General updates: It seems I've been slacking on my follow through on interesting topics. I'll try to catch folks up.

I got my studded tires on this past Saturday morning. We bought a set of tires off of craigslist for $80. Awesome deal! Someone had dropped these off in these folks' yard, so they sold them online. Yay for us! We called the tire place Friday night to see about having them put on the next day... No appointments given, but they opened at 8am. So we got there at exactly 8am and found we were about 10th in line. Dang! We were told it would be a 6 hour wait. So we left the van there (we had brought both vehicles) and headed over to the half price sale at the thrift store. ;o) We parked outside the front door of the thrift store in the dark waiting for it to open at 9am. [We know we have a problem... and that's the first step, right?] For the record, we got some great deals!

In the end, we got the van back with it's new studded tires after only 5 hours and $64. Stephen bought himself a set of studded tires on rims off craigslist for $700 and swapped them out himself on Sunday... just in time for Monday morning's snowy commute.

As for daylight hours and temperatures, with daylight savings time over, it seems to get light at around 9:30am or so and then the sun goes down at like 5:30pm I guess. We really don't notice it at this point. It's super overcast today and snowing. But it's still daylight. No daylight-deprived- depression as of yet. But we make an effort to be outdoors in the daylight each day for at least a small period of time. Supposedly that's part of the trick.

Today's highs are around 32 degrees, I think. Relatively warm. But it's supposed to get much colder after today.

I have my 2nd and final quilting class tonight. I meant to get all my blocks put together this week so I could move forward during the class tonight. But I was only able to put together 4 out of the 30 blocks! So that's what I'll be doing at class this evening. The quilt pattern is called Crazy Eights and works with squares and rectangles from fat quarters of fabric. It should turn out to look like randomly placed pieces. I'm using fabric that looks like old-fashioned calicos which I find very attractive and comforting. (Little House on the Prairie-ish). I'll take some photos when I have a few more blocks done and post them.