TIMBER! and Tech’s Winter Carnival

It has been awhile. This should come as no surprise to teachers, people who live with teachers, or anyone who has known me in the last 8 years.

I’m swamped and I have my first cold of the year. I’m up to my ears in vitamin c, airborne, and cold care tea (what happened to Celestial Seasonings Wellness Tea, by the way???). I was hoping for a cold day in order to get one more day of sleep and rest, but it looks like no such luck.

Nonetheless, the last couple weeks have featured an authentic, home cooked Turkish meal at Mustafa’s place, two trees down and more wood in the woodshed, a ridiculously (and I mean RIDICULOUSLY) creosete-clogged chimney, and a lot of planning and grading.

Tech has a tradition dating back to the 20s called Winter Carnival. It involves all the of the student groups, residence halls, and fraternities spending weeks creating snow and ice sculptures. It’s a competition and classes are canceled on Thursday and Friday of that week so that students can pull an all-nighter to finish them on Thursday night. Judging starts Friday morning, I think, and it’s amazing what they create. Some of them are two stories tall! Last year we came about a week or two after Winter Carnival to see what this Houghton place was all about and decide if we could imagine living here. The remnants of the sculptures only made the town seem more enchanting, so I was excited to go check them out right away this year. My cold and other events prevented us from doing so until this morning, but I brought the camera so you could check out WC from afar. Based on what we saw, the theme must have been children’s movies. There was everything from what I think is iRobot to Wizard of Oz scenes, and Land Before Time characters. The only thing missing was a nice scene from Jumanji. Just sayin’.

This one, of the famous scene from The Lion King took 2nd in its category. I don’t know what took place first, but this was definitely the best one I saw!

This is only one half of the amazing Lion King one.

I don’t even understand this. They had it all: The hyenas and gazelles, the whole shebang.

That’s the good witch and the other one, crushed by Dorothy’s house.

I was pretty impressed with this Lion King one until I saw the other one…

This was a 101 Dalmatians sculpture, complete with, you guessed it, 101 tiny Dalmatians.

Other than planning lessons for this week, we also had a nice dinner at The Library and Bryan cut down a dead tree for firewood. Last time he snagged his tree in another tree, but this time he nailed it. I got to come out and help save a nice little oak by yanking it out of the way at just the right second, so I got to see it fall. It’s amazing how loud a tree is as it crashes to the ground! By the time dinner was ready that night, the tree was down, dragged by sled to the shed, cut up, and split. We burned logs from it in the fire that night. He’s pretty impressive if I do say so myself.

Plus, he’s handsome too.

TIMBER!!!