Prepared for Snow and Ice

Last night the weatherman called for snow and ice. By the time we went to sleep, my car was covered with snow tonight. Momoko thought it would be warm enough today to melt everything. Nope. So when I woke up, we got the family up for ice duty.

The big driveway was covered with a sheet of ice. It was thicker on the new part of the driveway. Kit Kat and Little Kat spread rock salt all over the huge driveway. I was prepared. I had around 6 big bags of rock salt. After about 30 minutes, the salt had done some work on the ice. It turned a different color. The rock salt penetrated through to weaken it.

Little Kat broke out a shovel and started scraping off the ice. I joined him with our big shovel. A new neighbor came over begging to borrow a snow shovel. We are prepared. I think we have 6 or more snow shovels. We loaned him two. Kit Kat and Momoko joined Little Kat and I in scraping up all the ice. Now the driveway looks like a rain had come by. No evidence of snow or ice.

Little Kat and I waited for our neighbor to finish his work. Then he and his son came over to return our shovels. His son was very shy and hid behind his dad. After we came in, Kit Kat cooked us all fried egg sandwiches. Very efficient.

Car Trouble

Momoko and Little Kat were late coming home from school yesterday. I played some computer games. Kit Kat was reading on her new Kindle. There was a furious knock at the door. That seemed strange. It was our neighbor from across the street. Her car would not start.

I told her I had some jumper cables. So I drove my car up her driveway. There was a problem. Her car was parked front side in her garage. I pulled my car up as close behind her car as possible. My extra long jumper cables reached. However the jump did not work. Her problem must not have been a bad battery.

This was troubling to my neighbor since she just brought the car in to the dealer for a lot of work. She said she spent over $1000 on the maintenance. I advised her to call the dealer and have them tow the car back to the dealership and fix the darn thing. She already paid her money. She did say that her car was an old one. But come on. It is a Volvo.

Laptop Surprise

Previously I had wrote about how Little Kat made some money by helping our neighbor cut down some trees. I was proud of Little Kat that night. He played tennis with the rest of the family. Directly afterwards he went to work with our neighbor.

Well just last night, this neighbor came by and said she knew Little Kat was saving up for a laptop. She said she had an extra laptop, and handed it to me. She said me and Little Kat could check it out. I asked her how much she would sell it to Little Kat for. She told me that whatever Little Kat had saved up would be enough.

I checked out this laptop. It has Windows Vista on it, as was Microsoft Office. There was a 230G hard drive and 4G RAM. Dang it. This laptop is better than mine. The only problem is that Little Kat has trouble saving money. He had spent a lot of his laptop fund already. Momoko and I need to decide whether to allow the neighbor to essentially give a laptop to Little Kat.

Gangster at the Door

I spent the whole afternoon digging up dandelion roots. At the end, I tried some Weed-B-Gone on the rest of the lawn. I figured I would give it a try, and compare the result to the side of the lawn where I dug up the roots.

Then I hear some gangster rap music. I figure it is somebody just driving by. But the music persists. The driver stops at my next door neighbor's house. The rap music continues so I take a look. It is coming from a white minivan. Hello? A minivan does not give you any street credit.

Out pops a tall dude. He pulls out a stack of pizza boxes. I figure he must have the wrong address. There is nobody home. I know because I have been here all afternoon weeding, and the neighbors are still at work. Then the tall dude walks towards me. What?

I ask the dude whether he is coming to our house. He replies Yup. Aha. I instruct him to ring the front doorbell. Momoko was tired. And she did not go grocery shopping. So the only thing available for dinner is pizza delivery. As the tall dude leaves, I notice some huge black objects stuffed in his ear lobes. No. They are not in his ear holes. They appear to be over sized earrings that are actually in his ear lobe. Nice. That makes up for driving mommy's minivan.

Driving with Kit Kat

Today I had to return to work. It was not fair because Momoko and the kids are still on Spring Break vacation. I hurried home after work to take Kit Kat driving.

We decided to take a longer drive today. On the first ride out, Kit Kat successfully hugged the right hand curb. This was good. A neighbor came around the corner and was driving in the middle of the street. Kit Kat's driving made it easy to avoid an accident.

On the second pass around the block, I told Kit Kat to signal a right hand turn out of the local school parking lot. She hit the windshield wiper lever instead of the turning signal one. The windshield wiper phased her and she lost control for a bit. We ended up going over the curb but there was no damage done.

Overall Kit Kat is gaining better control over the car. She says she is more confident. Her acceleration and braking is more smooth. I noticed she also goes above the speed limit on the open roads a bit. Got to watch that. I am hoping Kit Kat gets enough skills so that we can drive all the way to her school in the morning (which is a long 30 minute drive away).