A few more photos to catch up on before I start today's entry, now that we have finally transferred them from the camera to the computer. Below is the lovely little hotel we stayed in when we went to Mount Sunapee ski resort in New Hampshire a few weeks ago. We arrived in the evening and found the hotel floodlit and festooned with fairy lights and snow. Very pretty.

 .

While Barry and the girls skied at Mount Sunapee with Rachel's friend Sydney and her Dad Marvin, Dougal and I spent the day with Sydney's "Mom" Jami. We went for a walk through some woods and it was sooo beautiful.

Bringing us a bit more up to date, Isabel had her cello recital a week last Saturday at the Brookline Music School. She played beautifully, performing The Elephant from the Carnival of the Animals and Family Portrait, one of John Williams' pieces from the Harry Potter film series. Barry accompanied her beautifully as well!

A week last Sunday we hired a Zip Car and zipped off to Wachusett Mountain, a small ski resort just an hour's drive out of Boston. It's not particularly challenging but was ideal for a day's skiing in the cold and Barry and the girls thoroughly enjoyed themselves. I was quite happy holed up in the ski lodge with a book and a coffee in the morning and watching them whizzing down the slopes in the afternoon. The New England ski resorts are not particularly high but seem to have an excellent snow record as the temperatures are so cold at night that they can make as much snow as they want so the pistes are always in a good condition the next day.

Enjoying a hot apple cider (that's non-alcoholic, just in case you're wondering!) in the ski lodge after a cold day's skiing.

To bring you up to date, we had a routine week and a relatively quiet weekend, just the usual RAFT (teen) activities on Friday night for Isabel and basketball matches and violin lesson on Saturday (including keeping an eye on the Wales v Italy Six Nations score via The Guardian's live blog on my phone). Isabel brought home her second quarter report card from school on Friday and has once again made the Honor Roll, so we're very proud of her. Barry flew out to San Francisco on Sunday - he's there until Saturday with most of the other IHI Fellows visiting a variety of hospitals and health care organisations and fitting in a bit of sightseeing including a trip to Alcatraz. I'm not jealous...

We watched a bit of the Superbowl on Sunday because we felt we should. American football (or simply football, as it is known here) hasn't lit our bonfire in the same way that the baseball did in the summer. Our local NFL side, the New England Patriots, is one of the most successful NFL sides of the last decade but didn't quite make it to the Superbowl this year, losing out to the Denver Broncos in the American Football Conference final. Having all the good players bar the quarterback Tom Brady injured and another player in jail facing murder charges probably didn't help this year.  It was probably just as well that the Patriots didn't make it as the Broncos were utterly humiliated in the Superbowl match by the Seattle Seahawks, the National Football Conference champions. (The NFL is comprised of two conferences, the American and the National, each of which is sub-divided into four divisions. The Superbowl is contested between the two Conference champions.) It's a huge event though. There was TV coverage throughout the day, building up to the 7pm kick off, and at half time there was a concert in the stadium featuring Bruno Mars and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Maybe the FA Cup organisers should take a look. 

Our other bit of news is that we have booked our next trip. We're off to New York and Washington DC in a couple of weeks' time, during the school February break. We have booked tickets to see Phantom of the Opera on Broadway so we're all very excited. Lots of photos at the Empire State Building, Statue of Liberty and the White House to follow, I hope. The Obamas did invite us for afternoon tea but we had to tell them we would be too busy sightseeing. 

Finally, on to my regular weather update. After a pretty frigid couple of weeks of sub zero temperatures (and this wasn't even a polar vortex!) we enjoyed a couple of days when the temperature crept above freezing. It felt positively balmy and spring-like outside!! But the winter has returned. We had an inch or two of snow yesterday, probably the edge of Winter Storm Maximus which dumped around six inches of snow on the Mid West, Pennsylvania and New York. We have Winter Storm Nika arriving in the early hours of tomorrow with the forecasters predicting anywhere between six and 10 inches of snow through the day so we're expecting another school snow day tomorrow. Then, the next weather system is expected to move in on Sunday with the potential to be the biggest storm of the week. However, the forecasters are not committing themselves yet as there is a chance is could bypass Boston.

I am learning from talking to Bostonians that we are experiencing an unusually cold winter. Billy bargain, as Barry would say. Just our luck. I think I'm right in saying that we have had more snow than usual too. I'm told that the snow and the cold weather don't usually start until February but we've had them this winter from the middle of December. I'm starting to understand why many animals hibernate. However, there are some positives - for example, I now really appreciate it when we get the occasional overcast, damp, drizzly but mild day, the sort of day which is typical of a Welsh winter and makes everyone miserable. Believe me, it's much more pleasant when put in the context of a Boston winter!