Christmas has come and gone.

Wow....what a whirlwind of a Christmas week. It's been a good Christmas but oh so very busy. I have lost track of what day of the week it is.


One of my best Christmas presents was having Damon home from Seattle for a week. It is always so nice to have him around, even if he wants to spend most of his time snapping pictures of his mother. We miss him so much and wish we were able to see more of him.


After a long day of shopping on Christmas Eve day I came home to the smell of Damon cooking chocolate peanut butter cookies. I walked in the door and said, "Oh..yummmm. That smells so good. And what is that other smell? It smells just like...wax. Wax? Why does it smell like wax is burning in here?" Paul and Damon looked at each other. "Do you think it could be the waxed paper on the cookie sheets?" Yikes. Waxed paper on cookie sheets? Damon seemed to think that waxed paper would work just as well as parchment paper on the cookie sheets. WRONG! I came home just in time. Damon and Paul madly scurried to scrape the cookies from the melted wax. The cookies were a bit deformed but tasted great. Not even waxy.


Christmas morning was bright and sunny. We enjoyed our traditional Christmas breakfast in the Belly Acres room and then we opened our gifts.


Paul always manages to get one silly looking hat for Christmas.


Who else but Paul could find a biography of the American Rifle so fascinating?


All this gift un-wrapping is pretty wearing on Paul and he had to pause for a power-nap.


Late in the afternoon we enjoyed a ham dinner by the lights of the Christmas tree. The only thing missing was a raging snowstorm. Maybe next year!


The day after Christmas found us motoring (that's a really old fashioned word, isn't it?) to Boston to visit Kara and Sean and the grandchildren. We opened more presents, had a nice lunch and then drove back home.

Yesterday I visited my mother in Hartford. She is looking so well and happy which is the best Christmas present she could give to me. Damon happened to be having lunch with some friends in a near by town and surprised us both by showing up at my mother's door.

Today we drove to Providence to visit Brett and Megan and the twins........and to have a sampling of Megan's wonderful cooking. We drove to the airport on the way home to leave Damon off and now we are back down to just the two of us.


The sky tonight was a "Mrs. Santa Claus is baking cookies" kind of sky. A beautiful but cold looking December sky. It's a wonderfully cozy looking sight when you are sitting inside by the fire looking out.


So now it is back to just us two. It's quiet. It's a little lonely, just a little. But we have some happy Christmas memories to make us smile. It's been a busy and wonderful Christmas.

And tomorrow I have to get those darn Christmas cards sent out................

Silent night. Holy night.

My favorite night of the year is almost over. I love Christmas Eve for it's quiet. It has to be the most peaceful night of the year. It seemed like this year I was farther behind than I have ever been. I still have gifts that haven't been wrapped. I didn't start making my traditional Christmas breakfast until 10:30pm.


I have had the recipe for this breakfast since the kids were very small. I heard a woman talking about it on the radio many years ago and I grabbed the closest piece of paper and quickly wrote down the directions. But each year it gets more faded and more tattered, as you can see. I really need to re-copy it in case the day comes when I can't read it any more. But somehow I really enjoy using this old, faded copy. A lot of memories come with this piece of paper.


A very merry Christmas to you all.

Let it snow.

The promised snow finally came yesterday. This is why I am glad that I live here. I love scenes such as this. A winter without snow is one of the most depressing things I know. One year we had a winter with no snow at all. Every day was the same. Sunny and 35, sunny and 35, sunny and 35. It was SO boring.
Paul has been visiting his mother in Florida during this snow event. I've been home keeping the home fires going, literally. Knowing that we were going to have a significant snow fall, Paul asked his brother-in-law to keep our driveways plowed. He also asked the teen age boy next door to shovel the walks at the office and the deck at the house.

I was sitting in the Belly Acres room last night and heard the comforting sounds of the brother-in-law plowing over at the office. I knew he would be at the house soon. Then I heard the sound of a tractor outside my back door. What in the heck?? Now there are two people plowing? Where did that other vehicle come from? This is very odd. I heard the brother-in-law's truck start it's trek to the house. Hmmmm.....this should be interesting. Two people plowing at once. It certainly sounded like a busy place. And then suddenly things went haywire, just like I thought they would. I looked out my window and saw what looked like a truck and a tractor at a standstill, like two dogs at a stand-off. It seemed that teen-age boy decided he would rather drive vehicles and plow than do mundane shoveling so simply showed up and decided to do what he likes to do best.


The driveway coming to our house goes down-hill. When it crosses in front of our house it flattens out. Then it goes back up the hill again as it takes a curve to the back of the house. As brother-in-law was coming to the house to plow, teen-age boy on the tractor decided he was finished and began to head home. They both met on the flat area of the driveway in front of the house. Each one attempted to back up to let the other pass. But neither vehicle could back up the slippery hill. They tried over and over........up and down again. Uuuuuppp and down again. Sometimes they would just sit there facing each other like two strange dogs preparing to fight for their own turf. What a predicament. Meanwhile they are getting dumped on by cold snow. I got so nervous watching I had to take refuge in the basement.


Brother-in-law eventually drove his truck onto the snow covered lawn and turned around, spinning his wheels. Teen-age tractor driver spun around and got stuck on the icy hill and just couldn't go any further. A liberal application of salt eventually fixed that and he was on his way. Even after all that I bet he would still rather plow than shovel.

Something good is coming!

This is it. My favorite time of year. I just love the snow. I really really do. So I am very happily anticipating our first "storm" of the year tomorrow. Not a biggie........6-14 inches. But big enough to make me happy. The start time is between 9 & 11 am so I am hoping I will wake up to a happy no-school announcement tomorrow. Then I can snuggle down and think of what's to come.

Unfortunately, what I happily look forward to is a nuisance to some other members of our family. My niece is supposed to be flying home from college in Utah but is stuck in Utah right now until the planes start flying again. Damon is supposed to fly home from Seattle on Saturday and may be in the middle of flight delays. Paul is to fly home on Sunday from a visit with his mother. Sunday we are expecting more snow. Once everyone is safely home and snug inside their homes we will all be able to enjoy nature's wonderful gift.

Book laden

I'm in the middle of the last minute push for Christmas shopping. It seems like every year I tell myself that NEXT year I will not wait until the last minute....that I will have it all done by Thanksgiving. And every year finds me running out after school to try to cram lots of shopping in in a few short hours. I get home late, eat dinner late and wish I could just sit down with a hot cup of tea and listen to Christmas music as I relax in front of my tree. There was only one year that I had my shopping done before Christmas and that was the year that I was expecting a baby at Christmas time. I wouldn't recommend doing that every year just to get the shopping done.

Today I did the book store thing. That is always a long process for me. I have to look at almost every book in the store. And once I start buying I_CAN'T_STOP. There is too much good stuff. I have one pet peeve about book stores and that is those tiny little baskets they give you to pack your goods into while you are shopping. They don't hold much and what they do hold becomes VERY heavy VERY fast. I usually end up shoving the basket across the floor with my feet because it is just too heavy to carry. Why can't they have little mini-shopping carts?? Not big grocery store ones, just little mini ones. It would make the shopping so much easier and more pleasant. fI would also buy more if I had a cart. The only reason I stopped buying today was because I couldn't fit any more in my basket. I guess that is Barnes and Noble's loss.

When I lugged my basket up to the cashier this afternoon I told them that I thought little shopping carts would be a fine idea because I would buy more if I could fit more in. The young man at the register said, "I suppose you would like a sheep herder to show you the way through the store, too." Do you think he was being sarcastic?

Ice? No ice?

The weather story for most of last week was the possibility of some nasty weather at the end of the week. The closer we got to Thursday the more it looked like it would be an ice event. Thursday morning was cold and rainy. "Ice storm warning" was what the radios were touting. We were dismissed from school early and told to go immediately home so that we could get there ahead of the "storm" as if it was a posse coming after us. We prepared ourselves for no school the next day.......such a "difficult" thing to do. It was raining when I left school so I went grocery shopping. It was still raining when I got home. It was STILL raining when I went to bed. I willed the thermometer to go down to 32 but it hovered at the same spot where it had all afternoon, 33.4. I really needed a day off to catch up on Christmas. I REALLY did.

I woke up several times during the night to the depressing sound of rain, lots and lots of rain. Inches and inches of rain. No sleet against the window. No cracking of branches from the ice load. Just lots and lots of rain. When my alarm went off in the morning I heard the announcer say, "Oh boy. Do we have a mess today. We better start off right away with our list of cancellations. Torrington public and parochial schools are CLOSED today." What?? How can that be? I looked out the window. It was gray and dreary and raining. What was he talking about?

Well, there was ice. Lots and lots of it if you lived above 1,000 feet. Much of Torrington is above 1,000 feet and those areas got hammered. At our house we just had a dreary rainy day.



As I looked out my front window I could see a very definite ice/no ice line.


As I sat in my little soggy water-world the rest of the area was trying to navigate around downed trees and power lines and coping with no electricity. We went out this evening and could see that less than a mile up the road from us the trees were still heavy and bent over with ice. What a difference a few feet in altitude makes.

It looks like next week we may be coping with more of the same type of weather. If the temperature is only 1 degree less than it was on Friday I may be looking at ice outside my window instead of rain this time.

Another good weekend

This is so much better than Albuquerque. It's so nice to have my family on this side of the country. For the second weekend in a row we were lucky enough to enjoy them. The Madden family drove down from Boston on Friday evening to attend The Nutcracker on Saturday. The same Nutcracker that Kara proudly danced in when she was little. We spent a relaxing afternoon at the theater, enjoying the show and absorbing the beautifully renovated Warner Theater.........the theater which almost became a parking lot.

Elizabeth said that she liked the first part of the show but liked the part after the "break" (intermission) a LOT because the princess hugged the king. A true romantic she is. Eamon liked the war of the mice and soldiers. A true boy he is.


The cat was happy with the visit from the little Maddens as he enjoyed a nice snuggle between two gentle cat-petters.


My snow penquin is beginning to weave it's magic as Sunday morning found us waking up to white, wonderful white. At 7:15 I was awakened as I heard Eamon knocking on the door to Sean and Kara's bedroom. "Hey", I heard him say in an excited voice. "It's foggy and snowing outside. Did you bring those snow boots?"



It was only a couple of inches of snow but it was enough to make us all happy. Eamon and Elizabeth grabbed their little shovels and were outside shoveling the deck before breakfast. After breakfast Kara and Sean tromped through the snow to cut their Christmas tree. Then they took Eamon and Elizabeth to a "special surprise"......a train show at the Armory. A paradise for a little boy who loves trains.


Each child was able to build their own train car. It was wrapped in tissue paper and carefully placed in it's own special box. Eamon was so proud of this treasure, a train piece that he made all by himself. As the drove up to the house I could hear him shouting from the car, "Grammie, grammie. I got to make my own train."


A small table was set up so that each child could "drive" a train. The idea behind the train show is to foster an interest among children in model trains, hopefully to lure them away from tv and video games. I think they have a success story in Eamon. The cost of admission was a non-perisable food item. You can't beat that for Sunday fun for a little kid!

The family is gone now and I have to start the dreaded process of Christmas shopping. So little time. So much to do.

Simple pleasures.

One of my very favorite sights, always and forever.........my book waiting for me on my bedside table. Every morning when I make my bed I carefully place my book and my glasses on the table next to the bed in readiness for my favorite time of day, that moment when I can crawl into bed and reach for my book. I look at it and think "I can't wait to get back to you tonight."

In the summer I love to lie there with the windows wide open as the breeze blows the curtains and the sound of crickets make lovely background music. Sometimes I hear the sound of the coyotes howling close by. My reverie is broken when Paul dashes out in his skivvies to fire a few rounds in the air to scare them off. In the fall the windows are still open but the air is crisp and smells like Halloween. I can hear the rustle of the dry leaves as I read my book. In the winter I love to cuddle under my fluffy comforter, book in hand and windows still open, and listen to the wind howl against the house as it rattles the bedroom door. Sometimes I can hear an owl hooting in the direction of the old goat house. In the spring I read to the sound of the peepers in the corner of the meadow or the rain beating against the glass.

Sometimes during the day I will stop and think of my book lying by my bed, waiting for me. Parents who read to their children don't know what a wonderful lifelong gift they are giving them. Reading is one of life's simplest and best pleasures. Now if only I could stay awake long enough to fully enjoy it..................................