Timekeepers!

May 2:
On Monday we drove through a crazy thunderstorm,

including a deluge of HAIL....

to get to the US Naval Observatory in downtown DC.  

The observatory is home to a very large (and somewhat old) telescope which is famous for its role in discovering the moons around Mars.   Because of the aforementioned storm, we didn't actually get to see anything  through the telescope, but we did learn a lot about it.   For instance, it was built in the 1873 and was the largest refractive telescope in the world when it was first built.

Later on the tour guide took us  to the USNO library, which in addition to holding one of the world's most premier collections of books on astronomy and physics, was also a very architecturally beautiful building.

It was difficult to capture the scope of this amazing round room in my camera lens, but suffice it to say, this room ended up one of our favorite parts of the tour. 

The last part of the tour was about what the USNO is most famous for (besides being the site of the home of the Vice President of the United States).....keeping time!  It was fascinating to learn about how time keeping has changed over the years.  As they've moved from tracking the  movements of the earth, to pendulums in vacuums,  and finally to cesium based atomic clocks, time keeping accuracy has gone from 1/10 of a second per day of variation to 1/1000 of a 1/1,000,000,000,000 of a second per day.    

It ended up being a late night, but, heck, since time is apparently  a human invented concept anyway,  we could all sleep more soundly knowing that the timekeeping ability of our clocks are in good hands! 

************************

Random Quotes of the Day: 

"If you have one clock, you think you know what time it is, but can never be sure.  

If you have two clocks, you don't know which one is correct.

So you need at least three clocks, so you can find a mean average time."   

Fact:   The US Naval Observatory has hundreds of atomic clocks.   

"NASA determines how long a second officially is.  USNO determines how many seconds have elapsed.   Therefore NASA is like a stopwatch and USNO is a clock."  

************************

Minnesotan + Coloradan

What happens when a Minnesotan and a Coloradan get married?

Besides a bunch of teasing about whose homeland is colder (I definitely win that argument), you also get a couple of weather skeptics who are constantly poking fun at the hype that the weather receives here in the DC area.   When forecasters started predicting that a big snowstorm may be coming that could leave us with 5-10 inches of snow,  it was hard not to get excited first, then leery about whether this one would be yet another dud storm where the temps would hover just above freezing and bring us nothing but another rainstorm.

They seemed to have a little more confidence in this storm than usual, but after a whole lot of false alarms over the past few years, we have gotten used to only expecting the lower end of storm totals, if anything at all.

So when we woke up this  morning to an entire foot of snow (even more than was predicted), there was elation in our house….from the kids that there was no school yet again and from Glen and I that we could all have a day at home together.  Although we haven't even had a full week of school since Christmas break, Glen always still has to work, so it ruins the fun a bit.

With the roads looking like this though, there was no way Glen was going anywhere today!    Yay!  

Here's a little glimpse of how we've spent this first real deal snow day we've had in about four years….

******************

Adam decided he really wanted a bird to land in his hands, so he's spent over an hour motionless out on the deck with birdseed in his hands.   He has had a few little wrens and a dark-eyed junco  land near him and this little one who looked like he was trying to make friends, but thus far none have ventured into his hands.   We always enjoy how many more birds we get at our feeders after a snowstorm!

Cami, as always, had to find something cute she could wear outside in the snow….

the hand-me-down boots from Adam, however, were an unexpected addition to her fashionable ensemble.  

Ellie spent 10 minutes explaining to me exactly how little girls in the "olden days" stayed warm out in the snow (with lots of layers underneath their dresses), so I shouldn't have been too surprised when she put on her fanciest dress and refused to wear snowpants as she play outside.  In the end, she came back in soaking wet from head-to-toe and hopefully convinced that modern winter wear is  a good thing to embrace.

Glen says that there's no way that he can miss another day of work tomorrow, so eventually we assembled the shoveling brigade to dig our driveway out before the rain made everything too soggy and even heavier to lift…

It took nearly three hours, even with the whole family out helping….

but eventually we got our driveway all cleared out...

and cleared a path to the mailbox.  

Based on neighbors' reports about road conditions, I still don't think we're going anywhere anytime today, but now at least we can drink our hot chocolate  in peace knowing we did our part to clear out!

Now it's time to sled, sit on the back deck some more, blog, bake cupcakes, and do laundry...

************************

When it Rains....

...the kids at our house take off their shoes and run in it!

You probably thought I was going to finish with "....it pours,"  but while it's true that it has been pouring a lot lately (literally and figuratively), it's also true that my kids have no aversion to getting soaking wet with their clothes on.  In fact, I daresay they think it's way more fun to play in the rain than taking a boring old shower.

Usually it's too dark, or too cold, or too thundery to take advantage of torrents of rain, but tonight it was perfect and they were not about to let a sorry old rainstorm dampen their enthusiasm to play outside.

It started off with just Emma...

and backward shirted Ellie...

both of whom were soaked to the bone in no time. 

But it wasn't too long before their giggles and happy screams drew Cami and Adam out the door to pull weeds, of which we have plenty. 

 

Of course they weren't pulling weeds to make our flowerbed look nicer, but they were merely using the weeds and clumps of wet dirt sticking to their roots as a base for their dam.  Yes my kids like dams as much as I do....except whenever I tried to call it a dam, they told me I had a potty mouth and insisted that it was actually a "darn."  (serves me right for showing them that comic a few weeks ago)

In the process of their dam darn building, they came across a little tiny cricket...

which Adam decided was too cute not to pick up and admire...

and then place as his first passenger in his tin foil boat...

Adam ensured that it was a five-star gutter cruise for his little cricket buddy.

At least that is until the boat crashed into a weed growing out of the neighbor's curb that had created a boat killing little vortex and mini dam.

Randomly the kids didn't call me a potty mouth when I called that one a (damn) dam.


******************

Hurricane Sandy through my Camera Lens

Here in the DC area, Hurricane Sandy didn't amount to much. We had a few branches down in our yard, but mostly it was just a really wet and windy 24-hours and  two days off of school for the kids.  Surprisingly, given the history of our neighborhood, we never even lost power other  than for a random flicker here or there.  The 20-minute derecho in June was far more damaging (to us and to the whole area) than the 20+ hour hurricane ended up being. 

In the height of the storm I stepped out and tried to capture a little glimpse of the wind and the rain with my camera. 

It was hard. 

Not only were the trees not swaying enough to capture any motion in a photograph, but the rain wasn't quite heavy enough (at the times when I was out) to even get the cool raindrop effect in the picture.  Here are a few of my photos of the storm:  

Our little flag "whipping" in the wind and a little tagalong in the bottom right corner. 

Every time I opened the front door to get a closer look at the storm, the kids would beg for me to let them take a jaunt through the rain.  It was a cold rain, so they never stayed outside for long, but they did make several trips out there, all with the excited notion that afterward they would be able to brag about being outside in a hurricane. 

This ended up being my favorite picture of the storm....the wet autumn leaves covering our deck.  It was rather illustrative of what the storm was for us-- a few branches down, but mostly just the leaves getting blown off the trees a week or two earlier than they otherwise would have. 

Then on Thursday, Glen and I drove to Great Falls to see what the Potomac River looked like after all that rain.  Although far from hitting  previous high water marks, it was insane to see how different the river looked compared to normal.  The water was a mass of roiling mud and debris and gave us a small glimpse of how powerful water can be.   If the river was this high and this powerful here in the DC area where the storm barely grazed us, I can't even imagine the impact of that much more water (and more severe wind) that those people a few hundred miles north of us are dealing with.

The incalculable damage they are facing is beyond my comprehension and we pray for those that were so severely affected by this horrible storm, especially as I read articles like this that predict further suffering as the weather turns colder and many shortages remain.   

Although not in a position to donate money right now, we were hoping for a way that our family could help somehow.  I was happy (and not at all surprised) to learn that the church in our area is doing an "emergency gifts of the heart" to gather coats, warm clothing, and gift cards to send to the victims who are facing a very cold week in front of them.  If you have anything to donate, the collection is on Monday from 4-9 at our church (2719 Hunter Mill Road) or you can drop items by our house.  We'll even come pick them up from you if that's more convenient.

Warm clothing for those suffering so much may seem like a small thing, but I truly believe that it is by small and simple things that great things happen. 

**************************

“At the end of life we will not be judged by how many diplomas we have received, how much money we have made, how many great things we have done.
We will be judged by "I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat, I was naked and you clothed me. I was homeless, and you took me in.”        ―Mother Teresa

Battening Down the Hatches

After fifteen plus years in the East, you'd think we'd be used to the weather hype that always seems to precede storms  that come anywhere within 100 miles of us.  Yet again and again, we get sucked into the drama and the hyperbolic television meteorologists who spout such catch-phrases as "storm-of-the-century" and "super storm" with careless abandon.  Occasionally there is a noteworthy storm worth writing home about (September 2003's Hurricane Isabel, June 2012's derecho, and the winter of 2010 being the main three), but most storms here end up being a tad on the anti-climatic side. 

Now we have Hurricane Sandy heading our way, threatening to pummel our area as well as most of the mid-Atlantic and Northeast US.  The meteorologists are talking it up BIG time and while we still hope this is another one of those over-hyped storms, we worry that this one might be the real deal.  After all it's not every day that a category 1 hurricane is heading straight for some of the most populated cities in America....DC, NYC, Philadelphia.      Our whole area is under both flash flood and high wind warnings  and they've already cancelled school for Monday and Tuesday.   We live in a neighborhood full of beautiful mature trees and we rarely have a storm of note without some trees and power lines down somewhere in our neighborhood, so we fully expect to be without power for a few days once this really gets going. 

Here is our checklist of what we did to get ready, figuring that doomsday or not, some things are reasonable and helpful to do anyway: 
 
Stock up on water--✓
Buy more batteries--✓
Find the flashlights--✓
Fill up the gas tanks--✓
Bring in the trashcans and lawn furniture--✓
Make room in the garage for one of the cars--✓
Park the other car in the driveway away from neighbor's tree--✓
Plan a no-electricity-required menu--✓
Charge cell phones and laptops--✓Blog--✓
Finish up the ice cream--✓
Pray and look forward to sunnier days ahead--✓

I took this picture on the road up to the Griffiths Observatory in LosAngeles, CA

"...there is no fog so dense, no night so dark, no gale so strong, no mariner so lost but what the lighthouse of the Lord can rescue. It beckons through the storms of life. It calls, “This way to safety. This way to home.” It sends forth signals of light easily seen and never failing. "  Thomas S. Monson

*************************

And on the same note, here's my facebook status from today: 
My mother-in-law, Sandy, is one of the sweetest, gentlest, most thoughtful people I know, which makes the impending storm that shares a name with her all the more ironic. We are battening down the hatches and praying that the storm proves to be a little more Grandma Sandy-like than the "Frankenstorm" that the meteorologists are predicting.

**************************

Feeling it in His Scar

Most people tune into the Weather Channel with its high tech radars and myriad of meteorologists to get their weather news ...

We have something much more reliable in our house....

Spencer's scar from his central line. 

Although he likes to tell people it's his bullet wound, in actuality the scar has quite a knack for predicting the arrival of big storms. 

About a day before a storm rolls through, his scar starts aching.  It doesn't ache any other time and since we don't have a working tv in the house, often his aching scar is our first hint that bad weather is coming.  I don't know if it has something to do with the barometric pressure or some other weather factor that changes before a storm, but just like someone who says that they can feel it in their bones....

Spencer feels it in his scar. 

And for the record...yes, his scar was totally aching last night and this morning. 

Night at the Theater Turns into a Crazy Adventure

There comes a time in everyone's life when they have to admit that no one will ever really "get" them like the people in their own family.  Take Crains and the The Pirates of Penzance.  Dad introduced it to us in the early 80's, a fact which originally annoyed us greatly, but as time has gone on it's become the fodder for many an inside joke in the Crain family.  Most of us can quote from it liberally and I still get some of the songs from it stuck in my head on a regular basis.  I've tried to get Glen in on it too, but apparently when you don't grow up being shown the movie on a weekly basis and listen to the soundtrack almost daily, you just don't get the hilarity of it all. 

So when my sister recently announced that Pirates of Penzance was coming to Wolftrap (a large outdoor theater near our home), I got excited to properly introduce the show to my children.  Although the temps were over 100 degrees and it was going to keep them up way past their bed times, I eagerly doled out the cash for the cheap lawn seats, hosed them down with bugspray, and patiently waited for them to magically get the Crain humor and start laughing hysterically. 

As expected, my sisters and I danced  our way through the performance,  sang along to the songs, and in general thoroughly enjoyed our little blast from the past.  Turns out though that, like Glen, the kids didn't quite get the humor and spent most of the performance rather wiggly, needing to go the bathroom every 1/2 hour,  and begging for food.  Thank goodness for the policeman's antics toward the end that got them giggling, so the night wasn't a total wash for them....at least until the last song of the night when a huge clap of thunder shook us back into reality. 

That was when the real adventure started. 

We had about 1/2 mile walk back to our car, so we, along with the thousands of other spectators,  hurriedly gathered our belongings and started walking quickly back to our car amidst near constant lightning and thunder. 

Then the wind started howling with gusts that we later learned were in the 60-80 mph range.  The flags lining the walkway were almost bent over double, our skin was being pelted with dirt and debris, and that was when my kids (three of them plus my nephew, Andrew) started screaming hysterically.  

At this point my sister and I each took charge of two kids  and started running. 

You probably won't be surprised to find out that I have no pictures of this part of the night, but if you want to properly envision it just imagine two flipflop wearing ladies, arms full of blankets and lawn chairs, trying to keep track of 4 hysterical children, running as fast as possible through 60 mph winds, all the  while trying to dodge thousands of other people trying just as desperately to get to their cars.   

When we finally entered the pedestrian tunnel to cross the road, we were grateful for a short reprieve from the wind.  Alas the reprieve was short, because we'd barely taken two steps into the tunnel when the power went out, causing my already stricken children to panic even more at being plunged into sudden darkness.   The moment the power went out was also when it started dumping rain. 

At this point we were close to the car, so we only hesitated for a second before exiting the relative sereneness of the tunnel into the deluge.  By the time we got to our car we were out of breath, soaked to the bone, and a tad bit traumatized (especially Ellie). 

As we shiveringly snaked our way out of the parking lot and onto the road back home, we realized that our adventure was not over yet. 

Every block or so we came across downed trees or large branches.  Miraculously none of them completely blocked the road, but it was very slow moving and felt like an obstacle course by the time we turned onto the more major thoroughfare to get home. 

By this time it was after 11:00pm and we were all more than eager to get back to the comforts of home.  Too bad a large tree had fallen across the entrance to our neighborhood. 

We turned around and tried to go home another way only to find an even larger tree fallen on some downed wires across the second entrance to our neighborhood.    (Note:  24-hours later and this very large tree is still blocking the road).

So we had one more option left to get home before resigning ourselves to a night in the car and we were not hopeful since historically this last route has proven to be the most likely place in our neighborhood for fallen trees.   Thank goodness this last way was clear and we were finally able to get back to our dark home. 

After tracking down a few flashlights, we said a prayer of gratitude for our safe arrival home, got the kids out of their wet clothes, and finally put the kids to bed at about midnight with threats that if they awoke before 9:00 that they would be in huge trouble.   Too bad all the clocks in the house need power and they had no idea what time it was when they popped out of bed before 8:00. 

In the morning, it was very eye opening to see, in daylight, the craziness we had driven through.   Most of these branches had fallen on and around our car, but by the time we all got up, our very nice next-door neighbors had already cleared the branches off the street and our car, which thankfully did not have a scratch on it.   With the help of our neighbors, our front yard is now mostly clear and the branches in the backyard are just going to have to wait until Glen gets home! 

With another 100 degree day, the lack of air conditioning proved to be the most painful after-effect of the storm.  I had to spend a lot of the day running errands, but by this afternoon, when I was home for the day, our house was getting pretty darn hot.   And so were our tempers. 

Finally after scraping together what proved to be a very yummy dinner cooked on the grill (BLT sandwiches, fruit salad, and coleslaw), we decided that it was time to cool off the old fashioned way...

In the hose! 

They invited over their friends...

and built gutter dams...  (Don't worry Mom, I would never in a million years think of calling them "dam gutters")

and laughed far more than they did during the performance of Pirates...

and even laid down for a little suntanning on the road in the 8:30pm sun....

NOTE:  We are still without power and based on the complete lack of effort they've made in removing the large downed tree and wires that are around the corner from us, we're guessing that it will still be a while before it is restored.  We were geared up for a toasty night camping in our basement tonight, but were thrilled when, late this evening, we discovered that the house where my sister is staying while they are visiting from California, regained power this afternoon.  So after the hose escapades, we traipsed over here, put the kids to bed, and now I am relishing in the beauty of air conditioning and my first glimpse at the internet in over 30 hours. 

And of course I had to blog about it all.