Ice Dam Disruption

We have some serious freeze-thaw action happening in our city right now and I spent all morning fighting with a gutter. I think the problem is at least temporarily fixed. Our furnace is making a troubling noise. Old houses always seem to break in multiple ways at once. We are plugging away at the painting/waterproofing work on the basement, but it is so slow going. Homeschooling took a bit of a back burner this morning since we were trying to dislodge life-threatening icicles from my neighbor's house and chipping ice off the driveway in anticipation of the freezing-rain-snow-sleet-whatever is going to hit later tonight. 

Laurel hopped on to her online classes today, tackling another week of writing responses about the People Could Fly. She is doing this pretty independently and enjoys interacting with other kids, even though it's all just on the message board. I helped my neighbor, who is also in 5th grade, with an essay he had to write. It was about this Thai football team from a floating village. When they were kids they wanted to learn to play so they built themselves a floating field. It was wobbly and small and had no edges so they had to get very good with their footwork to keep the ball in play. What was originally a hardship, actually helped them get so good they became very competitive in mainland tournaments. An amazing story! 

Laurel and Marko did some math pages. Max worked on Scratch. It wasn't a totally productive day of school, but some days are like that.

We ate pizza for dinner. We spent a lot of time trying to describe the style of pizza that M makes. It's focaccia dough, super light but very thick and cooked on cast iron skillets in a very hot oven. The bottom is crusty, the middle is airy. It's not like anything I have ever eaten at a pizza restaurant. The best pizza tonight had apples and gorgonzola.