There were grand intentions this weekend of tackling the mountain of recycling in the garage. But in order to get to it, we would have had to do some serious scrambling, since the recycling center doesn’t open until 9, but the first haircut appointment was at 10, and it takes about 20 minutes to get there. So….next weekend. And in the meantime I shall dream wistfully of one day living in a town with curbside recycling pick up. Sigh.

Today is my mom’s birthday, so there was the usual flurry of emails trying to schedule a time when all the family (in the area) could gather. Now that are are all adults and some of us have small children with busy lives, and all of us work full time and have things that pile up on weekends (recycling not withstanding), it is always a challenge to try to schedule birthday gathering appointments. Due to conflicts on all sides of the family, we ended up finally settling on Saturday lunch as the prime window of opportunity. Richard had a writer’s group in Sacramento and since he is the temporary leader of the group, he couldn’t skip it. But the rest of us all converged on a restaurant in Fairfield, which is the midway point between where we live and where my older sister and her family lives, and over salads and sodas and fried shrimp, we gave my mom her birthday presents. From me she got a small bag with a skein of yarn in it – a skein which I promptly took back from her after she opened it, because it (and nine of its little clones) are destined to become an afghan, as per her request, but I simply have not yet had time to start on it. People keep having babies and there was Christmas knitting last month and a short pile of other knitting (shop samples, test knitting, husbands who have been wistfully pointing to the holes in their felted slippers in the hopes of being given replacements for several months now), and so I figured the only way I was going to make room for getting this thing done was to gift it pre-knit, which would then force me (through a clever method of self-guilt) to get to work on it.

This morning was the usual swirl of recorder practice and choir practice and church. After the service, a few of us went next door to walk through the (very old) parsonage, since its last tenant moved out. As chair of the Board of Trustees, I’m responsible for everything to do with church property, and this little house needs some work. It’s larger inside than it looks, and it’s got that quaint victorian type charm (it was built in the 1800’s), but there is no insulation and the bathroom really needs to be completely gutted and replaced, and the floors in the largest rooms are so uneven you can literally see the ups and downs, and there are people on the building committee making noises about redoing wiring and stripping off the siding, and also, quite frankly, I was really curious to see what it looked like, since it’s not exactly polite to go strolling through a house, peering into closets when there is someone living there.

My parents invited us for dinner, and since it was my mom’s birthday, I baked her a cake (after some quick searching online to find a recipe that would fit my dad’s low-sodium diet) because everyone should always get a cake on their birthday. But otherwise, we finished off the day quietly, me manically knitting, first to finish Richard’s new slippers, and then to plow through nearly an entire baby sweater in one sitting (because the best part about knitting baby sweaters is that they are very, very small).

The news was chock full of dire warnings of freezing temperatures for last night and the next few days, with warming stations set up around the area, and even the possibility of snow in the Sacramento Valley. When I woke up this morning, there was no snow (alas), and the only sign of it having frozen the night before was the little lake of ice in the middle of the backyard, where the water from the sprinklers tends to puddle. And yes, we did turn the sprinklers back on, because it’s been a rather dry winter so far and even though we are all about conservation around here, there is only so long the fruit trees can go without water before they shrivel up and die. Although, considering that we did not go put little Christmas lights all over the tangelo and grapefruit trees last night to ward off the frost, it may be a moot point anyway.

Anyway. When I got to work, I noticed it was pretty cold, but I didn’t think much about it because, since our office is in an old and kind of ‘eclectic’ building, the temperatures tend to swing wildly throughout the day. So I turned on my space heater, as I usually do, and then started wondering why it didn’t seem to be doing any good. This is about when my coworker came over, also noting it was downright nippy in the office, so the two of us went over to the thermostat to investigate. And that is when we discovered that the thermostat in our office had apparently decided it wanted to stand in solidarity with the freezing temperatures outside, and thought we would all prefer it to be a nice, balmy 62 degrees.

The problem with this thermostat is that none of us have ever figured out how to make it work. They set it up when they installed it, but over the last year or two, each of us has tried to muddle through the array of buttons and incomprehensible instructions, trying to change the preset temperatures, but never with any luck. So my coworker and I did our usual routine of randomly stabbing at buttons in the hopes we might trigger something to happen, and then when that didn’t work, I tracked down a passing maintenance guy and decided it was time to let the big guns have at it. We have found it rather amusing that it took two of them to come in and do the random stab at buttons and inspecting of vents (indicating that it is not that we are all singularly stupid when it comes to thermostats, but that this thing really is incomprehensible to all), until they declared that it was possible that the thermostat might actually be broken, and then left, promising to come back later to see how things were progressing.

It appears, however, that at least some of the random button-pushing done by either my coworker and I, or by the maintenance guys, seems to have worked. After an hour or so the temperature in the office finally started to creep slowly upward. By the time I was sitting down to my highly nutritious lunch of microwave popcorn and peppermint hot chocolate (guess who forgot to bring her lunch today?), it had finally just about reached the temperature it should have been when we came in to the office this morning.

Yesterday, as the afternoon was stretching on for what seemed like forever, and the hands on the clock were taking their own sweet time inching toward 5pm, my coworker noted with a groan that if we thought this was bad, wait until next week, since that would be *five* days and not four. It’s hard to go back to a full time schedule after the holidays are over, especially after the last few week of December which are always filled with a hundred different reasons to get out of work. Leaving early for holiday dinners. Days off for the holidays themselves. Taking time off in between for whatever reason we can come up with. And then January hits – and with it, an entire stretch of over six weeks without a single holiday to break up the monotony (and January 1st does not count, because it only starts the month off) until sometime in mid February. No matter how much you might love your job, working in January is hard. And the hardest week of all to work is the week after vacation.

But aside from the pain of returning to work, it’s been an otherwise quiet and nice sort of week. Work and home and even time to watch a movie or two – one of which was Art School Confidential, which started out far more promising than it ended. We even did some new-to-us cooking, finally tracking down just what the heck to do with the portobello mushroom caps we bought on a whim last weekend (the first experiment turned out delicious; the second night’s experiment was the sort of cooking where we each took a bite, gave a little shudder, looked at each other across the table, and then he ordered the pizza while I scraped the remains into the disposal).

We’re slowly starting to make some progress on clearing up the library. I did some major reorganizing of my yarn stash on Monday, and we moved the big shelf into the computer room, where somehow Richard managed to wedge it into the space between the window and my secondary desk (and I do mean wedge – that shelf isn’t going *anywhere* after this. I’m not even sure how we will ever pry it back out again), and I cleared off enough shelf space above my computer desk so my slowly growing knitting library has space, thus clearing up more room in the newly wedged shelf unit for bins of yarn. This year I am starting off with grand plans. This year it is going to be all about reducing the stash, and I am off to a fine start with work on a pinwheel baby blanket made from some vintage pink swirled yarn that’s been sitting in one of my bins for far too long, waiting for me to make up my mind what to do with it. I still have to take down the big folding table that’s in there (which means tackling the random piles of stuff that are on *top* of the table first), but once that’s out of the way, we can start thinking about how best to turn the library into a temporary guest room space, since it’s about time we had something to offer to friends besides the rather uncomfortable (and slightly broken) futon downstairs.

Azzie is….well, how do I put this delicately. He’s very adorable, in a Nermal kind of way (all big-eyed and fluffy and cute) but he is unlikely to ever win a battle of wits against an overripe tomato. Let’s just say that where normal kittens usually figure out the whole cat-in-the-mirror thing by about ten weeks of age, Azzie didn’t get it until he was about two or three years. And we will not even discuss how he can get himself lost behind the (see-through) shower curtain. I merely mention this to provide background for the story.

Azzie is enamored of the DVD player. Ever since we got it, he loves to watch the drawer open and close. It fascinates him. Every time we watch TV, he comes scurrying into the living room just as we are about to get up because he is convinced that us in the living room = magic DVD drawer opening/closing. Naturally, because he is so very cute about it, we usually oblige him (also, it’s hysterical to watch). Every time the drawer opens he gets all quivery and excited, and hunkers down and gets all wide-eyed and he does this Every. Single. Time. The beauty of having the brain power of an overripe tomato is that the whole world is exciting and new every time you wake up.

So last night, we were doing the usual DVD-drawer play time, him hunkering down, and even occasionally scooting up to rear up on his hind legs, prairie dog-like, to wave one paw at the drawer, and I was busying myself in the kitchen, when Richard starts laughing hysterically and telling me to come quick. So I come back into the living room, and there is Azzie, in front of the DVD player, flopped over on his side, in the classic ‘cat submission’ pose. I’m not sure *why*, or what inspired him to suddenly decide to surrender to the mighty DVD player, but there he was, flopped over, feet in the air, tummy exposed.

Clearly, whatever the confrontation had been, the DVD player has now won. However, I do not know whether to laugh hysterically when I think about it, or fear for the safety of our planet. It’s a sad, sad world when your household appliances can dominate your household pets.

I awoke this morning early, to the unmistakeable sound that told me that I had better watch where I walked when I got out of bed, unless I really wanted to feel the charming squish of cold slimy hairball between my toes. I awoke again to the same sound, a half an hour later. By the third time, I realized that getting any more sleep was going to be impossible, especially because it occurred to me that there might be more landmines besides just the three I’d had the pleasure of hearing, so I finally got out of bed, and cleaned up the mess, and fed the cats so that if they insisted on continuing to hork great piles of slime loudly onto the floor, they would at least do it downstairs, out of hearing range.

We went out for breakfast because Richard wanted chocolate chip pancakes, and since this was his birthday, chocolate chip pancakes were what he got. And then we figured as long as we were out, we might as well do the massive grocery run we’ve been needing to for the better part of a week, so we went to CostCo and stocked up on fresh veggies and fish and laundry detergent and then on to the grocery store to get everything else.Somehow it seemed appropriate to be doing such a full scale grocery shopping trip on this, the last day of the calendar year. Stocking up in preparation for a new year of healthy food and healthier living.

This afternoon I put together two small lasagnas and popped them into the freezer, and decided it was time to try out the new apple peeler-corer-slicer contraption we picked up the last time we went up to Apple Hill. So I pulled all the old apples out of the fridge and any that were salvagable were processed quite quickly using that very handy little device, and were dumped into the crockpot with some cinnamon and apple juice and chopped dates, and they have been simmering in there now for several hours, in preparation for being turned into apple date butter, which I will pour into jars and seal for later in the year.

Richard got one of his birthday presents yesterday – the lemur I ‘adopted’ for him from the San Francisco zoo – and he knew about the main present, which is the purchase and installation of a new stereo system in his car that will let him plug in his MP3 player. So neither of those was much of a surprise. However, I am pretty sure that his third present came as a surprise, because few people would ever guess that for their birthday they would get a felted jellyfish.

We had such a late breakfast that we didn’t ever get around to eating lunch, and my parents took us out to dinner as a birthday treat for Richard (he’s getting three birthday dinners in a row, which works out quite well, all things considered). We never got around to making any sort of exciting plans for this evening, so we’ve basically just spent a fairly quiet day and except for the New Year wishes from the clerks at the grocery store, it would be easy to think this was just any other day. I think that the one nod we will make toward the end-of-year festivities will be to turn on the television at a minute before midnight, just to watch the stupid ball drop in Times Square, and maybe I will go downstairs and put some apple cider on to mull, just for the heck of it, while I am mashing up the apple butter and working ever closer to putting aside the very last bits of this year to savor in the next.

Tis the season for Holidailies

We went to the zoo again today. Now that we are members, we get in for free, plus we were given some free parking passes and some free admission passes, so we invited Richard’s family along as well. Only his mom and his niece could come, since everyone else was busy, but the four of us had fun walking around the zoo, and counting how many ways the critters found to pee (I think my favorite was the tiger who spent a long time drinking from his pool, and then as soon as he was done, turned around and promptly peed right in his own water source).

Since today was the ‘official’ birthday zoo trip for Richard (since his birthday is tomorrow), I gave him one of his birthday presents early – a ring-tailed lemur. Or actually, I ‘adopted’ the lemur for him through the zoo’s adoption program, so now he has a little picture of ‘his’ lemur and is entitled to attend ‘Zoo Parents Day’ in June. It wasn’t a huge surprise, since he was home when all the paperwork arrived, in an envelope clearly marked ‘Zoo Adoption Program’, but at least he says he hadn’t figured out which animal I adopted for him (or if he did, he was just nice enough to lie about it).

While most times we go to the zoo, I come back with a dozen or so really nice shots of the various animals, today’s visit and last week’s visit didn’t quite work out as I’d intended. Last Saturday, we were at the zoo and I reached into my purse to pull out my camera, only to discover that I had left the memory card in my computer, thus rendering my camera useless for the day. This Saturday I remembered to check my computer to make sure the memory card had not been left behind. However, when I reached into my purse, I discovered that not only had I left the memory card at home, I had also left the entire camera. I had a moment of panic there, trying to figure out what I did with it, before I remembered that the last time I took a picture was when we were at home, and that I did not somehow manage to leave it behind somewhere else.

We’d originally planned to go to dinner at a restaurant in San Francisco, but we ended up finishing up at the zoo earlier than expected, so we waved goodbye to Richard’s mom and niece, and then drove back home and made reservations at a place in Sacramento instead. Conveniently, I happened to have a gift certificate for that particular restaurant, received as a recent Christmas gift, which covered pretty much our entire dinner check, with the exception of the tip. Rather a nice way to end the day.

Tis the season for Holidailies

I had grand intentions for today. The big project on my list was to try to tackle the attic, laying down more flooring so we’d have a little bit more storage space beyond the tiny little square that was installed when the house was built. But last night, as my dad and I were standing up there, surveying the space, it was determined that this was something we probably did not want to tackle on our own. I knew we would have to build up over the existing loose insulation up there, but I didn’t realize quite how high we would have to go. So if we’re ever going to extend our storage space up there, we’re going to have to pay someone to do it – and likely pay them quite a lot. Sigh.

So instead of tackling attic flooring, which would have involved trips to the hardware store, and nail guns and drills and crawling around in loose insulation with face masks, Richard and I spent the day doing pretty much….nothing. We’re overdue for a grocery run, but somehow we cobbled together three decent meals with what we could find in the cupboards – I made pumpkin cornmeal waffles for breakfast, Richard made cheese and (turkey) bacon omelets for lunch, and together we made salmon shortcakes for dinner. Tthe rest of the day we spent lounging about. We watched Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which has been sitting on our shelf from Netflix for a few weeks, and determined that just because a movie has very cool CGI special effects does not mean that it does not need a plot. I read three books and spent a few hours working on the lace scarf. I think the only time either one of us actually left the house was when Richard walked down the block to pick up the mail.

I am a tiny bit disappointed that we did not get the attic flooring dealt with, like I had hoped, and there are other things we probably should have been doing today (like finishing a bookshelf, or organizing the library, or taking the mountains of recycling over to the center downtown), but it was a perfectly lovely, lazy day, and we get so very few of those any more, that sometimes, it is better to just spend a day doing nothing at all, just to have something to remember until the next time.

Tis the season for Holidailies

My little sister and her family flew back to Seattle today, where luckily they still have power (now that the blizzards have moved on to Denver and other places). They spent most of yesterday up in Napa, visiting with my older sister and her husband and the nephews, but because I was out most of yesterday with a group of knitter friends, doing a yarn crawl, and Richard was busy having fun with home ownership, we didn’t go with them. So this morning we went over for breakfast and stayed until when they had to leave for the airport, which was shortly after lunch. I have no idea how many games of Rat-a-Tat Cat we played with my niece, but it was a lot. There were also a few more games of table-top shuffleboard as well, and since she is sometimes a bit prone to drama, it was hysterical to watch. There were lots of hugs and discussions of upcoming visits, and my little sister and I chatted very briefly about ideas for where we might want to go for our 2007 Sisters Only Weekend, and we ate leftover Christmas cookies and chocolate pie and I promised to email them the directions for how to felt my niece’s very floppy pink and blue striped slippers, and then, before any of us were ready, it was time for them to go. And even though my parents are going to get to see them all very soon, since they are flying up in a few weeks so my dad can perform magic tricks for a certain soon-to-be-seven-year-old’s birthday party, I suspect that for Richard and I, it will be a lot longer.

It feels as if, now that my little sister has flown back home, and our tree has taken itself down, that Christmas is now officially over. There are still plenty of decorations around the house that eventually need to be put away, and I still do not have to go back to work until next Tuesday, but there are no cookies or fudge in this house, and there is no excited little niece to come bouncing over, wanting to read us stories (and I do not think I can even begin to describe how much I love what bookworms she and the oldest nephew are turning into), and instead of sneaking into the kitchen to steal some dark chocolate M&M’s or some cookies, we set up the EyeToy Kinetic and played games, because sometimes getting older just is not nearly as much fun as it is cracked up to be.

The rest of the day has passed in a quiet blur. I started working on a lace scarf I am doing as a sample piece for the yarn store, and we watched an episode of The Simpsons, and then we decided that we were finally ready to watch the amazing cinematic masterpiece that Richard put in my stocking this year, so he popped in Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter and spent the next hour or so alternately gaping in disbelief at the television, or giggling madly. Because I am not sure anything else could herald in the end of a holiday season so perfectly than a (extremely) low budget film with a tattooed, ear-pierced Jesus fights vampires and athiests with the help of a shiny rubber-clad Mary, and a masked Mexican wrestler, and did I forget to mention that every so often, they all also broke into dance and song?

Tis the season for Holidailies

Ever since we put up the Christmas tree, it has had a slight tilt. It wasn’t much to worry about at first, since the trunk itself was a bit warped, so it only looked tilted from one angle. But over the past few days I’ve noticed that the tilt seemed to be getting more pronounced. Last night, when we came home, I glanced over at the tree and made an off-hand comment that we probably ought to fix that tilt soon, before it gets worse. But we were tired and it didn’t seem all that important and so we went to bed and promptly forgot all about it. Until about 5:30 this morning, that is, when I was awakened by a loud crash, followed shortly thereafter by the panicked skittering of six sets of cat feet, tearing madly from anywhere they might have been in the house to somewhere else.

When you are a pet owner, and you are awakened by crashes, you learn, very quickly, to lie there and assess them. Does it sound like anything fragile? Does it sound like something that might be toxic to cats? Does it sound like someone breaking in? And the most important question of all, does it sound like it really needs to be cleaned up now, or can it wait until morning? I lay there and rationalized the sound and, because it was still so early and I was still so tired, I somehow convinced myself that it wasn’t anything important, and went back to sleep.

Alas, by the time the cats finally nagged me out of bed, about two hours later, I think you all know what I discovered downstairs, lying on the living room floor in a very prone position. In the cats defense, I doubt it was any of their fault. The only tree-related activity any of them have been involved in is when Azzie has tried to take out a little stuffed unicorn ornament (hung, on purpose, within reach of fuzzy paws because we have learned that the soft and unbreakable ornaments go on the bottom), but that was on a branch that was flexible enough so he could wrestle madly with the unicorn without disturbing the rest of the tree (usually while Richard and I sat within visual range and laughed hysterically, too). I think, in this case, maybe we have to blame Cthulu. After all, he was perched atop that tree with his team of degenerate servitor caribou, and everyone knows that ancient elder gods are never up to any good, despite the presence of sparkly gold horns of cheer.

I woke up Richard and between the two of us, we managed to pry off as many ornaments as we could find, and then clean up all the water and the pine needles. Luckily, only two or three ornaments broke, and those were ones we didn’t have any sentimental attachment to – all the others survived the crash just fine and the worse they got as wet. It was amusing, in a way, because we had both been considering taking the tree down a little early this year, just because it’s kind of in the way for when we use the EyeToy Kinetic. So maybe I am being too quick to blame Cthulu. Maybe he was just trying to be helfpul after all.

Tis the season for Holidailies

It is tradition for my mom and my sisters and I to get up early the day after Christmas and hit the after-Christmas sales. So this morning the four of us met in the parking lot at the Target in Vacaville (thus conveniently avoiding any actual shopping mall), and before the sun had risen, we were thronging into the store with dozens of other people, determined to score great deals on all the holiday things we’ll need for next year.

I found a few boxes of cards, and then picked up quite a nice selection of stocking stuffers for next year, and successfully avoided purchasing even a single roll of holiday wrapping paper (since we are currently swimming in it from a rather large wrap-purchasing fest during a similar post-holiday shopping trip a year or so earlier). Then, once my sisters and my mom were done in the holiday section, we meandered our way throughout the rest of the store, which meant that I managed to find parent-approved birthday presents for my niece and youngest nephew (whose birthdays are coming up in the next two months) and get some ideas for my mom’s birthday (which is coming up in a few weeks).

A quick detour to a coffee shop for sustance for my mom and sisters, since apparently none of them got any breakfast before they joined me at the store (while I, on the other hand, had swung through a local bakery to snag a bagel and an extra large cup of life-giving caffeine to sustain me through the shopping mania), and then we headed off to the next store on our list – Joann Fabrics. There I avoided doing anything more than glancing briefly at anything related to yarn, and instead focused on picking up a few more stocking stuffers for various family members for next year.

We hit a few more stores after that one, but by then we were all getting hungry and the early wake-up had started to hit me, despite the large coffee I had gulped down earlier, and it was far too early for lunch, so we all decided to go home and crash for an hour or two and then get back together later. I tried very hard to take a short nap, which thrilled the cats to no end, but it is sometimes hard to sleep when you are being purred out so enthusiastically by several felines who think that ‘napping’ really means ‘lying down and petting them’.

After lunch, Richard and I decided to hook up one of our new Christmas presents – an EyeToy Kinetic, and as we hooked it up and tried to try it out, we discovered a little problem. Amusingly, ever since we rearranged the furniture, we’ve noticed that the lighting in the room really isn’t very good, but it wasn’t until we tried to play with our new game that we finally broke down and took care of the situation. It didn’t take long to go out and procure two inexpensive floor lamps – one of which even has a flexible reading light which will be perfect for my knitting – and after that, the game worked perfectly. Basically, it’s a workout game, with a little camera, so that you see yourself on the screen, and the game can ‘sense’ where you are. You move around, trying to punch or kick or sweep objects off the screen, and it can track your movements and score you appropriately. There is even a program to set up a personal trainer, which will track your progress over twelve weeks and increase the intensity of your workouts as you improve.

I was busily ducking and dodging in front of the television, trying to protect a big blue orb from a bunch of little gold orbs by smacking at them when the phone rang, so after we both had a chance to do a basic workout with our new game, we inhaled a ‘healthy’ dinner of breakfast cereal and then picked up my little sister and her husband, and went off for an adults-only outing to see a movie – “Night at the Museum”.

The movie, athough a bit predictable, was just what we needed. It’s funny and entertaining, enough to make us laugh here and there, but not too complicated or intense, so that we could just sit back and have fun and not have to think too hard about it at all. We stopped for ice cream on the way home and sat in the store and chatted until we noticed they were starting to clean up and had turned off the ‘Open’ sign, so that was our cue to regretfully head back to the car and drive over to my parents’ house and drop off my sister and brother-in-law, and then come home.

Tis the season for Holidailies