Another Snowy Day

This morning, my carpooling companion and I made the decision to each work from home due to the snowy condition of the roads we would have had to travel to get to work. That worked out pretty well for me. I spent the day working, using both my work laptop computer and our desktop computer to make my work a bit more efficient. Also, instead of listening to music with earphones and my iPod, I just played music through the computer's speakers directly from iTunes. This gave me access to the entirety of my music library instead of limiting me to the four gigabytes that my iPod can hold. Never mind the fact that there is no way I could listen to 4 GB of music in an eight-hour work day.

This evening, Mel and I went to Coralville to meet some friends for dinner at Olive Garden. These were people with whom I worked when I taught in Riverside, Iowa, several years back. In fact, in June it will have been five years since I left Highland. I got caught up on some of the gossip about what's going on at the school and we got to see friends, some of whom we haven't seen in over a year! In addition, we got some baby gifts while we were there, including some diapers and a couple of books that come with CDs--Rhinoceros Tap by Sandra Boynton and Poetry Speaks to Children edited by Elise Paschen. The poetry book includes poems by Odgen Nash, Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, Rita Dove, Robert Frost, Sonia Sanchez, Roald Dahl, and many other poets.

On the topic of baby gifts, we did get a phone call from Mel's sister this afternoon. We were to have a baby shower tomorrow afternoon in Shell Rock, but due to the weather, the shower is being postponed until some time in April. The roads are so bad in northwestern Iowa that Mel's mom can't make it the two miles into Humboldt, let alone make it across the state to Shell Rock. And travel is not advised across most of the northern and western parts of the state. It would have been nice to have the shower tomorrow, but it's better to have it when people can safely attend.