Merry Christmas

Twinkles says…..

Jack says too…..

Cat agrees….

Kitten seconds the motion…..

Bodie is wondering why it’s taking so long…..

Trixie and Beta say Get on with it and tell everybody…….

Merry Christmas from all of us to all of you!

 

Winter Solstice

Tomorrow is the first day of winter, which means it is the winter Solstice, or the shortest day of the year.

Time and date dot com says this about it-

The December solstice will occur at 23:38 (or 11.38pm) Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) on December 21, 2010. It is also known as the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere and the summer solstice in the southern hemisphere due to the seasonal differences. Its date varies from December 20 to December 23 depending on the year in the Gregorian calendar.

I don’t think one should waver when it comes to the Gregorians. Just sayin’

That being said, it’s snowing today. Again. Fortunately, I now have Cody to help me shovel. Which we will have to do in an hour or so.

Is it so different than the last blizzard pictures? No. Not really. Although, this is supposed to be a little heavier snow. Yippee. (Insert sarcasm font here).

Between yesterday and today we have had a bit of a breakdown in systems. First of all, our big TV broke. The color no longer converges correctly. Magic Focus gets stuck on Blue, and we cannot manually align the colors. It does add a lovely jaundiced pallor to the characters on TV. But can get somewhat irritating after a quarter or two of football. So we went online and looked around and found that 1) the TV never had a very good customer rating and 2) average life span is about 5 years. 5 years? Really? Because all of my other TV’s last forever. I probably have one in the storeroom that still has dial channel changing on it.

Oh well, I give up. So off to Best Buy with Cody today, after a massage at the gym. One should always have a massage before spending money on a new TV. Luckily, it’s Dave’s birthday in 3 weeks so Happy Birthday honey. The broken TV was also a birthday present, 7 years ago. I can’t keep this up.

Here’s what we got-it was on sale. I was going to go with a little cheaper model, but, well, Cody was with me and the rest is history.

• Insignia™ - 42" Class / 1080p / 120Hz / LCD HDTV

Oh, and by the way, we got the 4 year warranty, just so you won’t worry

After this, we went shopping a little more but it was starting to snow. So we hurried home after going to Pine Needles Quilt Shop. For some reason, Cody said there was nothing to look at there, and it bugged him that there were no price tags on the sewing machines. Ha. You don’t want to know, honey.

Arriving home, we found that the pilot light was out on the heater, and  the wiring on the kitchen TV cable box was broken. Man. I am almost afraid to be using the computer.

And speaking of which, sometimes certain people complain when there is not a new blog posting in what they consider a timely manner. (You know who you are…..) Maybe this will offer some explanation.

Sometimes I just can’t fight it. It’s like the help I got when wrapping presents.

Yes he is lying in the box I was going to use. And that crappy brown blanket hanging over the door is Dave’s way of keeping drafts out. Ghetto, eh?

Jack was also busy over by the quilting area-

The Chaos theory.

Here he pretends to ignore the mess he made and study his bag.

Jack seems to be getting quite a bit of press in the blog lately. Probably because, as we’ve seen, he insinuates himself into everything, unlike my little Yeltsie, who very politely sits on her cat square and lets bygones be bygones.

Besides all this, last week at work I heard a little buzz from the next cubical over, and look what I saw-

Mary was sewing. Sewing! Yep, that’s what we do at work. Actually, her machine broke, so she was trying to use the machine Laura brought in. It gave me just a little chuckle.

Oh, and speaking of Laura, we like to play some games on Facebook. She has always beaten me at Bejeweled, and now we have found a new game Zuma. I’ll just show you the leader boards so you can see what I am talking about.

Oh, wait. Is that me at the top of the leader board on both games this week? Well, I’d never intentionally post something like that. Dave asked me if Laura and I had a little bit of a competition going, and I said that Laura and I would never compete over something as freaking important as this so trivial. Seriously. I don’t know where he gets these ideas.

So, off to shovel. The weather guy on the radio said that this isn’t going to be another “snomageddon” like the last one. But it looks like it is going to be enough. Again.

Hey-Merry Christmas to all, and to all, a Good Night.

Best Laid Plans

Woody Allen said “If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans”. And Julia Sweeney did a stage show called “God Said Ha!”, along the same premise. I like this one “When we make plans, God laughs”. Any way you say it, it means the same thing. And so we experienced this last week when Cody’s fiancé, Kate, decided that she didn’t want to get married right now, or maybe never, taking us all by surprise. We were saddened by the news, but things happen for a reason and hopefully when we figure out what the reason is, it will have all been worth it.

And on the home front, things continue to go along, and along, and along.

Blane moved, and his friends helped out.

Jeremy provided the truck

And Daylen provided the dog

I’ve known those boys for a long time.

So that was successful, and the dog sure is cute.

It snowed about 8 or so inches, and we shoveled.

Look at how good we did

Very professional. Unfortunately, this snow cancelled my knitting Block of the Month, and my massage, because I couldn’t get out in time.

The dogs watched, but did not help.

We put up the Christmas tree. Christmas. I am so behind on Christmas. And truthfully, I didn’t even put up the tree, Dave and Jack did.

Here’s the tree, from the “Jackcam”

Seriously, this picture made me laugh so hard I could hardly hold the camera. And I’ll bet you’re thinking “Really? Am I missing the joke? How exactly is that funny?”. Well, trust me, it’s very funny. Even Jack thinks it’s funny.

I finished this quilt top for the shop

Jack messed it all up and I had to distract him with a large bag. Jack loves a bag. Any bag.

See him? Well, then look what happened-

It’s Yeltsie! Jack is very afraid of Yeltsie (who’s real name is Elvin), who is half his size and has no tail.  But Jack doesn’t see Yetsie, yet. But then, oh no.

Well, that wasn’t so bad, except Jack came out a little and guess what he saw?

He saw Elvin. And then he was trapped in the bag. The only thing left was to escape and run away.

And so ended that saga. Which, by the way, is repeated about 20 times a day.

While this was happening inside, we were having another snow outside. A week after the first snow. Only this wasn’t just a snow, this was an all out blizzard.

Yep, white out conditions.

We did the first round of shoveling on Saturday, and when we got up on Sunday this is what we saw.

More snow.

And more snow. But at least we didn’t have a 5 foot berm across our driveway, like the neighbors. (That’s Dave providing scale) But at least the neighbors didn’t have to shovel by hand, like we did. So it sort of evened out. Sort of.  We moved a lot of snow. By hand.

 

And of course, it was the weekend so instead of missing my crappy job, I missed all the fun stuff-my sewing class and my knitting meet up. Not to mention the Christmas shopping I am now doing on my lunch hour all week long, instead of my gym time. Ok, I am only shopping for two lunch hours, but it seems like more. Especially when I had it all planned out for Sunday. Damn you Mother Nature!

Nothing is scheduled for next weekend, so the weather should be great.

So, as I said life goes on. And we aren’t making any plans whatsoever, because lately it seems that when we make plans, God laughs.

Vacation

Yes, I was on a “vacation” to Tacoma, so I have been negligent of the blog. And I have to say, when I am on Ravelry, for example, and there is a link to someone’s blog, and then they haven’t posted for a while-really ticks me off.

Anyway, on Nov 22nd, Dave and I took off for Seattle. There was talk of a snowstorm in Seattle, and I tried to tell Dave that in Seattle, if the going gets tough, the tough abandon their cars and run away. What a doubter he was.

We got to the airport at oh dark thirty and this is what it looked like.

Seriously. I love an empty airport. I got the whole body scan too, but alas, no pat down. Dave was really looking forward to the pat down but he just got the regular metal detector. Hmmm.

We flew out without a hitch-

At the very end of the flight I discovered that the little TV in the seatback in front of me also had a moving map-dang if I wouldn’t have watched that thing throughout the whole flight.

Can you see the little airplane? We are almost there! (This might be a picture you want to click on to make bigger-it is really quite cool)

And when we arrived and started driving-this is what happened

People-are we in Minnesota or what? It actually wasn’t like this the whole way, only about the last 10 or so miles. But we arrived unscathed physically. Mentally I was a little on edge. It stopped snowing long enough to get to Safeway. Yep. Thank God for the Safeway. I spend so much time there on vacation, yet I have no pictures of the place. Next year.

Here’s the back yard. There was quite a bit of snow. The Seattle/Tacoma area does not do well with snow.

This sort of says it all-except I really like this one too-

-especially at the end when the car smashes into the cars at the bottom of the hill. Truly awe inspiring. Why people were going up and down this hill in an ice/snow storm is really beyond me. Another reason to live where it’s flat.

This little tidbit, from KOMO news (yes, we watched a lot of KOMO news, and it tickled Dave to no end that it was KOMO news) about the car issues-

“Cars, trucks and buses still litter many roads throughout the area after drivers abandoned them during Monday's nightmare evening commute, and a bitter cold setting in has turned many areas into sheets of ice”

This from KING 5

“The Washington State Patrol reported that in King County alone on Monday, troopers responded to 305 collisions and 405 disabled vehicles, mostly on Interstate 5, I-90, and I-405.”

Disabled-read abandoned. Like-it’s taking 6 hours to go 20 miles-I’m walking. I pointed this out to Dave several times-he is now a believer.

So that was interesting. We stayed home Monday night and Tuesday.

Happy, the cat, was a fun diversion.

 

See the shoe-that’s in there for scale-the cat is seriously giant.

Kate and Cody arrived on Wednesday, but sadly, Blane missed his connection Thursday AM so he wasn’t there for Thanksgiving dinner.

The whole Thanksgiving party started out with this giant bottle of wine.

Oh yeah, that’s what I’m talkin’ about. I personally drank out of the normal sized bottle because I am not a fan of the red. The whole family partook of some sort of grape while huddling around the fire. (Did I mention my parents like to keep most of the house at a toasty 52 degrees?)

Dinner was at the country club-very nice. We missed Blane and sent him this by phone.

We were in pain from eating so much-and notice we brought the giant bottle of wine with us.

The next day Dave, Cody, Kate and I went to Seattle to see the Macy’s parade and do a little tourist thing.

Look-giant cakes.

This one made Kate laugh so hard she couldn’t speak. It’s not the dragon, it’s the guy in front of the dragon. Kate thought he was just an old guy who happened to wander in the parade. After a while we realized that he was actually a part of the festivities, but we got a good chuckle out of it.

There were also pipers and dogs. It was a fun parade.

We took off from here and went to the Market (after a stop at Starbucks, of course)

That was fun. Kate got to see a few fish getting thrown. I picked up a couple of things for Mary and Laura, left behind to watch the animals (they deserved much more-I mean, I don’t even like to watch my own animals-know what I’m sayin?)

Saturday night was out to dinner at the Mexican place, about a mile away. Dave drove. Shocker.

Here’s Cody and his look alike cousin Katie.

Really, they look more like brother and sister, and I always think of that theme song-

And of course, Cody and the lovely Kate, the best looking part of our group.

I took them to the airport on Sunday, early, and it was packed. PACKED! I think 90,000 people were through Sea-Tac that day-70,000 of them dropping people off the same time I was.

We stayed home and got ready to go-I untangled yarn by the fire while Dave watched the Alamo

And on Monday, we went back to the airport, and flew the other way, back to MN

I had the briefest glimpse of Mt Rainier.

And by the time we left, all the snow was gone.

We got home to rain. What is wrong with that picture? Flew to Seattle in a blizzard, came home to St. Charles in a rain storm.

Welcome home.