Redux, revisited

How is it that we are supposed to get even more snow?

Okay, Universe, I hear you.

This is definitely a winter for the scrapbook.

Snowpocalypse and Sniffles

Snowpocalypse and a head cold mean tea, blankets, and knitting.

Wintery Mix & Tea Cake

The snow began falling just before dawn, and the world was covered in a quiet fluff of white when I woke up.

Overall, the day was perfectly spent under a blanket with a book, specifically bell hooks’ Teaching Community. The day seemed to call for tea cake, specifically using Snow Monkey Plum tea, and it baked while I read, the snow and sleet making soft ticks against the windows, just about a perfect winter’s day.

Snow Day

The snow has been falling all morning and I've been enjoying the day with tea and graph paper. Numbers for active cases continue to rise, the highest they have yet been, and nothing seems to make sense.

There's a lot of editing and proposal work that is in progress on my desk as I walk away from the computer this afternoon, but progress is happening.

The Memoir continues to unfold in surprising and tender ways. This is not a project that will be completed swiftly, at least not yet, but I'm here for it for as long as it takes.

I'm craving the countryside again, and gardens of course. January is the time of taking stock and preparing the ground for planting. I love Virginia, but the city is less and less my home. Visions of a pond with or without koi, a path that ends at a plum tree, a stone statue beside a butterfly bush.

The Way of Peace.

White Christmas

It rained all day on Christmas Eve, then just before midnight it turned to snow. You could almost hear the sleigh bells.

 Thank you, Universe.

Snow Falling on Warm Ground

Snow Day

The view from my desk window.

First Snow

As the first snow began to fall, nothing amounting to much yet, I hit send on the submission of the critiques for the workshop's December pieces, putting a period on my obligations for my first term as an MFA student in creative writing.

Tonight is the Friends' Winter party, and we are all looking forward to gathering in the dark to share love and warmth, food and friendship.

Winter Weekend

The home front had to have some ugly and uncomfortable unveiling before any positive work could begin. Hopefully the worst of it is behind us and we can begin to walk forward, even if it's with baby steps. 

And through it all, we continue on, a family, whole.

Check out Little Miss and her new kitchen. 

She's wearing the dress that I knit for her this Christmas, and she loved the kitchen and the dress equally.

Some of those baby steps forward include getting the Little Mill. 

We ground our first batch of flour -- right there in our own house!

We used the first batch of Hard Red Wheat to make Graham Crackers (they were really good!) and then Yet Another Batch of Sourdough Crackers (these are so good that we have to make a double batch just to have some to put in the bread box). Then on Sunday evening, we ground some soft white wheat to make a batch of lemon wafers -- so thin, crisp and filled with lemony cheerfulness, a perfect end to the snowy and super-cold weekend. 

She is wicked-good at Parcheesi as well as cards. You have been warned.

I started the reading for one of my Spring Term classes and I'm looking forward to it very much.

Despite the chaos, there is balance.

Despite the rage, there is love.

Snow Day

It's here.

We had snow when I got up at 6.

Porridge and hot chocolate are at the ready.

Snow Day Fun

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Snow on the farm in early December

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recent events

The boys seem to have been out of school the past two weeks more than they have been in it. Between dental appointments and weather closings, this has been the strangest back-to-school month I think I have ever seen. On the positive side, we love our new family dentists. Dr. Mills specializes in children's dentistry, and the boys can't say enough wonderful things about her and her staff. Given that they used to lose sleep before seeing a dentist before meeting Dr. Mills, I think this is simply marvelous. Yesterday school started at the scheduled time for the first time all week. Of course, we ended up needing to take Ethan to have his hand x-rayed just to verify that Tuesday's fall wasn't any more serious than soft-tissue damage. Ethan and David went to an immediate care clinic in Salem together, and made the best of it, enjoying a late lunch at Five Guys before trucking back up the mountain to school. For his part, Ethan was a real trooper through the whole thing. David rescheduled his own appointment and does indeed have a serious sinus infection that has decided to make itself known in his lungs as well. He felt horrible this morning, and I'm keeping my ear out for pneumonia, which aside from being A Really Scary Thing to me, is also pretty serious. Between school weirdness, weather, dental and doctor appointments, David and I do somehow manage to show up to our jobs on occasion, mostly through tag team efforts¹. My job is going quite well, and I’m enjoying adding additional products to my testing responsibilities. I’ve just been ‘officially’ given my second piece of software to manage and I’m enjoying figuring out how it all fits together. It has a quite intricate interface, with multiple drop-in components, each with their own configuration, so I certainly haven’t any lack of intellectual work in front of me. And, as always with software, there is a release deadline sitting right on top of another build, so the pace isn’t anything to sneeze at, either. David has likewise seen his lab get into some serious R&D stuff, so the schedule there is tight and demanding and weird as only a biological lab would be. On this upside, they are doing some cool development stuff, and chatting about work is far from the typical ‘how was your day’ fare. We are also enjoying our time at home, weirdly scheduled though it might be. This past weekend we took yet another trip to Floyd, this time with the boys, and visited School House fabrics (which the boys tolerated), the general store (which the boys loved) and a custom woodworker’s storefront. We had dinner at the Mexican restaurant and ended up poking around in the clothes store, where I picked up a new pair of pants and a sweater than I just fell in love with. We ended up designing ever-so-many things, and it was a nice outing, all told. Sunday we had plans aplenty from which to choose: we ended up scrapping them all, staying inside and making a carrot cake. How yummy and cozy was that? The boys are looking forward to more snow, as the recent acquisition of snow-discs had them howling with glee on Thursday and Friday as they turned the driveway into a slalom course. David took the tractor and scraped the snow into banks around trees and at the end of the driveway, and I swear they would have stayed out until hypothermia set in if we hadn’t tempted them back with warm food and hot chocolate. At home we are watching netflix and library selections, with a few randomly selected episodes of Firefly just for fun. David and I watched Babel (not so great: quite dislocated and dislocating, perhaps by design) and The Devil Wears Prada (wonderful and funny). From the library the whole family watched Holes (outrageously funny and cute), The River Wild (a touching and exciting tale) and The Dangerous Lives of Alter Boys (serious and thought-provoking, despite the humor; an entry on the Must See List). Those are all on their way back, and I'm looking forward to our next installment this weekend. 1. More than ever, this month I feel as though we are the Wonder Twins, assessing the latest split-second development, declaring "Form of. . a taxi!”" and dashing out the door in our various directions.