Dickieville January-March 2011

Snow, tennis, snow, stuff, snow, snow.  Enough said?  Probably not.  Let's get the snow part out of the way right now.  Massachusetts had a lot of snow.  Not as in "I bought that lot of Cambell's Hungry Man Stew from BJ's WholeSale Club and we've been eating nothing else for a week."  More like "I was mentioning to Noah that we've been having a lot of rain but he was too busy herding animals onto his ark to pay attention." 

Top left, our mailbox buried under a ridiculous amount of snow. To the right, our mailbox a few days later with the letter to God in it:

Dear God,

ENOUGH ALREADY!

With enormous respect,
Dave


to the left ... with ice damns like these, the Hoover damn seems a little second-rate

Below left, a DBI (Damn Big Icicle) and, to the right, me in front of the mound of snow from shoveling the driveway.  By hand.  with a teaspoon.
 
But enough about snow.  Let's talk about happier topics, like the BEST BIRTHDAY CAKE EVER.  For Dave' Birthday, Kate, enlisting the aid of Brie (home on winter break) and her visiting RPI friends, made a Whoopie Pie Cake, which is like a Whoopie Pie (which is, in turn, kind of like a round devil dog), only it was the size of a Labrador Retriever. 



Exteme yumminess underway



Brie was home for winter break, with some of her RPI friends visiting for a few days... Mary, Jess and Goofball (Matt)
 
Will played two level 7 18-year-old USTA matches... winning both.     
 
In other news, the revamping of the house continues; the new kitchen is finally complete, with everything back in it's proper place, the family room is recarpeted, and the bathroom on the middle floor has had the marble bar that served as a transition from the new tile to the linoleum changed out, by which we mean the entire bathroom is remodeled.  Because if we were going to replace the transition piece, we might as well redo the floor in tile.  But if we redo the floor, we need to pull up the toilet and cabinet, and if we're going to do that, we might as well replace them.  And pulling them is going to scrape up the walls, so we should probably have those redone.  And there's no point having old light fixutres and towel rods and things that don't match the new paint.  
 

Dave participates in "Destination Imagination," just for the joy of doing something other than work, where teams from 5th to 12th grade participate in competitive challenges that combine technical and artistic skills.

Kate's ex-highschool boyfriend, Mark Leamy, visited while here on a business trip.  It's been 27 years since Kate had seen Mark.
 
Oh, and we have the latest addition to the arsenal... this is the venerable .22 Long Rifle Smith and Wesson Model 41, one of the few pistols in the world considered competition ready out of the box.  It's the same pistol I used on the Navy ROTC pistol team at RPI 30 years ago.   And, despite it's rather high price tag, I have to say, it's a great handgun; it feels and shoots exactly the way I remember it from way back then.
   
Will on the indoor range
 
And we close, as usual, with pictures of the beloved doggies, Patric and Tasha, Tasha with the standard "why are they doing this to me?" look, and Patric with the "this just seems physically impossible" pose. 
 
If you want the latest on Kate, you can see her story at:  http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/kdickie