woooohoooo

the sun officially rose before 8am this morning and we are now gaining over 2 minutes of sun a day!!! Our solar noon altitude will hit 30 degrees by sunday (from a low of 23.9) on dec 21... I always notice the sun seems higher on the horizon about Feb 1, so i think that 30 degrees makes a difference. Long way to go to 70.7 (june 21) but we'll take it.

We had a warm rainy day yesterday, which melted our snow. Its the first time you could see the ground since Dec 4th! Just as the sun was setting the clear cleared to the west creating a rainbow. I've never seen a rainbow in January before, so we thought that was kind of cool. We only had our phones with us (we were in the car) so the picture isnt great, but here it is anyway.

in other news, a friend at work gave Bee a little notebook. At dinner the other night i noticed it was sitting on the table, so i picked it up and read the cover out loud to the family. "Bee's Dire" (Bee's Diary). So then I opened the book and started to read the first page to the family, and it said "Please do not read my dire." Frankie laughed so hard she fell backwards out of her chair. Poor Franks. Well, I learned my lesson about opening other people's diaries!

Athlete of the week....

And the winner is Cho Cho!! Cho loves playing in the snow. We had our first real storm of the season and must have gotten about 8 inches or so. Its cold but sunny and Cho Cho cant get enough of the white stuff. (The runner up is scott for shoveling all of that snow and doing such a dandy job, too!)

Speedy Lady

Congratulations to Angie, who ran the fastest 5k in Mid-Michigan for her age group in 2009. She ran the Alma Highand Festival 5k in 20:15 on Memorial Day weekend. That blew away the second place finisher, who ran a 21:07 in Ele's race. Full results are here.

When asked about her achievement, Angie said it gave her motivation to go out in the cold and dark tomorrow morning for a speed workout. We'll all be chasing her at this year's Highland Festival.

Happy New Year!!!

Welcome 2010! We were going through our photos from 2009 and thought we'd pick a few of our favorites as we look back and ahead. Sorry if the titles arent aligned with the pictures. I cant seem to get that right!!

Marky sniffing snow dog (Jan)!

Koompa's fur (Feb)

Chasing ducks (march)... spring cant be too far away!

Tulips (april)

Horse barn & Alma festival (May)

Scotland! (June)

Welcome Cho Cho (July)

Lemonade stand (aug)

First day of school (sept)

Road trip! (sept)

Camouflage (oct)

the big sleep over (nov)

getting ready for christmas (dec)

Haircuts!

Bee and Frankie and i went to the hair salon for girls day out. Here are the girls haircuts! Frankie's hair is short and layered. I will try to take a better picture today. Its really cute. She wanted to get a haircut just like me (because then she said she wouldn't have to brush it. ha ha).

Christmas tree and winter days

its been a while huh! I guess that is end of semester madness for you! You know what else comes along with this time of year? Talk about the length of the days!! We keep telling ourselves up here on at the 42nd latitude that Monday is the shortest day of the year! yah! But this year instead of fretting over how our sunrise/sunset is:

Dec 20, 2009 8:05 AM 5:07 PM

We just decided to look up edinburgh, scotland:
Dec 20, 2009 8:42 AM 3:39 PM

Ouch!!

And in case you were wondering: The December Solstice (Winter Solstice) is on Monday, December 21, 2009 at 12:47 PM in Lansing.

And here is our cute christmas tree! We decided to decorate our indoor palm tree. We debated back on forth on whether to get a real tree or a fake tree, but all of the research we read said the best thing to do is to get a live tree and then plant it outside when you are done. We did that last year but ended up killing the darn thing. Apparently if you go the live tree route, the evergreen shouldnt be indoors more than 3 days. That was probably Step 1 in how we killed the tree last year. No need to get into the other steps we followed. Suffice it to say that we went the live tree route again this year but are using a year round indoor plant that we've had for a little while. Bee and Frankie think it's cool and it kind of warms things up a bit!