We got our first snow of the year last night, and boy, was it pretty! It's been a while since we've seen a snowstorm and high winds at the same time.
Justin and I headed out around 4:30 pm yesterday to finally go get our Christmas tree. At this point in time, it was about 25 degrees with a feel-like factor of 9 degrees due to the gusty wind. Looking back, this may not have been the best time for Christmas tree hunting: we ended up going down to Fred Meyer and purchasing one of the first trees we laid eyes on.
It's a good thing there was only room for the tree over in the corner, because this tree only had one good side. Also, it's center branch was chopped off about four inches below the top of the tree, so I had to MacGuyver something (using a metal bookend and some elastic hairties) to the top of the tree so I could tie the bow up there. Oi.
It smells good, though. And it was fun listening to Perry Como's Christmas album and badgering Justin into helping me hang some ornaments.
Around seven, I took a look outside and it was snowing like crazy! The cool thing (no pun intended) was that the snow was super dry and the wind was blowing it all over the place in these huge gusts. Beautiful. We steamed some milk for some hot chocolate and watched Edward Scissorhands (interrupted at half-hour intervals when I kept jumping up to go look at the snow).
We only got a few inches, which is good because the temperature isn't supposed to rise above freezing for at least a week -- whatever we have, we're stuck with for a while. I'll have to post pictures once Sunset Pond freezes over in a few days.
Hopefully the snow will sweep off the steps easily so I don't end up breaking my neck or various appendages:
We'll see. In the meantime, I'm going to try to talk Justin into a walk to Starbucks in 28/13-degree weather. I'll let you know how it goes.
domingo, 14 de diciembre de 2008
sábado, 13 de diciembre de 2008
done… almost
Hey, everyone who may (against all odds) still pop by here from time to time despite my failure to keep up blogging...
We're doing great up here in The Ham. Here are a few updates, after which I hope to get back to semi-regular blogging if I can tear myself away from Facebook long enough...
Justin just graduated (yay!) and I am oh-so-close... I'll be graduating in March, but I figured out a way to do two correspondence courses this coming quarter. As a result, I'll only have to be on campus a couple of hours each Tuesday and Thursday with a prof I really admire. Easy, peasy.
I finished finals this past Tuesday and then had the rest of the week off work. I have been reveling in the extra time. How do I revel in extra time, you ask? I've been on an OCD rampage for nearly a week -- cleaning out neglected drawers, de-linting sweaters, organizing our game chest -- you know, all that important stuff. I can see most of my desk here in the office for the first time in about two months. Ahhh. That's better.
I've also been doing large amounts of cooking and baking. Which, for Justin, helps to offset the fact that so much of my time has been spent, say, trying out all the pens and markers in our pen box to see which ones need to go.
Justin and I treated ourselves to a used bookstore visit a few days ago. It's fantastic, to have the time available to actually read the books we purchased. I finally read Little Prince to the end, knocked out The Catcher in the Rye for the first time, and since we bought a pretty version of Love in the Time of Cholera rather than the hideously ugly one Justin had picked up a while back, I think I'll be finally able to give that one a good shot. I know it seems silly to, um, judge a book by its cover, but this copy is beeee-yutiful. It's hardcover and has those cool uneven page edges and everything.
It seems I am not a good candidate for the Kindle. I like my cool uneven pages. Grace knows what I mean.
By the way, don't bother with the movie version of LitToC. It was awful. I made Justin stop it about forty-five minutes in because I didn't want to have the movie's lameness stuck in my head when I finally got around to finishing the book. Yikes, it was bad.
A few others I picked up:
Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard by Isak Dinesen. Includes "Babette's Feast," which I've been wanting to read for quite a while.
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov --This falls into the category -- "should'a read a long time ago." Continuing on with the weird fascination with how books are presented, I was able to find an Everyman's Library version. This makes me quite happy. They have the little ribbon in the middle to use as a bookmark. I never end up using it, but knowing it's there. That's the thing.
Arcadia: A Play by Tom Stoppard -- this was a recommendation from one of my favorite lit profs. I have a list about six pages long from Dr. M, listing what he considers the best of literature from ancient writers to today. It's in ten-point font. Might take me a while to work through it.
And this last book, Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary, is by Rebecca Brown, a woman I had the privilege of meeting when I was at the writer's conference over the summer. For several years, she was a home care worker for people with AIDS (though fiction, she drew on her experiences when writing The Gifts of the Body) -- and then she ended up caring for her own mother during the last six months of her battle with cancer. This book chronicles that journey.
Rebecca is one of the warmest, most human people I've ever had the opportunity to sit at a breakfast table with. Check out her stuff.
* * *
Alright, kids, I think that will do it for now. Hope you're enjoying the holiday season (I find that to do this, you just need to avoid going out as much as possible). More soon, if all goes as planned. Which it frequently doesn't.
* * *
Oh -- one last thing. The hubby and I are all signed up to go to the Writer's Conference this coming summer... together.
We're doing great up here in The Ham. Here are a few updates, after which I hope to get back to semi-regular blogging if I can tear myself away from Facebook long enough...
Justin just graduated (yay!) and I am oh-so-close... I'll be graduating in March, but I figured out a way to do two correspondence courses this coming quarter. As a result, I'll only have to be on campus a couple of hours each Tuesday and Thursday with a prof I really admire. Easy, peasy.
I finished finals this past Tuesday and then had the rest of the week off work. I have been reveling in the extra time. How do I revel in extra time, you ask? I've been on an OCD rampage for nearly a week -- cleaning out neglected drawers, de-linting sweaters, organizing our game chest -- you know, all that important stuff. I can see most of my desk here in the office for the first time in about two months. Ahhh. That's better.
I've also been doing large amounts of cooking and baking. Which, for Justin, helps to offset the fact that so much of my time has been spent, say, trying out all the pens and markers in our pen box to see which ones need to go.
Justin and I treated ourselves to a used bookstore visit a few days ago. It's fantastic, to have the time available to actually read the books we purchased. I finally read Little Prince to the end, knocked out The Catcher in the Rye for the first time, and since we bought a pretty version of Love in the Time of Cholera rather than the hideously ugly one Justin had picked up a while back, I think I'll be finally able to give that one a good shot. I know it seems silly to, um, judge a book by its cover, but this copy is beeee-yutiful. It's hardcover and has those cool uneven page edges and everything.
It seems I am not a good candidate for the Kindle. I like my cool uneven pages. Grace knows what I mean.
By the way, don't bother with the movie version of LitToC. It was awful. I made Justin stop it about forty-five minutes in because I didn't want to have the movie's lameness stuck in my head when I finally got around to finishing the book. Yikes, it was bad.
A few others I picked up:
Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard by Isak Dinesen. Includes "Babette's Feast," which I've been wanting to read for quite a while.
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov --This falls into the category -- "should'a read a long time ago." Continuing on with the weird fascination with how books are presented, I was able to find an Everyman's Library version. This makes me quite happy. They have the little ribbon in the middle to use as a bookmark. I never end up using it, but knowing it's there. That's the thing.
Arcadia: A Play by Tom Stoppard -- this was a recommendation from one of my favorite lit profs. I have a list about six pages long from Dr. M, listing what he considers the best of literature from ancient writers to today. It's in ten-point font. Might take me a while to work through it.
And this last book, Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary, is by Rebecca Brown, a woman I had the privilege of meeting when I was at the writer's conference over the summer. For several years, she was a home care worker for people with AIDS (though fiction, she drew on her experiences when writing The Gifts of the Body) -- and then she ended up caring for her own mother during the last six months of her battle with cancer. This book chronicles that journey.
Rebecca is one of the warmest, most human people I've ever had the opportunity to sit at a breakfast table with. Check out her stuff.
* * *
Alright, kids, I think that will do it for now. Hope you're enjoying the holiday season (I find that to do this, you just need to avoid going out as much as possible). More soon, if all goes as planned. Which it frequently doesn't.
* * *
Oh -- one last thing. The hubby and I are all signed up to go to the Writer's Conference this coming summer... together.
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