Internet blocks blogger and facebook so don't expect to hear too much news from us unless we decide to revert back to the old days of just emailing or we suddenly find out that Mark got a job and we get Internet. That would be the ideal solution... Until then...

Who knew?

At the entrance to the zoo, admittance was free!

Mark and I did not have school today so we called up some friends to see if they wanted to go out and have some fun. They were available and they suggested that we go to the Swetsville Zoo out in Timnath, Colorado. Mark is not a big fan of zoo's so I didn't think he would go for it but it turns out that that Swetsville Zoo is actually a sculpture park! We had no idea that there was so much scrap metal in Northern Colorado or that so many people were interested in such sculptures. The man who set up the "zoo", Bill Swet used to be a farmer and in 1985 he began making the sculptures from car parts, farm machinery and scrap metal. There are over 160 exhibits. It all began as a hobby. He made a few creatures and set them out in the yard and people starting stopping to look at them. He built most of the creatures from 1985-1995. Here are some of our favorites.

Bill Swet added this castle facade to their house. What an understandng wife!

He made a huge bug out of an old slug-bug! Clever!

Gone Fishing!

Mark golfing!

Snoopy and Woodstock!

This one was dragonflies and bluebirds chasing mosquitoes

Ants marching to the cooler

This last one was labeled #101, "So long Saddam Hussein". He made it during the Gulf War and described it as the secret weaopn to take down Saddam. Too bad it didn't work or we can't use it now somewhere.

Our Oven

We have now lived happily in our apartment for 7 months. We really like our apartment and are happy we chose it. The one problem is our oven. When we first moved in we noticed that sometimes when you turned the oven onto bake it wouldn't turn out so you had to jiggle it a little. We didn't think too much of it because it still turned on just fine. Well this problem has grown bigger and bigger in the past 7 months. At first you would just have to twist it a few times, and push on it really hard. Then it started turning off while something was cooking so it always took forever for anything to finish and now we are no longer able to turn the oven on to bake at all. This is very very frustrating. Many things are not supposed to be broiled to cook them.

I know there is a glare but I set the knob on bake and the red light practically laughed at me! Meaning it would not turn on. I would try to have it a little past the word bake and the light would turn on but if I came back in a few minutes and it was cold inside the oven. What a pain!

I finally got around to calling the managers on Monday who are very nice and quick to respond to maintenance issues. (Our dishwasher also broke in December not quite as annoying as the oven and we got a brand new one in the end.) He came and looked at it and said the starter button was out so he would order a new one and if that didn't work he would order a new oven. We don't mean for them to have to buy new things but whoever moves into this apartment after us is going to have a nice set up! One day when we need to buy an oven I am totally going for the flat ones that are super easy to clean and for the ones that have the buttons on the top, not the knobs. I hope that our oven gets fixed soon. Maybe I should request that the managers let us come over and use their oven to cook. Last night we had a Chicken Pot pie and it was in the oven for almost 2 hours! We were so hungry and good luck baking anything!

Award Wining Cinnamon Rolls

All my life I have wanted to be able to make really good bread and cinnamon rolls. Well, tonight our ward had a chili/cinnamon roll cook off and my cinnamon rolls won!! I never win contests so this was really exciting and unexpected. There were three categories:

A. Gooiest
B. Biggest/fluffiest
C. Best Overall

My award winning cinnamon rolls won for B so not the most glamorous category but a win nonetheless. We won a 5 dollar gift certificate to Cold Stone and I now get to introduce my cinnamon rolls as "award winning." Oh and we get to enjoy eating all the extra, award winning cinnamon rolls. It's fun. I am like the most uncompetitive person so I wouldn't have been that upset if I hadn't won but it was very nice.