“Soda.”

Soda? Soda? Where did her learn that word? We’re a midwestern family; we say “pop.” Where did he here “Soda?”

The trails still had some snow and ice on them in places, but it was amazing the amount of sitting water puddled on the trail. We came home wet and dirty, but enjoyed our ride.

Ora 5 and Aspen both had personal bests: Aspen went 6 miles on her own, doubling her previous distance. Ora went 18 miles besting his best distance by 6 miles. By the end, I was having trouble keeping pace with him and he probably could have gone farther.

They are high-efficiency windows so the house feels warmer and I expect to save almost 75% on my heating and cooling costs! Woot!

After being in for about 1/2 hour, I saw another neighbor shoveling her drive. From seeing her husband arrive home, I knew that she would pull her car down the driveway, he would pull his Mustang in the garage and then she would repark in the driveway. I grabbed my shovel again, offered Ora and additional $1 and out we went. It was short work again.

Probably a 1/2 hour later my neighbor knocked on my door. Her husband’s Mustang was stuck at the bottom of the street. I ran down with my shovel and we cleared  short path for his wheels and tried pushing, but it didn’t work. As soon as it hit more snow, it was stuck again. We ended up shoveling a path for each tire all the way up the street to his house! He’s in his garage now.

The highway was much better. Though not cleared, it was plowed so I didn’t have to contend with with piles of snow. But the wind was making visibility very difficult. At one point I lost site of the car in front of me only to have him reappear at half the distance he had been.

My final challenge was my own street. Still covered in snow piles that were even higher that the frontage road. Since few cars run this road, there weren’t tire tracks for me to follow. But I made it.

I texted my coworker to say: Home!

At first I didn’t believe it was him, but I couldn’t deny it: same hair, Ewan’s shirt and I’ve seen that expression, too. I wondered if they had stolen a pic from Enid’s Flickr page, but after checking there I found that she had no pictures of Ewan like that, so they must have taken it one time when he was unhappy that we had dropped him off at the Y kid care.