Saturday morning the girls decided to skip swimming, but Porsche-dad stopped by later and said they might go sledding at the park behind my house. So, the girls and I met them over there later, the whole Porsche clan, as well as a few neighbor kids. I remembered to wear my cool weather riding gear this time, and waterproof lined pants with armor are just the thing for bombing down the slopes in thin pieces of plastic. I did have trouble getting back up the slopes, they were nearly ice, and my boots just did not have enough grip. I think I'll bring some ski poles next time.

But that's not all. Our neighbors from down the street who moved last fall were having a shindig, and I decided to make an appearance, mostly to keep in touch, but also to check out their house. It was only a few miles away, but the flurries were bad, and it was dicey driving to get there. But I did, and made small talk for a while (one of their guests is in the direct mail business, and when I mentioned $corp, he mentioned $product, though his company doesn't have one, as they just do black and white for their direct mail). After a short while, my knees were acting up (yeah, the arthritis is not improving with Minocin, and seems to be getting worse), so I went back home just in time for a bedtime tantrum from ten year old. She was hungry (probably because she didn't want to eat dinner, go figure).

Sunday ended up being the least social, the girls and I went to the YMCA for family swim, but we didn't run into anyone we knew. The water was nice, but with my pathetic body fat percentage, even at 84 degrees I could only tolerate about 20 minutes of it. It was good to get some low resistance exercise on my joints.

I ended up spending a lot of time with the girls, as Mrs. Ha worked Saturday and Sunday hostessing at her new job. So far, so good, and the end plan is to have her work M-F 9-3, which dovetails very nicely with the kids's school schedule. If that works out, it should be enough to keep up solvent until something better turns up, or until I can borrow another chunk of my 401k to pay off high rate credit cards.

Mrs. Ha's weekend really started yesterday then, so we watched a movie last night, rather than watch the SuperDuper bowl. This time it was Lackawanna Blues, a movie about a boy being raised in a rooming house in the 50's and 60's in the black part of Lackawanna (a suburb of Buffalo) before integration changed the community for the worse. I'm not sure if it was integration, urban renewal, or the loss of blue collar jobs in the autoplants and steel mills, but it's desolate nowadays. I picked this up because it's a Buffalo story which I thought Mrs. Ha would appreciate, and she did. A nice capper to a good weekend.

The girls school is hardcore, so hardcore they sent home flyers last week saying that even if the city schools were closed for the cold, they would be open. But, we'd have to provide transportation, since we use the City school buses. Wouldn't you know it, with single degrees today, the City Schools were closed, but ours was open.

We talked sleds a bit on Saturday. I recall having a flexible flyer, and if I recall right, it rarely worked well, I think you needed solid ice for those narrow runners to work. Those long wooden tobaggans were another idea that was better in practice than in reality, I think I've had two rides on them in my life. When I was younger, the saucers and roll up ones worked best, nowadays kids get tubes, and plastic tobaggans and all manner of stuff. The plastic toboggan things do work well, that's what we have. What's your favorite sled?