Leavenworth

We spent President's Day weekend in a cabin in the snow with friends. It was a lot of friends, and a mansion of a cabin: 13 adults and 7 kids, eight bedrooms, two living rooms, huge double kitchen, hot tub, giant yard full of perfect snow, you name it. We knew about half the people fairly well and the other half just somewhat; we all got along great, including the kids. Each family took a meal and cooked for all 20 of us. Here we all are in cooking-and-eating mode:

The kids spent long hours outside building snow forts in the yard (the weather was great).

Subgroups of people went out skiing or sledding or snowshoeing, including Jordan, who learned XC skiing at Billings last year.

The kids came in for hot cocoa, extended sessions of Dungeons & Dragons, and movies in the 16-seat home theater. Adults hung out in the capacious living room playing board games, reading by the fire, or doing crafty things. There was much knitting, and also weaving and spinning (I kid you not, one friend brought a loom, and another spun wool into yarn in the corner like in a fairy tale). I learned to knit and made great progress on my first hat. Really, there were all the makings of a great winter holiday.

Sadly there was a very unfortunate event. Dale went XC skiing with a friend, and almost immediately fell, heard a nasty popping sound, and was in blinding pain. He had clearly done something horrendous to his ankle and spent almost the whole weekend in bed, resting and icing and compressing and elevating. Nothing like the fun weekend we had hoped for. The pain got better over the days we were there, and he was able to hobble around the house sometimes. But when we got back to Seattle, x-rays showed that he has not only a severe sprain, but also a broken fibula.

Ugh. He will be evaluated tomorrow for possible surgery and is looking at a long recovery time. So distressing how things can change in the blink of an eye.