Thursday

Tricky scheduling situations kept me glued to the computer all morning long. We did have a lovely breakfast...

And I had the treat of good music in the background while doing my kitchen routines.

This is totally thanks to Ed and my younger son-in-law. Ed helped me sell of a bunch of stuff on Craigslist this week, netting me a little pocket money. With it, I bought my bluetooth "sound system" (portable and beautiful, displayed above). It's amazing how prices have come down and quality has gone up with these small devices. I knew I needed one when the Chicago young family last visited and my son-in-law wanted to stream some good music for us (he picks such excellent stuff). Looking around at what is available here at the farmhouse, he let out a light smile and said -- you do have the dated devices! I mean, that was being kind. I actually had no devices. We had to listen directly from his phone. But I vowed to improve things here a bit, and clearing spaces around the house put Ed in such a good mood that he even helped me move forward with this new, wee but powerful addition to our home.

In the afternoon I scooted out to pick up Snowdrop. I hadn't had time for lunch so I grabbed a coffee and cookie while she was here. Chocolate covered covered gingerbread? No way is she going to let me eat that alone!

(Reading through some new books...)

We are all circling around bugs and viruses that are in the air and I dare say she felt a little run down, but she rallied and it was a lovely afternoon.

(Helping Ed fix a computer problem for my mom...)

And in the evening? Happy half b'day, little Sparrow! You are officially 3.5 years old today!

 

 

Sandpiper, on the other hand, tries hard to impress with a pull on the old sock...

I mean, it's a real skill! And back at home, Dance just keeps hitting on that girl-with-a-goat ornament again and again and again.

 

 

cold, continued

Again we stayed well below freezing today. Nevertheless, I felt toasty warm all day long. First of all, Ed and I accomplished a lot in terms of emptying some spaces in the farmhouse -- so much so that he told me, in an effort to show his appreciation for my efforts, to please put out the jigsaw puzzle again, even if it is a bit of clutter. I managed to slide in a comment about how much my efforts to finish the sky had been disrupted and thus I haven't the motivation to work on it again, but if I wanted to punch, it was a futile effort -- we were both in such good moods that any attempted sarcasm was bound to fail.

The morning walk to feed these guys.

Breakfast.

 

 

 

The other reason for feeling warm was that we have now allowed our blood to adjust to winter. We took a walk by lakes that were freezing over rapidly...

... and we were okay with the frosty air and cold wind. Indeed, I considered it to be a comfortably pleasant excursion. Hardly the bone chilling outing that would have made me shiver and shudder just a few weeks back.

Of course, this holiday/winter ritual (see below) also contributed to inner warmth. Try it! A warm beverage and a cookie, in front of your tree, if you have a tree. Heaven. Really, heaven.

Wait, who is that playing with the ornaments?! Dance! No! (Do cats listen to commands? They do not.)

cold

I think we hit single digits last night. By the time I began work on breakfast, the thermometer registered a meager 12f (-11c). 

There is a dusting of snow, which is like you licking the spoon from the mixing bowl even as the frosted cake is hidden for another time or another person. Oh, how we would all love some real snow right now! I say this having just sold my cross country skis and boots on Craigslist and unpacked a new pair of both, made necessary by the fact that I outgrew my ski boots (did you know that an older person's foot gets... wider?). A new boot unfortunately needs a new binding and so the twelve year old skis became obsolete. Capitalism at play! So I am dying to try out practically the last Rossignols still available on the marketplace! People are crazily buying out Nordic skis -- I blame the pandemic. Or supply chain issues. Or both. In any case, for me, new skis happen once in a blue moon.  I am so ready for the thrill of a new skiing season.

Obviously we are not there yet.

In the meantime, I am back to packing a suitcase and wrapping presents by the tree. (With my cookie break there as well.)

 

 

 

We all try super hard to hit it just right with the kids. (The grownups these days post wish lists: we are done with guessing the needs of big people!) Skis for Snowdrop are one big hope for me. (Sparrow gets a pair of play skis which are an iffy thing as he was not so much into the snow last winter. If Primrose comes up during the winter, she can try her hand at skiing as well, since the skis don't require a special shoe.) Snowdrop claims to really want to learn. But of course, we need the weather to cooperate. Oh, for a snowy season!

Fact is, the kids always surprise us with their chosen favorite presents or toys. As my daughter commented -- nothing, absolutely nothing we will give Snowdrop for Christmas will bring her as much joy as the stupid paper badge she wears every single day proclaiming that she is an "Official Word Detective." We don't know where it came from or what it stands for. We have all taped up the tears dozens of times. She wears it to school, she wears it at home. She'll probably wear it to her wedding -- there, over a beautiful dress, a paper badge proclaiming she is the "Official Word Detective."

 

 

 

Speaking of Snowdrop, here she is, leaving school. All these days she has come out bundled up to the max. Today, by far the coldest day of the year and she is without her jacket, without anything at all. Go figure.

Lately we've been playing this game we made up called "there is no Santa Claus." I challenge that claim with evidence that I produce of there being a Santa, she takes apart my challenges. She is in that delicious phase where she really doesn't buy into it anymore, but she doesn't want to let go of it either. Much like her other worlds of fairies and magic.

And in the evening -- here at the farmhouse, all is calm, all is bright. And that's such a good thing!

Monday

So let's get organized! Laundry done, suitcase out. Nothing in it yet, but we'll get to that. Chicago baby still hanging in there, squashing mommy's belly, giving me time to attend to things here. 

What else? Christmas wrapping? Later. I'll get to it later.

How about Ed's top choice: clearing out "clutter."

I can't believe I am actually giving in to this crazy obsession of Ed's to empty out all living spaces around him, but I figure it's for the good of the earth and humanity, so I indulge him and we begin the (odious, according to me) task of either selling or Goodwilling stuff that hasn't been in use for the last handful of years. Sentimental value? What's that? We're dealing with purity of space and mind here. Stuff has little value, right? (I am a little forcing myself to believe this, but it is true that, in theory at least, I will always opt for minimalist over cluttered.)

But breakfast comes first.

And a walk over a windy and frozen outdoor land.

Evening: all right, we Craigslisted a half a dozen items (toys, camera, millions of CDs -- that kind of stuff), and packed into the trunk of Ed's car miscellaneous dust collecting stuff for Goodwill. But guess what I'm not giving away? The mug, the tea towel and the Christmas tree! Mine, forever!

Sunday

I'm to go to Chicago no sooner and no later than when my younger girl goes into labor. That means that I have to be ready to sprint and ready to be away for a while. Everything I do now is with the thought that it may be interrupted.

And I am interrupted this morning. Not by my pregnant daughter, but by the grandkids in town who really, really want to come over.

The day is set.

But my thoughts run to the past. To the years when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago (sociology, but I never wrote the dissertation that would have netted me my PhD). 

I had a quirky group of smart friends then. Few of them wound up doing conventional tenure track sociology at some prestigious university (well, my then husband did, but he was not really part of my set). One such quirky guy was Steve. He was funny and brilliant and he was the first openly gay friend I had. (I'd arrived from Poland just two years earlier and believe me, in those days, if you were gay in Poland, you did not disclose it, possibly not even to yourself.) Along with another friend, who herself was omnisexual (a category that I definitely knew nothing about), we formed a very fun trio of friends. 

But it didn't last. I left it all and moved to Madison with my then husband who got a job here and I chucked sociology (hence the unfinished dissertation) in favor of law school. I tend to take five minutes to make life altering decisions, both in terms of career and life partners. Had there been email then, I would have stayed in touch, I'm sure of it. But, letter writing wasn't a thing with us and long distance phone calls were expensive (remember those days?)! Besides, I was struggling to be a good cook, a present and caring parent and partner, and a faculty member at the law school. My focus had shifted.

Steve died last night. I got an email from a mutual friend telling me about it. Cancer.  I hadn't spoken to Steve since I stopped attending sociology conventions (some 40 years) and yet it was a real gut punch. It made me think about all the quirky friends I had over my adult life. The sets I joined, then left. The years of being intimately connected to Madison's Latin American musicians. Other years where I hung out with L'Etoile's restaurant crew late into the night finishing bottles of wine customers had had uncorked but never finished. All these friends had no connection to each other. They stayed in their own sets and I was the interloper. No one minded the presence of an outsider. And me -- I was mesmerized by the views into these other lives.

This is what I talked to Ed about over breakfast this morning. It's our ongoing conversation about how to both appreciate and work around differences between people who, like us, seemingly have nothing in common.

I speculated if maybe us immigrants who have switched cultures have an easier time of it with moving between new environments. We don't need the comfort of the same people around us all the time. Academics who mingle with academics, machinists who stick with other machinists. (I say this having been married to an academic and now having entered the world of machinists and machine designing through Ed.) My Polish friends, with rare exception, are equally entrenched in their world of economics and academia. How does it happen that we limit ourselves in this way? That we pick friends not because they're funny or clever or good cooks and talented musicians, or even just good pals, but because they do the same set of tasks as we do?

Anyway, I miss Steve and I wish I had written to him and let him know that he was a very important person in my life and that he made my graduate school years sparkle.

 

 

In the afternoon the kids are here. 

 

 

And in the evening, the parents and Sandpiper join us all...

... for dinner.

First Arctic blast coming at us tomorrow. Get ready for it!

night and day

 Let me start off with my hyggelig moment (my Danish speaking friend tells me that Hyggelig is the adjective form of hygge).

It's nearly dusk and I am lost in reflection on the last 24 hours. It's been intense. 

Last night, as some of you who read Ocean on the early side may have noticed, image loading was disabled on my blog. After all these years of blogging and many many episodes of software or computer malfunction, I've learned the protocol: when something is not working, you erase cookies, reboot your computer, try a different browser, try a different computer, google the issue on the internet to see if anyone else is experiencing the same problem, and finally, only then, call -- Ed!

The trouble is that Ed and I were in the thick of a rather difficult moment (the holidays seem to bring this out: penetrating discussions about the fundamentals of our daily life together). We put it aside to try to resolve the blog photos issue. We tried everything, he tried everything, finally, well after midnight, we gave up. Only to return to our penetrating discussion about the fundamentals of our daily life together -- a conversation that basically took up much of the night. It's not something he enjoys, but I view it as essential. You need to put labels on things, and explain them to each other, and come together (or not) on some happy path forward. 

We finally fell asleep at around 6 a.m. and of course, I was up soon after because I had a date with the grandkids to bake cookies.

I rushed to get things ready. I mean, I was a speed demon!

I thought I would be tired, but somehow all that expression of inner most thoughts seems to have been good for me because that and the presence of these wonderful two kids absolutely lifted me to places where tiredness does not exist!

Here's our cookie baking morning and early afternoon:

(arrival)

 

(ready to roll)

I remembered several things about cookie baking: the "natural" sugars and coloring agents are tame in color. Unless you pour it on, you'll get pastels rather than eye popping color. Which, to me, is a very good thing! A gentle blue on the snowflake. A quiet green (or pink!) on the tree. Soft, not brash. 

(tasting chocolate sprinkles)

And cooking times can be way off if you roll out a thicker cookie dough than the 1/8 inch you're instructed to produce. (When you bake with a three year old, you need a cookie that is slightly less fragile than the 1/8 incher.) What was to be a baking time of 12-15 minutes produced a cookie that clearly looked like it hadn't been in the sun long enough. Another 10 minutes still did not produce the golden glow at the edges. So you need time and patience.

Sprinkles go on prior to the bake, frosting goes on after. More sprinkles can be added to a frosted cookie of course. (Sparrow is working through color combinations...)

The kids were so excited and happy that there was plenty of patience to go around. Time? Not so much. Snowdrop had a violin lesson later in the afternoon and we needed to be done by then. (Who knew that cookie baking and decorating would take more than three hours??)

Finally, if you are going to put your own frosting into little jars for squeeze-decorating, well then someone has to stand there and force feed that frosting into the little opening of the little jar. And squeezing it back out is going to require strong little hands!

(Thanks, Ed for helping with this part!)

 

 

 

 

 

In the end, we produced several dozen of credible Christmas cookies! The kids were soooo proud!

(first batch)

(Ed took this one...)

(...and this one)

And after I dropped one child off here and the other one off there, I came home and I put up the final tree decoration -- the star, made of grape vines, and sat down to exhale and reflect. And the tree looked so beautiful and my day felt so full and rich.