one day short of a week

I do believe that's a record for blog neglect in my blogging career thus far. I can't believe it's almost been a week since I last wrote. Lot's to catch up on...

We had a wonderful weekend away... Ryan and I got a condo in Osage Beach in the Lake of the Ozarks for a couple of nights. It was beautiful. I can't wait to go back in the summertime, when the Lake is really active. Here's the view from our backdoor at night...Mike and Kasey joined us for the first night and we had a great time with their company, a great dinner, played lots of games, and then a full day of touristy shopping (I heart outlet malls!!) the next day. We said goodbye to our friends and had a wonderfully relaxing evening to ourselves, even getting out to see a movie... a real live movie in a theater, LOL! Can't remember the last time we did that!
Monday morning we were looking forward to a leisurely morning taking our time getting out of bed, ready and packed up and planned on more shopping before hitting the road to take a wandering kind of stop here and there trip home. Well, that was before I woke to the sound of freezing rain at 8 in the morning. I looked outside, and sure enough, our deck was covered. I turned on the news and they were predicting up to a half inch of ice to come down pretty quickly in that area that morning. Great. So we rushed around trying to get up and together and out the door before we got stuck in the Ozarks. We actually got out to the car and turned around twice thinking we were too late to make it out of there. Ryan was scraping the windshield and it seemed it was just freezing right back up again. We had pretty much resigned ourselves to the fact that we missed our chance to get home and we would be spending an extra night at the lake. But then we decided to try it after all and see if we could at least make it out to the main highway (our condo was right on a little inlet of the lake at the end of a hilly, windy road). But when we finally made it out to the main road, it was actually worse than our drive out. Instead of the fresh "crunchy" ice pellets resting on top of the untraveled roads, it was slushy and slick, melting and refreezing into a sheet of ice under the traffic. But once we were out of there, we decided to push on. It took us about 2 hours to get 45 miles north to Jefferson City, where we had finally outrun (if you can outrun at a snail's pace) the storm. And even then for the rest of the trip, while the roads were clear and fine, it was still freezing rain/mixing and it was so cold that any moisture in the air would freeze up constantly... we cooked ourselves in the car having to keep the defrost blasting on high heat so we could see at least a bit out of the windshield. People were pulled over right and left along the highway having to stop and scrape their windshields every few miles. Crazy. But we made it home, back to the real world. It only took us four hours to drive a 2.25 hour trip, but we made it!!

We left behind our computers and didn't watch tv, so it was a true weekend "away". Those three days must have broken my computer habit, because I've been a little slow on the blog reading, emailing, and obviously the blogging front the rest of this week.
We've just been hanging out around here... the storm followed us home, and the next day on Tuesday, our schools were closed due to the ice. So it's been too cold to do much, but today is supposed to warm up so we're looking forward to getting some fresh air. We're also going to take the kids bowling and to the Magic House before my parents head home this weekend.


So that's been the extent of my blogless existence this week... now you can see you weren't missing much!!