A funeral and an ice storm

On Tuesday February 4th we said our final goodbyes to my uncle Ralph Lueken. He has been battling Parkinson's disease and other health issues for years and is at peace with god now.  Although I haven't been able to visit with him much in recent years I spent a lot of time there growing up playing with their youngest daughter Sarah. He will be greatly missed.  I drove up to Schnellville for the funeral and met mom, dad, Lisa and the kids.  We visited with family for a while before heading back home.

We knew we were due for some nasty weather that afternoon so when I got back into town instead of going to work as planned I went ahead and picked up the kids from daycare and headed home. Aubrey's school had released the kids 2 hrs early and everyone was talking about how bad it was going to get.  I decided to take the kids out for a while when we got home since they hadn't been able to play in the snow yet this year and I wanted to try to clear some of the snow already on the driveway.  Wes's boss sent them home early as well so we were all home before the freezing rain started about 4pm.  We already had several inches of snow on the ground from a storm Sunday night and it ended up sleeting and freezing rain for at least 6 hours.  By 10:00 we were hearing a lot of popping outside with branches and trees falling.  We heard several really loud ones during the night but couldn't see anything.  Come morning we found out one large cedar tree fell across out driveway along with several other parts of trees around the yard.  I ended up just staying home with the kids again.  Wes was able to move enough of the tree to get my car out and he went into work late morning.  The tree landed inches from his work truck but luckily didn't really hurt it.   The tree was right on the line between our property and our neighbors they were great and offered to help cut it up for us.