You Capture: Outside

Occasionally native Californians tell me that they're jealous of the weather we have in Illinois. I'd call them crazy, but growing up in California I just thought snow was the coolest thing ever. It was so exciting when your parents took you to "the snow." And when I was a kid, I heard that in places where it snowed, you could wake up in the morning and find out that they had actually canceled school.

Now that I live in a snowy climate, there are things I like about snow (namely, it's pretty), but there are also a lot of weather-related hassles that I didn't know about before we moved here. There's the shoveling. And the gigantic, time-consuming drag it is to locate and put on approximately 17 pieces of snow gear on yourself and your kid before going out. And because of the shoveling and the gear, you often just decide you're better off staying home. This is a phenomenon I call snowflaking, as in, "I was gonna go to the mall, but I totally snowflaked."

Snowflaking is responsible for a lot of poor mental health. And when you've been in your house all day and you feel like the walls are caving in, and your kid is so stir-crazy he's actually throwing handfuls of flour on the carpet (true story), it's time to get out. Good thing this week's You Capture challenge at I Should be Folding Laundry was "Outside." So I could grab my flour-covered kid and be all, "We have to go outside. Mommy needs pictures for a blog post."

The first thing that happened was that we slid on our asses on some sidewalk ice. So I decided to put down some salt. (Note to Californians: You buy big bags of salt because it makes the ice melt, and then you aren't The Jerk Who Tripped the Mailman.) The only receptacle I could find for the salt was this dump truck we used for sand at the beach. I feel like it's our own personal version of the city salt trucks that drive down the streets, which I call the Salt Spitters.

Nathan with our personal salt spitter.

And then some more pictures:

Do you like my snow boots? They're totally utilitarian, but with the cute feminine touch of a ribbon. And no, those aren't the Pajama Jeans peeking out from underneath.


My kid chucks a snowball at me.


Speaking of snowballs, Nathan demonstrates our cool snowball maker. Only suckers roll their own snowballs by hand.

Look how beautiful and uniform they are!


The residents of this house were smart enough to relocate to their southern house for the winter.

This poor snowman. Not only was he decapitated and dismembered, but then a dog peed on his lifeless body.

And speaking of winter misfortune ... glove loss! Every single year I lose several gloves, so that by February I'm wearing two different gloves (if I'm lucky enough to have a right and a left glove by then). But this poor person lost both gloves, and look how pretty they are:

I almost picked them up and took them home.

And then, not ten feet away, another double-glove loss:

The story of the black gloves has a happy ending, however, as it appeared that the gloves and their owner were reunited by the time I came back to that same spot.