February 4
Here we are in February already, and the shortest of months (though a leap year this year) has the most going on with Ellen’s birthday as well as many of her friends.
I picked up my new rear wheel for my commuter on the first day of this month and was able to ride to work on the second day. So far so good. I’ll ride by the shop on Monday night to have them just re-check the tension on the spokes.
Today was a busy day. Phoebe is an alternate for her school’s chess club tournament team as I think I mentioned last month, and the tournament was this morning. She wanted to support her team even though her chances of playing were low, so we went to the location at 8:30am ready to play in case. Though everyone was able to make it, she stayed to play some practice games with her teammates and listen to the judges provide information about how the day was going to go so she’ll be ready when she gets her chance. Meanwhile, across town, Ellen and Jada went grocery shopping and prepared for Ellen’s Junior Bach performance where she had to play a memorized Baroque piece. This year she chose Intrada by Christoph Graupner. Phoebe and I were able to leave her chess tournament in time to make it downtown to Ellen’s performance at Sherman Clay pianos in NW Portland. The showroom was full of Steinway & Sons baby grand pianos costing about twice as much as we paid for either of our cars. The 6 foot grands they performed their pieces on were $87000. (Yes. That’s what we said too!) She did great, and she sounded wonderful with the acoustics in the recital room. In the afternoon, I napped while Jada made soup for tomorrow night. Then I did laundry, did some light garage cleanup, re-adjusted the brakes on my commuter, and played guitar on the front bench outside while the girls played (and fought) in the yard. Ellen is learning how to type again, so she’s been using a program at the computer. In the evening, we went out to dinner with our friends, Becky and Paul, to a Moroccan restaurant in Wilsonville called Dar Essalaam. It was so good. We split a bunch of options, and we tore through a dessert bastilla in about 2 minutes. Paul tried to film the dessert massacre with his phone, but it was almost gone by then in a flurry of spoons.
February 5
We were up early for a beautiful day of skiing. This was the first Sunday Snowblasters for February for the girls. Also, since it was Super Bowl Sunday, we wanted to make sure we were up early in case everyone else was just going to ski the morning and then bail at lunch. We needn’t have worried. We got to park near the front. There weren’t any clouds in the sky when we arrived and only high, light clouds all day. Best of all, there was very little wind! A perfect day on the mountain. I slipped on my way to the lodge just enough to cause my back to go into spasm. Luckily the ski position takes a lot of the pressure off, so I was ok as long as I wasn’t trying to stand upright. We dropped the girls off and checked in before we went in search of fresh tracks. We didn’t have to go far since we took the Stadium lift up and over to Shooting Star where we were one of the first sets of tracks on the Shooting Star Ridge corduroy. We hit 7 runs before 10:30am and another 6 after lunch. We checked in with the girls during lunch. Phoebe wasn’t happy since she seemed to be stuck in a lower group than she wanted, but Ellen seemed to be in a good group. They had gotten to go up on Vista and Mount Hood Express. I’m hoping Phoebe will get leveled out appropriately next week. With dry roads (53 degrees down in the valley as our mid-February spring weather continues) and light traffic, we were home shortly after 5pm for dinner.
February 8
Jada was sick on Monday and stayed home from work. Luckily it passed in a day and didn’t linger. I rode my bike to work even though my back still hurt hoping it’d help it loosen up. It didn’t. Tuesday Jada was able to wrangle me a massage appointment after work in hopes of helping me recover from my back problem. While I was gone, Jada talked to the Oregonian columnist, Steve Duin. It turns out that Ellen won the “Student” division of the reading contest that she participated in last year to see how many pages she could read. She finished with more than 89,000 pages. The criterion for her category was number of pages read, but she also had to do a write up talking about her reading. Here’s the link to the online article: http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/steve_duin/index.ssf/2012/02/10_years_of_the_annual_reading.html. Jada was co-chair of her school’s math night, so she went to that while I picked up the girls from gymnastics. They were disappointed that they couldn’t attend the math night
February 9
The librarian at the school gave Ellen a party today. As the article was read aloud, the students distributed confetti, which they proceeded to throw at Ellen and each other. The party included music, hula hoops, limbo, some kids hung out in the computer lab or played Bananagrams. There was also a battle with small, foam balls. One of the girls made a “confetti angel” on the carpet. The festivities were loud and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, Ellen most of all! Later her Battle of the Books team had a match, which they won, although there were 5 questions that both teams were unable to answer. Afterschool was the usual piano lessons, piano practice, and finishing any homework due on Friday. Jada was so caught up in the activity that she forgot about her massage and had to cancel it when she realized that she didn’t have enough time to make it downtown. She was disappointed, but rescheduled for next week.
February 17
Man, I missed a few days there. We skied last Sunday again, and again, we had a gorgeous day. There was very little wind and a whole lot of sun. We found out that Ellen’s new class has gotten nicknames from their instructor. Ellen’s is “Ninja” because she’s always dressed in black from head to toe. Phoebe was just upset because she hasn’t gotten to use poles yet this time after getting to use them last time. Valentine’s day was this past week as well. Phoebe spent a long time working on her valentine box, but it didn’t quite work out. She didn’t just do a standard box or bag, she made hers in the shape of a horse however the cards didn’t fit, and she hadn’t figured out how to make the head stay up on her own. She never asked for any help either. I didn’t even get a picture of it. Ellen’s birthday was on Thursday. Jada brought her lunch from Fresh Grill, and she had her kindergartners stop by during lunch in the cafeteria sing to her. Jada didn’t have time to make the dinner Ellen requested (although she did buy non-local asparagus for the occasion and rice pudding for dessert.) Ellen will have her Chicken Marsala on Monday. After dinner she opened her presents. She liked them all, but then she looked disappointed when she didn’t see the envelope with the recap Bapa makes of the whole year. I told her it was probably in the bottom of the box still, and sure enough that’s where it was. Ellen’s birthday party was on Friday afternoon at the Conestoga Rec Center pool. She had 8 of her friends join her at the pool for free swim. Then then we had pizza afterwards. A few of the girls joined us to watch a movie at our house – Dolphin Tale. Two of the girls stayed the night and Dave heard them whispering at various times of the night so we don’t think they slept much!
February 18
Ellen lost another tooth. That’s 3 in the last month! So far she’s lost one in the lift line up at the mountain, one in her classroom, and one while she was at a birthday party at one of those massive pizza fun palaces.
February 19
We went skiing today and somehow landed another perfect day. However, this time we had good snow to go along with it. We got to ski in the morning with our friend Laurie. We even got to ride the first lift with Phoebe. Then we skied with Ellen in the afternoon. We weren’t even looking for them today, but we were able to find them by chance. The drive home was bad. Traffic was backed up all the way to high 35 from Government Camp. I turned us around and went back the way we came and on to Hood River. At the very least, we probably didn’t lose any time. I just didn’t want to sit in that traffic. We didn’t get to eat dinner until 6pm as it was, but it all worked out.
February 20
Presidents’ Day was busy. We went out to breakfast for the first time in a few weeks and then dropped the girls off at our friend’s house while we had our traditional tax appointment. I realized that I hadn’t gotten my 1099 form from my management account yet so I have to fax that in when it comes. Hopefully it’ll be this week. We did ok. We’re taxed more than any of the Republican nominees for President, but so are just about everyone. We picked up the girls and had them get their music practice done while I did laundry. Ellen had another birthday party in the afternoon at Cinetopia, a new cinema near us where Ellen is seeing that whale movie which I can’t remember the name of at the moment (Big Miracle.) Our new mattress arrived while Ellen was out. Phoebe wanted to help, so she stood in our room and chatted with the guys delivering the mattresses.
February 24
I got to go into the girls’ school to do the National Engineer and Technicians Month presentations. I did 5 classes (3 first grade, and 1 each Kindy and 5th) that Jada helped schedule to work for everyone. For 3rd grade, I did my natural filters discussion. It went ok. Phoebe’s was the last class of the day, and there was an earthquake/firedrill during it. It worked out. Kindergarten was the normal Lego towers. Fifth grade was a completely new lesson that tied in with their math work. I had them create a container of any size and shape out of an 8.5x11 sheet of paper. Then they had to compute the surface area and volume of the shape. They had been doing geometry in their math class, so it was good that it reinforced and introduced some concepts including Pi which they hadn’t seen yet. The goal was to create the largest volume with smallest surface area. We sort of ran out of time in the end, but I have some ideas to try to make it flow a little better for Phoebe’s class. Before my presentation, I got to sit in on Ellen’s math class. Her teacher has those kids engaged the entire time. I made the comparison to the math class from the John Cusak classic, “Better off Dead.” Then we went out to Benihana for dinner. Ellen had wanted to go there recently, but we had been told some time ago that they didn’t accept reservations for parties smaller than 8. However, when she had asked the last time we had shown up hoping for a table, they said we could make reservations for smaller parties. Brad was our cook. We were the first customers of the night since it just opened at 5pm, so he was a little off his game almost hitting me with both an egg and a lemon slice. I suggested that maybe they need like an on deck cooking station in the back to get warmed up before coming out.
February 27
Ellen and Phoebe had their last week of Snow Blasters at Mount Hood Meadows on Sunday. On Saturday, it stormed at the mountain, and they got 12 inches of snow. Sunday was much better. It was lightly snowing all day with sun breaks and some moderate wind at the tops of the lifts. Plus it was 11 degrees at the top of Mount Hood Express and only 20 degrees at the base. Jada decided she didn’t want to go out in that kind of cold, so I went out on my own all morning. I had fun in the freshly fallen snow. I even challenged myself to a black diamond called Mercury off of Shooting Star Ridge where I stayed all morning. The snow was soft and deep. The angle didn’t look too bad from the lift, but when you’re on the hill, it’s a different story. I made it down only falling once, but it was towards the hill instead of away from it meaning I didn’t slide all the way down on my back. I also fell over in the line which was nice. The only bad part about it was I wasn’t always coming back to the lodge, so I wasn’t able to check on Jada until I came in at 11am for lunch. She had wanted to come out, but I hadn’t gotten her message. We went out after lunch together though. She was having trouble with her boots so we only did a couple of runs before the end of the day. The girls both got their report cards, and they’re both going to be blue/black when they do it next time.
February 29 : Leap Day!
What an odd day Leap Day had for us. It was snowing all morning with big fluffy flakes, but nothing stuck to the ground which was great because we don’t want to have any snow days. The girls continue to get ready for a recital coming up this weekend. It’s an un-adjudicated recital called the Sacred Recital. Ellen is playing “Amazing Grace”, and Ellen and Phoebe are playing “Morning has Broken” as a duet. We’re ending the month quite worn out between skiing, Ellen’s battle of the books team, Phoebe’s guitar, Ellen’s violin, Phoebe’s chess, both of the girls gymnastics, piano, and school. Then soccer will be starting up some time next month for Ellen. Yet somehow we continue to manage.
Journal Entry: February 29, 2012