Snowmageddon

Yes, snowmageddon has officially arrived in Eagleville, PA. I'm not sure who coined the term, but they certainly succeeded in creating mass hysteria in the mid-Atlantic region this weekend. My theory is that the weather stations have a racket with the retail stores where they get a cut of any snow shovels, melting salts, or other snow-related purchases. To be fair, Philadelphia did receive over two feet of snow, setting a record for 2nd highest accumulation for any snow storm ever in the area. The western suburbs received much less, probably 12" to 18". Here are some photos of our apartment complex:






We are also in the midst of purchasing plane tickets for our travels this year. Already purchased are the tickets to Dallas in April. We will be visiting my family for a week. We're biding our time on tickets to Hawaii to see if the price comes down. We're also looking at tickets prices to SLC to get Melody home a week with her family. By the way, if you have not used farecast.com, you should. It searches all flights and predicts trends in pricing. It will even recommend purchasing or waiting and give you a percent confidence that it is correct.

I will be doing a weekend winter encampment with the scouts this weekend at Valley Forge National Park. This particular encampment is the longest running encampment in the United States and is the only encampment that takes place in a National Park. I think it will also be cool to remember George Washington and the other soldiers that made it their winter home so long ago. Needless to say, these are my justifications for (potentially) freezing this weekend in (potentially) a foot of snow. Good times.

Avoiding the Swine Flu

I came home from work on Monday to what seemed like an empty house. Instead, something I can only characterize as an undead Ben Franklin jumped out of the closet to greet me. Melo said that my reaction was half scream, half hysterical laughter. I guess this was Melo's way of encouraging me to get into the Halloween spirit!

We are definitely in full Halloween mode this time of year. This was always in contention with Christmas as my favorite holiday as a child. We had a great night decorating halloween cookies with some of our friends in the area last week. Here are some sample cookies:


As you can see Melody made some jack-o-lantern and manatee shaped cookies. We're planning on going to a pick-your-own-pumpkin pumpkin patch tomorrow. We'll see how they turn out.

Swine flu hit home this week as some of the members of our church congregation came down with it. On another note, Melody and I had a good time walking along the Perkiomen creek trail this afternoon. It's really incredible how vivid the trees become in the fall up here:



I'm settling into my new position as an 11 year old scout leader. I've really enjoyed it so far. My old scout shirt even fit! Apparently I still need to make some modifications to my old shirt for it to be suitable for a scout leader (i.e. removing some badges, changing epaulet color, etc.). I guess I could still pass as a Boy Scout however, because one of the scouts asked me if I had "received any of my eagle palms yet". I laughed and could only reply that I was still working on them. (For those not in the know, eagle palms are an award available only to scouts 18 years of age and younger).

We had a lot of fun baby-sitting for a couple we know recently. One of the children referred to Melody as "Jeremy's mommy" haha. This coming on the tail of the comment from the scout was just too much! At least Melody knows that I'm a full-grown adult... Right Melo?