Just when you thought it was over...

This winter has been really warm. Few snow days and lots of days in the 30s and 40s. We even got a few 60-70 degree days in there. It was lovely. I even took a picture of the first green sprouts I saw. It made me excited to think that Spring was here!


But then out of nowhere, we got the biggest snowfall of the season when we least expected it. All the forecasts warned of flooding and heavy rains. Instead, we got some crazy snow--about 8-10 inches at least. The snow was heavy and sticky and made everything look like it was covered in cotton and icing. I should have played hooky to make a few snowmen!



Note how high the snow is on the left side of the picture. Before this snowfall, everything was brown without a speck of snow or ice in sight. Also note that Secret Agent Man is super awesome and scrapes, digs, shovels, and snow blows all the snow off my truck, out of our driveway, clears the backroads for us and our neighbor, along with the sidewalks in front of ours and our neighbor's house.


I don't know if Taylor is stalking Radar or squirrels.


Radar gets so tired trying to make his way through the snow...but he's so pretty!


I hope this is the last of winter but everyone tells me not to get my hopes up until June.

Sugar*mama

Icy Icicles!

It's been a pretty warm winter. We didn't get snowfall well into January this year. No white Christmas for us. We did experience our first ice storm, though. I didn't know what that meant and why that seemed to alarm people more than a snow storm but we soon found out.

When there's an ice storm, globs of ice form on anything and everything. It forms on trees branches, weighing them down and breaking them since it's so much heavier than snow. Worse, it forms on powerlines and brings those down too. This ice storm was that crazy, huge storm that covered two-thirds of the continental U.S. This ice storm left two inches of rock solid slabs of ice up the drive way and totally blanketed my truck. Secret Agent Man, had to pour copious amounts of salt on everything and wait for the sun to start melting the ice before he could break up it up and remove it. If you don't remove it as soon as you can, then it just remelts into larger and larger, thicker and thicker slabs which you can't walk on, much less drive on. I think it was 12noon or 1pm before the ice was melted enough to get into my truck to go to work. Weird stuff...

Here's some pretty pictures of some icicles that forms before the ice storm.




Here's Secret Agent Man walking to the porch to knock off all the icicles before the ice storm hit. If we left it up, the ice would have just accumulated and may have weighed down the gutters so much that it would have caused damage.


Here's some icicles that formed on some plants.


Kinda reminded me of Krypton.
Sugar*mama

Fat Tuesday

A year ago today, I was in Sweden. It was actually quite a fortuitous time to have been there because a storm had just passed through and covered the countryside in beautiful snow. Not much unlike here, our current home. However, the real reason it was great to have been in Sweden on Fat Tuesday, or I believe it's more commonly known as Shrove Tuesday there, is because I got to be introduced to their traditional Fat Tuesday fare--you know me and food!

So where New Orleanians have their King Cake and Hawaii Portuguese have their Malasadas, my hosts in Orebro were excited to share their Semla.


Semla is this wonderfully soft yeasty bun flecked with cardamom in the dough. It was a surprising and unusual flavor but mostly because it was difficult to identify at first bite and it was quite faint-not strong or overwhelming at all. Here's the best part:

They scoop out the middle, mix the crumbs with some milk and almond paste, put it back inside the bun, pipe some lovely fresh whipped cream and top it off with the 'cap' of the bun.

Semla is sometimes even served in a bowl of steaming milk. I purchased this second semla at the airport while waiting to board the plane and it was fabulous with a cup of strong, black, Swedish coffee (which by-the-way, is so well protected you cannot import, mail, or ship other coffee to Sweden without permission). I still dream about Semla a year later. In fact, I wanted this post to be about making Semla but my house is too cold to properly rise any yeast dough without extreme effort so you just get to dream with me.

Since we're on the topic of food and Sweden, I was only there for literally 30 hours. So I cannot review Sweden and all it's glory but it doesn't seem to have a strong cultural identity surrounding food. Their fare is rather simple (which I really do like) but there was nothing that really stuck out. This is what I had for dinner one night and this was as close as I could get to Swedish food:


I opted for chopped steak (essentially salisbury steak or hamburger steak) instead of Swedish meatballs since I can get that IKEA (hahahaa....) and the lingonberry sauce was quite good. They seem to like to drink beer with every meal, like any other European country, I suppose, and they serve boiled potatoes as their primary starch.

On the topic of food, some of you might get a kick out of this--look what I found in the middle of the town square:

Weight Watchers in Orebro!

I did get to see the town's castle and take a tour but I won't bore you with all the pictures. It did look lovely covered in snow though.
It was complete with a moat and everything!

The people were very friendly and many could speak enough English to explain to the dumb American girl how to find her hotel, and how much money she was holding, and what would be best to eat at the hotel bar. I would love to go back and visit during summer where the countryside is said to be the most stunning.

Hope you're having a happy Fat Tuesday in your corner of the world!
Sugar*mama

Winter X-games

Secret Agent Man has been waiting--literally--for the past 14 years (I think since 1996) for an el nino winter in California. The last el nino brought crazy snow fall in the local mountains all the way through April and he remembered going snowboarding and enjoying the sweetest rides that season.

So, of course, the ONE YEAR I move him AWAY from California is the ONE YEAR that el nino shows up. I'll never hear the end of this. Especially because despite all the snow here, there isn't a great snowboarding mountain around. So clearly, he's salty about missing out on all those sweet rides back in California, he's suffering from shingles (which for the most part have healed nicely), and he's quite literally freezing all the time. Yet, he tries to be a good sport about it.

He even pulled out his snowboard.
Um...hunny? Hun? Where are you going?


He's heading up the mountain...um...I mean, hill. This is our street before the snow plows could come through.


We've got some cool neighbors. That guy up on the right offered to push some snow and build a couple ramps for Secret Agent Man.


And here he comes!








Trust me he was all smiles...too bad he was going slower than an old lady with a peg leg. The pictures made him look good though, eh?

So, that was our big X-game moment. Here I leave you with a thought... Who says there's no waves in PA?






Happy surfing!
Sugar*mama

Snowmageddon-Doggie Edition

Snow might be novel for us and we probably enjoy it a little more than the average northerner might during this point in the winter but our enjoyment is NOTHING compared to what the dogs must be thinking. They are elated!

Here's Radar dying to play outside.


Here's Taylor trying to find her "spot." Note how high the snow is.


Taaayloooorr!!!


As you can imagine, manuvering through snow that deep is a tad bit more difficult for Radar. What this picture doesn't show is how high he has to jump to beable to propel forward; nor does it convey all the grunting sounds he's making.


But he's happy.


Meercats in PA?


Our dogs are terrible retrievers. So we were caught by surprise when Radar was barking and running around mad and Secret Agent Mad decided to throw a snowball at him (to get him to shut up) that he turned around and caught it! He was probably being a brat and showing up Secret Agent Man but none-the-less a new game was born!


Truth is that Taylor just thinks we're throwing food at her. She'll usually watch where the snowball falls and take a chomp out of it.


Radar can jump pretty high though!


Sometimes, they conk heads trying to catch the same snowball. It's very entertaining in a very sadistic way.


Here's a magic trick...how to make a dog disappear by the time I count to three...
One...

Two...

Three!


I wasn't fast enough with the camera but Taylor looked so concerned.

In the end, they even learned how to actually retrieve!


And here they are all pooped out, waiting at the door to go back inside. A tired dog is a good dog.


I'll leave you with this picture of our pretty boy snow fox.


Sweet times...
Sugar*mama

Snowmageddon-PA edition

We thought the big snow storm was back during Christmas. Since then it had been gray and brown with some rain and really frigid temperatures. Some of you may have heard about the huge storm to hit Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, MD areas that shut down the cities. That same storm hit here and dumped at least 18" of pristine, fluffy, dry, sandy, fine snow.
And now you know why Innuits have 40 words for snow.




The snow piled so high that the stairs on our front porch were buried and there's a good 6" of snow ON the porch.


The trees looked like it was dripping with frosting.


This should give you some perspective of how deep "we" had to dig. My truck's bumper is in the background.


The snow was almost too high for the snowblower.




Secret Agent Man has a lot of fun with the snowblower.


He's also a good neighbor. We have 24 hours to shovel our sidewalks after a snowfall. Secret Agent Man has so much fun with the snowblower he keeps going until he clears the block.


He still needed to shovel the stairs though.


Our village/town/borough does a great job with clearing the streets. This time the snow fell so quickly, they had a hard time keeping up.


Our neighbor thinks we're weird.


Here I am, trying to make a snow angel. The doggies wanted to help. You know, kids make this look so easy but my question is how the heck do you get up without ruining the angel??


While I'm writing this, we're bunkered down, waiting for the next snow storm to pass. Another 12" is expected to fall between tonight and tomorrow night.
Stay warm!
Sugar*mama