January and February have been quite a couple of months for me, hence my near-disappearal from WrinkRoks. To begin with, Dad got a hernia fixed, which was no small matter. (He's the kind of person who faints at the sight of blood. He once passed out at the VET, for Pete's sake.) The doctors told him not to eat anything a certain number of hours beforehand, but they neglected to tell him not to drink anything, so he had some coffee that morning. That turned out to be one expensive cup of coffee, because they had to postpone the operation for FOUR HOURS to let it go through his system :-P
Turns out he had a cancerous tumor in him, which they removed. They don't think he's got any more, but he has to do some radiation treatments "just in case".

And we got four inches of snow! (See link below for some gorgeous photos.) Quite a feat for us, at 1200 feet in central CA. You could hear the branches snapping off oak trees that had never felt the weight of snow. It was loads of fun...well, most of it...The snow started piling on top of our six greenhouses, so at nine o'clock at night, my brother, father, and I were out with push brooms sweeping it off. Then the power went out. Great, we thought, we should've left the snow ON the greenhouses to serve as insulation. Oh well, we've got a generator, 500 feet away in our pumphouse. My brother got cold and tired, leaving me and my hernia-prone dad--who was NOT to lift anything over five pounds--to get it started. We did, but the distance from the generator to the greenhouses was too great to power all of the heaters, so we needed to move it closer. The tractor had no traction, and the pickup wouldn't start, so that left us with a dolly. By this time it was 11 o'clock and my cowboy boots were starting to leak. We got the generator on the dolly (which has a TINY foot)and tried to figure out how to push it UPHILL IN THE SNOW without overexerting Dad. He pulled and I pushed. Somehow we got it up near the greenhouses. And do you know, that generator had the gall to not power any more heaters than it had BEFORE we moved it! So we moved flats of plants from the non-powered houses to the powered ones. It was past midnight before we finally got finished and into bed. Y'know, I think I'm glad it doesn't snow like that but once in sixteen years.

A couple weeks ago, we painted various areas of the house, moving furniture and finding assorted and sundry disgusting things that had not seen the light of day in a long time in my brother's room.

And just two days ago, Dad had to pick up in the afternoon Boy Scouts from Klondike, an overnight camping "adventure" in the snow (my brother couldn't go because of illness) and he took me skiing! It was great fun except for getting a cold from one of the Scouts *sniffle* They reminded me of RinkChat (especially the way the subject changed to food):
Chauncey: Give me back the beanie!
Austin: No!
*Chauncey twists Austin's arm.*
Chauncey: I will MAKE YOU CO-OPERATE!
Austin: Ow!
Dylan[who was half asleep]: Why would you make him into a waffle?
Chauncey: No, I'll make him co-operate! I never said anything about waffles.
*Chauncey scuffles with Austin.*
Dylan: Oh, I thought you said you'd make him into a waffle.
Austin: I have waffles every morning for breakfast.
Chauncey: Yeah, I like waffles, but I like pancakes better.
Dylan: Me too! Pancakes with chocolate chips or strawberries.
Chauncey: But not chocolate chips AND strawberries. There's just something not right about chocolate-chip-strawberry pancakes.

La"The point of this post: hmmmm"Zorra