The Long Winter and the Long Break

For those of you that have read the books from the Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, perhaps the title The Long Winter will ring a bell. For those of you that have not read the book, The Long Winter is pretty much about just that: A long winter. Of the eight main books in the series, this one is by far the most depressing. Laura's older sister Mary is blind from a previous illness, it snows almost non-stop, and everyone in the town almost dies from starvation waiting for two of the men to bring back bags of wheat from a town 20 miles away. 

Since we last wrote, there have been a few larger winter storms in our area. Engineer R has now dug the cars out of multiple feet of snow three times. When the only shovel you have is a broom dustpan, this can take a while. During one of the more recent storms, school was cancelled for a day, buses almost crashed, and 8 foot long icicles formed. The usual stuff for these parts:

A few weekends ago, a downpour hit and all the snow melted, which inundated the sewers with copious amounts of rain water and melted snow. The associated influx of water overloaded the sewer system, and a few people had basements full of....sewage.  Since we live on the second floor of our building, we were able to avoid the deluge.

Bless the heart. We do hear that the summers are pleasant.

Internship

Since Engineer R will be doing an internship in Champaign, Illinois this coming summer, no one from Domestic Engineering will be present to actually verify if the summers in the current location are nice. Perhaps next summer (2018) will be the summer of glory.

Engineer R's internship will be with Caterpillar. Most of you will probably recognize Cat by their products:

While Engineer R actually knows next to nothing about tractor and dump truck engineering, he will be working more in a data "engineering" role. His work will deal with survival and reliability analysis of large mechanical components. He is hopeful that this will lead in the future to a job that pays a livable wage in a livable location. By livable wage, he means "more than $15/hr" and by livable location he means "not too many people who think we want to read about politics on Facebook." Perhaps some of you that claim to have been to every state in the nation can suggest some jobs and locations. I am resisting the urge to tell an unemployment joke now. Resist, resist, resist.

Engineer J has a very full class schedule this semester. Since she has to take a minimum of 15 credits a semester, she has to take several long lab classes this semester. She will be starting a marketing minor this summer. She is also looking into doing some research over the summer at the University of Illinois (at Urbana-Champaign). The benefits of being 5 minutes from an AAU campus. She is on track to graduate in December and will be looking for a job for the few months that follow until Engineer R finishes up. His plan is to finish up by hopefully August 2018.

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