The last few weeks...

OK, so let's bring you all up to speed. The last few weeks have been eventful ones for us, but maybe not the kind of events you would generally sign yourself up for. For starters, a few days before Halloween, we woke up to this:

Yeah, so this is how our back porch looks under almost 2 feet of snow. All of this snow fell in a 24 hour period, and it pretty much shut down the city. Dan got a snow day, and Dana (who only gets snow days if a natural disaster is announced) had to drive to work in it, getting stuck three times. Or maybe four if you count getting stuck trying to drive into the driveway.

Generally, a snow day is a great thing, kind of like an unexpected holiday. Not so much for Dan. See, that snow day was also the first real day of symptoms for what has turned out to be a two-week long adventure with the Swine Flu! The aches, the fevers, the sore throat, the overall nastiness. Great fun.

Louie seemed to love the snow, but it was literally high enough that he couldn't walk in it. Standing in the drifts, the snow came up to almost his shoulders. So he had to find creative ways to navigate the back yard, generally hugging the sides of walls where the snow was not so deep. We threw one of his toys out in the snow to see how he would react, and he stood in the doorway for several minutes having an existential crisis of sorts: do I jump in after my toy, or do I chicken out? In the end, he chickened out.

Before the storm hit, we went to a ward Halloween party with this couples-look. We loved our costumes, but Dana had some trouble with her make-up. She originally intended to go completely white-faced like traditional Geisha, but the make-up burned her skin and just looked greasy. So she went with just the lips and eyes, and still looked fantastic.

By the time Halloween actually rolled around, the snow was all melted and the weather was beautiful. We, however, were still too sick to enjoy it. We had a really poor turn-out from kiddies, which was probably good, since we were too sick and tired to run to the door too often. We only had 11 trick-or-treaters the entire night, and one of them was a kid coming back for seconds! Yeah, it was pretty weak. At least the Utes won their game.

Dana went all-out with the decorations this year, as you can see. The pumpkin we carved together with our buddies the Mairs, and as you can also see, by Halloween morning most of the snow was gone. We had high hopes to get mobbed by costumed kiddies, but our neighborhood is just wierd that way. Tons of kids walk past our house every morning to school, but we never see them playing in the streets or other normal stuff. Wierd.

After a while, we eventually got over the Swine Flu. Dan ended up missing 4 days of work, and Dana should have missed as many, but only took one sick day. We started to feel better from the flu stuff, but Dan had a cough that would not quit, and Dana had a sore throat that just seemed to be getting worse. So, Dan went to the doctor a second time, and found out that he has a mild pneumonia. Dana, it turns out, has tonsilitis. From what we have been told, it is a common thing to get secondary infections when your body is fighting off a major flu. Now we know.

So that is the scoop from the last few weeks. We are both on antibiotics and are slowly getting close to something similar to healthy. At least we now have a life-long immunity to H1N1, and can say with pride that we survived the Plague of '09. Now if we could only do something about the lame children in our neighborhood. . .