Snowed In

Unlike in Utah, where it would take about 3 feet of snow to shut anything down, here in Oklahoma it's a whole different story. We get snow about 5 times a year. It always begins with freezing rain, then sleet, then snow (or would it be than?). That means there's a nice, thick sheet of black ice under the snow and roads are extremely treacherous. Snow in Utah is very soft, big, fluffy, and wet. OK snow is dry and crunchy and it usually kind of hurts, small ice chunks more than flakes a lot of the time. We actually got some soft flakes on Thursday.

So we woke up Thursday morning with freezing rain but very little snow on the ground after reports on Wednesday of the worst storm Oklahoma has seen in years on every news station. Well, it ended up being a pretty good storm and the roads were really bad on Thursday, but I think people got overly excited because it was the first snow of the year and such. Thursday all the schools were closed, which meant I didn't have to work and Brandon didn't either. We really enjoyed our day inside watching the snow fall, watching tv, baking, snuggling, eating, etc.

I made one of my favorite (and extremely easy) recipes. It had been almost a year since I last made it, what a shame. I got this recipe from my friend Ann from Hawaii a few years ago.

Great Grandma's Banana Bread
5 large bananas
4 eggs
1 c. shortening (I use butter or marg. or both)
2 c. sugar
4 c. flour
2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
1 c. chopped nuts (optional)

Beat all together and add to three greased loaf pans. Test for doneness before removing from oven. Bake 45-60 mins. at 325 degrees. Delicious!!

Been enjoying that bread for 3 days. I especially liked it this morning accompanied by hot chocolate.

Silly enough, all the schools closed again yesterday. We were a little stir crazy and went and wandered around Walmart for awhile in the afternoon. Then watched the rest of our My Name is Earl dvd (best show around) that we'd rented from Netflix (I don't understand why everyone doesn't join). Last night we decorated our little 3 ft. tree. It looks great! Brandon is a little disappointed that we didn't get a bigger and/or real tree this year, but we leave out of town on the 21st so I just didn't want to. We put lights up all over the dining room and a few other decorations out too. The cats haven't eaten any ornaments yet, so that's good. We've also been enjoying a lot of Christmas music. Our favorites have always been Bing Crosby, but we also really like the Charlie Brown soundtrack, the Nutcracker ballet soundtrack, and the Harry Connick Jr. cds. Yesterday at Walmart we bought an excellent Elvis Christmas cd and Christmas with the Rat Pack which is also quite good.

Hope you are enjoying the first few days of December! Love you.