Mickle and Fem's Winter Adventure

If you do something two years in a row, that automatically makes it a tradition, right?  So, it's a tradition for me to hate school. It's tradition to re-read my favorite book every January. Tradition to not go skydiving on the first of every month. You get the idea.

So basically I'm declaring it a tradition for Mickle to visit me around New Year's every year. And traditional for us to have a great time. This year, she flew in on New Year's Eve.  Remember that snowstorm on my birthday? And how we had about 18 inches of snow?  Mickle and I wasted no time getting in to the winter spirit.  And what's more spirited than an igloo!?

Champagne.  Champagne is more spirited than an igloo.

My parents' backyard has plenty of space; the weather gave us plenty of snow; and we bought plenty of champagne, so naturally, we started construction on an igloo. Pretty simple in theory: you pack snow into recycling bins and spiral them upward. However, because we are total igloo rookies, we only started angling the blocks after the 4th row. The result was a nearly 10-feet tall and somewhat triangular structure, which we decided looked like a snow teepee.

The first layer

The seventh layer

Igloo spaceship and space martian dog

COMPLETE!  And yes, we have a mailbox.

It took about 30 hours total between Mickle, myself, and my mom, to finish the igloo.  Have you ever been inside one?  It's so much fun!  Warm-ish, and unbelievably quiet. When we were bored of hanging out in there by ourselves, we called Katie and Steve and told them that we custom-designed our ceilings for Steve's 6'8" frame, and therefore they must drive in from Buffalo immediately.  They did!

Mickle, me, and Katie. . . reunited!

Mickle and I also did lots of xc skiing, snowshoeing, and CrossFit. It snowed almost every day!

On a snowshoe adventure

I wish I had more action shots of the whole week, but I just upgraded from a 3-year-old flip phone to an iphone, and I'm treating it like a porcelain doll, or a bag of raw eggs, or both.  However, the iphone is eventually going to work out great for anyone who still cares about reading my blog, because I'll have more pictures to share!  I'm such a techno bot now. Did you know I even have a twitter?  I don't really understand how to retweet or reply or anything, so I just write my own posts. (Plus I'm somewhat wary of twitter because I'm afraid of birds.) But the occasional tweet is practically a tradition so I guess I have to keep doing it.