Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Christmas Eve


It's Christmas Eve morning.
All the presents are wrapped. The shopping's done. The cooking is pretty much set. I just have to clean the house so Santa doesn't find a mess. We've had winter storms for the past few days. Nathan was off school on Friday and Monday and it was too cold for them to go out and enjoy the snow day (minus wind chill). We got about 2 feet of snow altogether, but the wind blew it in drifts. Jordyn and I walked Nathan home from school yesterday and because some of the sidewalks were not shovelled, had a rollicking good time climbing snow mountains.
It's supposed to rain today, go figure! Although it is then going to freeze. I have two errands to run today: get the great Christmas morning coffee cakes from Walther's bakery and pick up a couple of books from the library, so I hope it's not too icy. Then it's just sit and wait for Christmas, watch Christmas movies and go to Christmas mass at 6:00 this evening.

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Five Days Before Christmas

It's beginning to look a LOT like Christmas. We had about 10 inches of snow yesterday that came down all day, closed the schools and really developed just like the weatherman predicted. We were all cozied up not having to go out in the storm. DH wrapped the kid's gifts while watching "Since You Went Away" an absolutely wretching but terrific movie. I finished the Christmas cookies: the last of the Cuccidati (Italian fig cookies), jam thumbprints, Mexican Wedding Cakes and pizzelles. We then watched "Operation Petticoat" after dinner. What a perfect day!

I started Collins "Flame" scarf. I think this will be just what he wanted.

We're supposed to have a lake effect storm tomorrow. Since all the shopping is done and we have no where to go, we'll just hunker down and watch the snow pile up.

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Sunday, December 7, 2008

The Best Laid Plans

“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley.” Robert Burns

With every good intention I wrote the previous post and the next week my computer developed a "bug". Not a tiny virus, but a brain wiping behemoth that caused our hard drive to lose it's mind-- all of it. Of course being the computer savvy couple that we are, nothing was backed up.

So instead of knitting, blogging, reading or sleeping, I have been trying to restore most of what was lost.

One of the most trying things was trying to remember where we put that interesting article, pattern, web site etc. Or getting our home page to look just like it did. Or re-ripping all of our cd's. Or trying to remember all of the various login's and passwords. Ugh!!!! Fortunately I had pictures on Flickr.

So now I have Norton Ghost which my son-in-law says will restore my settings. We are going to purchase a removable hard drive and I have only re-ripped my Christmas cd's until we get that.

It has been a wintry 17 degrees and snowy blowy the past few days and that will continue through the week. I love this kind of weather at this time of year, having the Christmas decorations up, the fireplace on, hot cocoa and a pile of books. It's so cozy. By February I am so completely done with it, however.

I am doing well with the Christmas knitting I wasn't going to do this year. I finished washcloths with different characters on them for all the grandchildren and the step-grand children.
I used free patterns I found on Ravelry. There are dinosaurs, stars, a penguin, a bat, a horse and a sheep.
I still have four pair of slippers to complete for the girls in WV and Jordyn, but I should get them done this week. I am going to start the scarf for Collin that he requested. A "fire" scarf of yellow, red and orange. We shouldn't have any trouble spotting him with that combination. I'll post it here when I have it started.

Our wonderful library site has added videos to the downloadable audio books, so now you can download things like the old "Dick Van Dyke" show (one of my personal favorites) or the Three Stooges. It's great and they all upload onto my Axim. So now I can watch them while I'm in the waiting mode (doctor's, dentist, meetings, boring drives, etc). They have also greatly expanded the amount of books available and you can have 20 downloads at a time. I was able to replace all of the "In Death" series that I had ripped to my computer. This is such a godsend to retired folks like myself and others who are feeling the economic pinch.


DD#1 has added me to Facebook, so now I have something else to lure me on the computer.