Not Your Typical "Day After Thanksgiving"

2nd UPDATE: Sorry, I realized this morning I updated on facebook but not here...Mark made it home about by around 7 p.m. last night. He parked at a friend's on the other side of the avalanche who drove him up to it, and he hiked over-pizza for dinner in hand. :) Our neighbor Mona met him on the other side and brought him home. Last night we got about 3 more inches and it's coming down again. Only trouble now is that he has a lot of the materials for the stairs in the van. On the other side of the avalanche that won't be cleared until tonight. This is beginning to look like a comedy of errors...

CORRECTION & UPDATE: We didn't get 8 more inches of snow today. It was 12 more inches. I've never been good at estimating, but a ruler helps.

The avalanche is supposedly not going to get cleared for traffic until tomorrow night. Mark is going to head up there now and see if they're letting people walk over, and if they are, I'll send the neighbors w/ 4-wheel drive down to fetch him. This is why he keeps snowshoes in his car during the winter. But right...he has the van today...
*sigh*

This is my day today...

We were at my parents' yesterday for Thanksgiving, and my mom had asked if they could keep the kids overnight. You know that saying "Give them an inch and they'll take a mile?"
Yeah, you know what's coming...I said sure, they could have them overnight, and could they please keep them till Sunday? :)

But we have good reason.

This is our basement. Yes, I'm embarrassed by it's condition. The couch doesn't even belong here...we're trying to sell it for someone who had to move out of state suddenly. Do you see the far corner, to the left of the doorway? After this weekend, if all goes as planned, there will be a staircase there that leads to our upstairs entryway.















Building projects and holes in the floor don't mix well with children...hence the leaving of them at my parents'. And in order for stairs to be there, the tools and such that are occupying the space now need to, well, move. But where to? There's hardly room to walk down there.

That's where I come in. It's not that there's not room...it's just a horrific mess (which is think what happens when you let an area of your house become the domain of men and children...maybe. I'm just sayin'). While Mark is at work today, my job is to tackle this basement, beat it into submission, and have it ready to get down to business when Mark gets home from work tonight.

And therein lies the snag, and the request for prayers!

See, this is what my day looks like on the outside. Last week we got about 6 inches of snow. It got warm and slushy for a day or so, then froze up again. Then Wednesday night, Thanksgiving Day Eve, we got 7 inches of wet, heavy snow. "Thankfully" it cleared by midnight, so we had no trouble getting to my parents' place.















But then we got another 8 inches of wet, heavy snow last night/this morning. Here is Mark's poor little car in the driveway-he wisely chose to drive the van to work this morning.
















Now it has cleared and the it's a winter wonderland outside. Except for one major issue.















There has been an avalanche about 7 miles from here. South of here. Between here at home and Mark there at work.
Pray that the avalanche gets cleared quickly, or I may be catching up on blogging instead of helping with a staircase!!!