Miscellany of a Cheshire Cat

7 states yesterday… 8 states total for the road trip… almost 1200 miles total, over 400 yesterday… 2 hours lost to traffic and another half or so lost to rain yesterday… But after a 10 1/2 hour drive yesterday, I made it home last night, safe and sound though tired, cranky and not quite sane.

I listened to almost 10 hours of Car Talk (hurray!), chatted with a few people along the way, had very bad Sbarro’s pizza as a break after the aforementioned 2 hours in traffic, and in general had an awesome drive.

I love driving.
I love my car. (I got new rubber floor mats for Christmas!!!)
I had a great time during my road trip.
I saw SNOW for many days straight!

(To be honest, I could have done without the rain and the traffic though…)

car, driving, holidays, road trips, snow, traffic, travel

I’m in Maine. There is snow! HURRAY!

Tis the season of food and road-tripping. The driving has been fairly uneventful so far… except that I might be a little hoarse from singing in the car. I am worried that I’ve used up my traffic karma and that the drive home might take well over 10 hours as a result. Cross your fingers for me on Wednesday.

Thursday evening I dined with the fabulous lisaf at a wonderful Indian restaurant in Nyack, NY. Friday evening I ate my vegetables in Hartford, VT with the awesome slyppi. I then went to a warm and happy bonfire at the Alden’s over in Plainfield, NH and crashed back at Juli’s place. Saturday morning came too early but we bounded back out to the Alden’s for Solstice morning stockings and breakfast yumminess. We met up for coffee and wandering in Hanover, NH with another friend for a couple hours then returned to Juli’s new condo for massive box extermination! That’s right, we attacked boxes with vicious enthusiasm (hyperbole makes you funnier) and accomplished a great deal around snacking and giggling. (I am in love with American Flatbread, Co. pizza now.) Sunday we hit Panera for coffee and goodies (and the Birkenstock store for happy feet!), then I headed over to Maine to see the family people. Awesome meatballs last night for dinner, xmas cookies for breakfast and a Maine Italian sandwich for lunch today. There’s a roast beef in the oven that smells delicious. It’s a good holiday.

So I am safely in Maine, there is snow, there is wireless broadband at my parents’ house for the first time ever, and I’m sipping Malibu and Diet Coke.

Have a wonderful Christmas, federal holiday day of silliness, and/or random day just like the others!

Remember… Christmas isn’t Christmas without disembodied Santa heads.

food, holidays, maine, new hampshire, new york, road trip, shopping, travel, vermont

First, a nostalgic snapshot of the Hanover Green from Dartmouth’s Baker Tower web cam. Ah, the beautiful lights, the holiday cheer… oh look, the Hanover Inn and the Hopkins Center beyond the green… Look at the picturesque snow … with a phrase epitomizing the Dartmouth spirit loving stomped into the virgin snow. Makes me all homesick for college again. (Thank you slyppi for the link!!)

This morning around 6:30 there was a spectacular noise. I was half asleep but I’m pretty sure it was a crash of some sort. M comes downstairs from the 3rd floor and I call out, “Is everything okay?” To which he responds, “I think the noise came from down here somewhere.” This means I have to get out of bed and find the source of the crash. Which I can’t pinpoint because I was half asleep when it happened. I checked the obvious places first – the bathrooms. Nope, nothing crashed there. M turned on the lights and identified the source: the 3′ tall, leaning tree I’d put on the windowsill in the stairway had leaned itself onto the landing spewing soil everywhere. And has broken its pot.

Now, it has not escaped my observation that it is indeed December. Nor did I miss that most people are not doing any gardening, indoor or outdoor, at this particular time of year. I went back to bed for a little bit dreading what lay ahead for the day: The Quest for the Big Plant Pot.

I did get lucky after a fasion. My first stop was the little hardware store near the house. The nice little old man only laughed at me because I was already laughing when I asked for a big plant pot. Of course, he also laughed at the Fop, I think, when he went to get a radiator key, so maybe this is just one exceedingly happy hardware store dude. Or maybe we’re just naturally hilarious. Must be something in the water.

He did send me over towards Kmart and one of the nurseries near there in hopes I’d find something. Kmart was almost a bust (I had a bucket in my hand to use as a makeshift pot) until I asked one of the employees. She sent me out to the “Patio” section. When I went through the double doors to the “Garden Shoppe”, I could have sworn I was walking into a storage area and quite definitely somewhere I should not actually be. But, hey, some nice lady sent me here so I’ll poke around. Essentially the shelves were still vaguely stocked with garden stuff but there were pallets of other stuff stacked in front of them.

Slinking around hand trucks, broken carts and boxes, I found the pots I wanted to buy – the only ones visible that were big enough… behind 2 rows of boxes on pallets. (Pots plural because I wanted a spare just in case…) Not to be thwarted by mere boxes I looked around for a tool to grab the pots. Did you know they make vicious looking hoe-things with a blade on one side and two very sharp prongs on the other side? You did? Well awesome! Did you further know that this is the perfect tool to wrangle large, plastic plant pots from a high shelf behind two pallets of random stuff? I didn’t think you did. ;)

It’s a vicious, vicious tool – really part mattock, part hoe and part pitchfork. All edges were sharp and fierce! Genius. I want one for when the zombies come. (In hindsight, perhaps given my clumsiness I should have chosen a different tool, but no one was harmed in the fetching of my new plant pots!)

At some point this afternoon I actually re-potted the leaning Norfolk pine into its new pot. It seems very happy as I straightened it up quite a bit in the process. I’ve placed it on the porch in a position where hopefully the sun will entice the top bits to straighten up as well. Ideally, there will be no more plummeting trees this winter, but if one does decide to take a flying leap, I have an extra pot.

… Of course, now I’m out of potting soil …

dartmouth, gravity, indoor gardening, kmart, plant pots, random, shopping, silly, trees, winter

That’s right – this week online retailers will be doing just about anything to get our business. I’ve received no fewer than 6 offers to upgrade to 3-day-type shipping for the cost of standard shipping just this morning. Happily, I successfully planned ahead this year and ordered everything I wanted from online places well in advance. Hurray! I still need to spend this evening at the Mall of Doom, but at least I won’t be waiting for packages and hoping they arrive before I have to leave for New England.

Oh wait, I WILL be fretting over packages arriving this week. Why? Because the FedEx delivery in my area at this time of year is completely inept. Saturday, a nice man drove over 2 packages for us that had been mistakenly delivered to his house. This morning, I tracked another package I am expecting only to discover that FedEx thinks it was left at my front door. Wrong. I called the company I ordered from and they quickly marked it as lost and will re-ship it overnight so I should have everything Wednesday. This is not the first year this has happened either and it’s always FedEx. UPS has never been a problem, even though some days they deliver twice (which seems inefficient but I get all my UPS packages on time and at my house so who am I to judge?).

Three batches of little cakes left to do.
Four batches of fudge last week.
Five batches of cookies yesterday.
Six batches of caramel corn Saturday.

No, I am not going to continue to try to make my holiday cooking into a sugar-laden version of the 12 Days of Christmas. Perhaps another year. ;)
But I’ve used seven pounds of butter and about ten pounds of sugar, so I *could* keep going with the 12 Days if I really wanted too.

The Fop took the train down to DC last night to spend a couple days in the actual office. He’ll be back Tuesday night. I’m a little pouty since I’m leaving Thursday afternoon for Christmas so I won’t get to see much of him this week. Of course, it also means I have the bed and the house pretty much to myself. [insert evil grin here] Okay, this just means I get to crank NPR in the morning (oooh, I’m so hardcore) and have popcorn for dinner. But this makes me happy enough that I can stop pouting.

I need to clean out my wonderful car for my holiday road trip too… I’ve been assured that there still will be snow up there when I get there! Still none here, but we’ve got serious wind.

baking, cooking, fedex, holiday prep, online retailers, road trip, screw-ups, shipping

It’s a weekend for holiday cooking which has distracted me from the disgusting weather. The volume of popcorn I made yesterday far surpasses the volume of snow our area has received this year. I made a LOT of caramel corn – 6 batches. I also made cookie dough to bake up today. I’ve got 2 other kinds of cookies on the list to bake too. I’m beginning to think I might be a little insane. Well, I certainly was yesterday as I bopped around my kitchen. I’m a desk-worker though, and as such not accustomed to bopping around my kitchen all day and all night. Last night when I finally stopped and hung out on the couch, my legs, feet and back started to remind me of that. This morning, Advil is my friend. As soon as the coffee kicks in, I’ll be firing up the oven and KitchenAid. … Oh and clean up more of the popcorn bits that are now everywhere in the kitchen and dining room.

Hmm… I think I should just go have more coffee.

weather, cooking, coffee, popcorn

There’s nothing like a busy week to make Friday arrive startlingly quickly. Between work craziness and cooking experiments, I’m both surprised and relieved that it’s Friday already! By the way, you can use white chocolate bits instead of semi-sweet in Never Fail Fudge with no problems. butterscotch bits don’t melt as nicely though. And don’t use old chocolate chips – they muck up the whole “never fail” part of the recipe.

Unfortunately, I do not have any snow. While there is snow in the forecast this weekend, it is bookended by rain. This positively sucks. However, at least I am assured of some snow next week when I head up north. If nothing else, my dad will put a snowball in the freezer for me if it looks like the snow is going to melt away. I page through my pictures of snow from years ago and get rather homesick. I don’t think I’ve taken any photos this month. It’s been pretty busy, I guess, but it still seems strange.

The primary elections continue to scare and amuse me. Fred Thompson appears to have woken up finally in Wednesday’s debate in Iowa. He’s really quite witty, but maybe he prepped his lines first. Huckabee and Ron Paul are still nutty. But I’m tired of lawyers, which doesn’t leave me a lot of options with either party. I hate the concept of “elect-ability” in our modern, marketing-driven democracy. I also have become wise or cynical enough that I can see the lies inherent in the system. I need to figure out if I need to pick/register for a party in advance in PA to vote in the primaries. Currently I’m registered as an independent – not only does it leave me blissfully unaffiliated, it means I get less junk mail.

In other news, I’m a sucker for the year-end lists in review. NPR had a book list from independent booksellers on Morning Edition. So many lovely books on the list! Which of course, leads me to remind myself that purchasing books does not mean I am purchasing the time to read them. Ah, the folly!

books, cooking, never fail fudge, politics, primaries, rain, snow, weather, work,

The snow was indeed gone when we got home on Saturday.

Before I get into a weekend recap, this is one photo in a series I took playing with depth of field and focus. I love columbine flowers and seed pods. The leaves below are a baby maple tree’s statement that, “Hey! I’m a real tree too! Look at me change colors!”

The trip to Virginia was short but fun. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel great most of the weekend, but that was probably due to the hotel beds being un-sleepable. (I hereby declare “sleepable” to be a word.) Thursday night we had a bit of a kerfuffle with the car service who was supposed to pick us up at the train station in DC and take us out to Vienna, VA. Standing in the chill while figuring out transportation may have contributed to my lack of greatness over the weekend. We had fabulous steak for dinner to console ourselves. Yum steak!

I didn’t sleep well on the un-sleepable bed Thursday night and couldn’t even convince myself to sleep in. When you think to yourself, “Maybe I’ll feel better when I get up.” it’s not a good sign. I did get up and got my one thing for the day accomplished – I hit the Mall for a haircut. My hair is shorter and thinner now (hurray for cool thinning shears!) and in general neater. I wandered the mall for a while and lost my book somewhere. *grumble* I also found one of the tiniest Lush stores I’ve ever been in – it was basically a short, glassed in hallway, perhaps six feet wide. Tiny but well organized and just wide enough for 2 people to get around each other. I resisted spending money in Levenger but I couldn’t resist Lush. In general, my mall outing was lethargic despite the caffeine… I felt better once I got back to the hotel and had some fruit salad and more water but spent the rest of the afternoon vegging out in front of the tv with my laptop.

The Fop’s company’s holiday party was pretty awesome. I got to meet most of the people I’d been hearing about (or hearing on speaker phone) for the past couple of years. Everyone was delightful, smart and amusing. We figured out that of the 16 people there we had 4 people from Maine! That’s pretty exciting, at least to us! The food was delicious and the whole event was lovely thanks to the fabulous planning Kristi did (one of the Mainers!). I think we all ate too much but it really was gloriously yummy. (Yum! More steak!) It’s always fun to dress up too – imagine, the Fop wore a suit!

Friday night was another night for not sleeping. Stupid un-sleepable bed. Saturday we needed to get to the train station a little early because the automatic ticket printer in Philly had failed to print both of our return tickets. Someone figured that out for us and we hit the lovely bookstore in Union Station to find me something to read. Not that I needed the book. Once we got on the train I crashed and slept fitfully most of the way back to Philly. The nap helped a little, but essentially the rest of our day was shot because we were both so tired.

I do like Amtrak despite the ridiculous prices. At no time did Amtrak security make me show them my personal hygiene products or make me remove my shoes. I didn’t even have to unload my computer from my backpack. I appreciate that so much.

Sunday was spent sleeping in. Happy sleepable bed, at least comparatively speaking! Grocery shopping and other stuff was achieved.

The weekend now seems very far away (as does the beginning of this post)! I started writing this at some point this morning and work got… busy. Very busy. But in a mostly happy way. My boss is out of the office unexpectedly today and tomorrow so I got roped in to a couple of unexpected projects beyond my usual Monday fun! I really enjoy feeling productive and today was definitely all about the productive. I was on enough of a roll that I even made something new for dinner (lollipop lamb chops with 3 different experimental seasonings) and then made a batch of fudge. Go me!

amtrak, cooking, photographs, photography, sleep, travel, virginia, weekend, work

The snow started yesterday morning and kept on well into the evening. This morning everything is just barely white. We got a total of maybe 1.5 to 2 inches of accumulation but that’s enough to make the lawns look like white blankets and to frost the top of the little round shrubs like cupcakes across the street at the church. So far today it’s staying cold so I’ll get to keep it for now. I’m sure it will be gone by the time we get back from VA on Saturday though – temps will be going up over the next couple days. For now I get to look out at a clear, bright blue sky over the snow-covered church roof and squint a little at the brightness of the light.

It’s not November anymore.

The chase to the end of the year is picking up speed. The calender feels like it’s in fast-forward. Work has become less crazy-busy this week, which is good though it feels odd. It will pick up again in the New Year if not sooner. Probably sooner, in fact. Probably Monday.

work, weather, snow

A quick couple of things…

• Jon’s new book is out. For those in the Oracle world, you can order Oracle Shell Scripting: Linux and UNIX Programming for Oracle direct from the publisher or through Amazon.
• I got dragged onto Facebook – find me there or leave me a comment to find you. I also have a thing over on myspace that I don’t really check very often. The Facebook interface is far more to my liking. I’m sure I’ll post a picture eventually. Maybe.
• The Merriam-Webster Visual Dictionary is a fun and distracting toy. (Snagged with a nod to Lifehacker)
• I may have to start a petition for Morgan Freeman’s narration to be removed from March of the Penguins. Each time that man opens his mouth, something bad happens to the penguins. I may not be able to watch the whole thing. Do you think if I mute it the penguins will be okay?
• Subversive Cross Stitch is just the obnoxious holiday project you’re looking for!

It’s almost time for snow! REALLY! It’s in the forecast for tomorrow and everything!!!

random, facebook, dictionary, penguins, books

I finished my 50,000 words yesterday at 7:33 p.m. I actually ended up a little over since I was in the middle of a rather pivotal conversation at the time. I hit 50k at a good point but the story isn’t over. I still need to add a couple more scenes to resolve the plot. I think I’m going to wait to do that in the Spring when I pick this up again. Right now I’m still feeling rather like I had two finals and a final paper due yesterday – which is too say, recovering.

So, 10 days ago I wrote that I didn’t like my story much anymore and I started mentioning to friends that I didn’t really expect to finish. What changed? The plot hit its stride and got interesting. It’s still not high art, but it’s definitely less trite than I’d feared. So not only was it an awesome experience that I hope to repeat next year, I have a large body of text to work with and try to work into a finished product after a requisite waiting period. The waiting period is definitely necessary. I need to step away from it completely so that I can see whether it is actually a cohesive story and world when I reread it. Ideally I’ll go back to it with fresh-ish eyes in April or so…

So what did I write? It’s a little, still untitled fantasy novel about a world just to the other side of our own. No, you can’t read it yet. Wait for summer after my editing exercise. I won’t even let the Fop read any of it.

I learned so much doing this writing project.

• Guess what? I can write a solid 2000 words a day even when I have no idea what to write!
• I need to get to know my characters and world before I can really get into the plot. The first 14-20k words were still part of the book but I think another time I’ll do more pre-writing rather than just jumping in.
• Writing is good for my brain.
• I can kick out high volumes of text when my plot is interesting and the deadline looms. I wrote about 14,000 words in the last 24 hours of my writing. (Just look at that graph!)
• I can send my inner editor on vacation for a month but sometimes there are ramifications of that in other parts of my life.

It was awesome. It’s like I remembered how to write over the course of 50,000 words. The difference between the flow at the beginning and the end is huge I think. Now we need a National Novel Editing Month scheduled for May…

finished, nanowrimo, novel, victorious, writing