First Night

At the risk of needing to rename “Pink Granite” to “The Snow Blog”, I will report that last night we were lucky to get only four or five more inches of heavy snow. Tomorrow we will likely get double that. Our cycle of a snowstorm every few days seems to be tightening to one every two. I don’t mind a “BOGO” at the grocery store, but I haven’t been buying a snowstorm, so I don’t need the second one for free, thankyouverymuch!

Wishing you all a very happy New Year’s Eve and all good things in 2008!

Oh My Goodness!

Between Christmas and New Year’s Day is an excellent time to go visit "Tacky Christmas Yards.com". They were recently spotlighted as a “Blog of Note” by Blogger. Blogger was right! Make sure you scroll down to the very bottom of the page and click on “older posts” to view even more outrageous yards decorated to the hilt. I found it particularly interesting that some families submitted photos of their own electrically charged houses!

Leaping Leopards!

This head cold grounded me tonight. It seemed unkind to spread any wayward rhinovirus marauders with our friends, so our dinner will have to be rescheduled. Sigh...

So what’s a gal to do whose head is thick and heavy with a cold? Very Good! Yes, I’m cleaning my computer’s hard drive. What started this industriousness was a recent significant upgrade of RAM, to speed up my nearly three year “old”(!) Apple. Then we made the leap from Panther, right over Tiger to Leopard. Ahhhh, Leopard. Lots of very cool whiz-bang stuff came with the newest operating system from Apple. My favorites are Cover Flow and Quick Look. I mention this not to bore the pants off you, but to let you know it is an excellent way to view files, especially digi-scrap files. My Adobe PhotoShop Elements 4.0 for Mac wouldn’t allow me to effectively use Adobe Bridge. So as a last resort, I dragged my digi-scrap supplies into iPhoto. But I effectively doubled the size of the files as they were duplicated into iPhoto. I could sort and view them easily, but goodbye hard disk storage space!

Now I just go to a file called Digi-Scrap Paper click Cover Flow and a parade of lovely digital papers glides by! It also works with any other text documents, spreadsheets, photographs, PDFs, Album Covers, etc. Slowly, but surely I’m gaining back the previously elusive space on my hard drive. Because of the increased speed, I’m also finding it much easier and more pleasant to do everything on the computer. The added bonus is, that while Apples are incredibly intuitive, it’s still very nice to feel comfortable wandering around behind the scenes inside my laptop. And now “behind the scenes” is less like a sterile computer room in a basement and more like going to a snazzy fashion show.

'Ere He Drove Out Of Sight...

Christmas, which we did celebrate on Christmas Day, was great! Our niece Carrie and her fiance Al hosted the festivities down in Rhode Island. They actually had two different dinners, which we soon came to call the first and second dinner seatings on their Christmas Cruise Ship! Multiple branches of the families came together and overlapped between meals (including two sets of twins!). The food was delicious and plentiful, the laughter nearly constant and just to gild the lily, presents were exchanged. I have no idea how Al and Carrie managed to pull it all off, but it was a great success!

Yesterday was a day for us to recharge our batteries. Unfortunately, I’m now fighting a cold and not really winning. I guess I didn’t recharge quite long or well enough! We did have a “White Christmas” up here and there was just enough snow left on the ground in Rhode Island, albeit mostly in piles, to qualify as well. The rains, which came over the weekend, still left us with a good eight to ten inches of snow on our lawn and virtually nothing on the walks, driveway or roads. I can’t ask for better than that!

Thank You Santa!

MERRY
CHRISTMAS!

Santa Baby II

Dear Santa,

Here’s what I would love you to slip under some special people’s trees:

D. would like all her kids and grandkids and great grandkids to be happy and healthy (and she wants it now!) Feel free to throw in a winning Power Ball ticket as well.

G. would like just the right amount of rain in GA and easy, low cost, on time air travel for every trip back to RI.

K. & J. would like good health and happiness for themselves and all the branches on their family tree (and for their DVD player to work).

T. & G. would like good health and happiness for themselves and their family and to celebrate a lovely Christmas ALL together.

K., M., A. & C. would like lots of time together to enjoy their family.

C. & A. would like more time together in their new home and to have a lovely wedding day and fabulous marriage.

K. & P. would like more time together, to be successful in their graduate studies and to have that honeymoon feeling never fade away.

J. & L. would like more time together and to have their nearly, fully remodeled kitchen completed.

A. & P. would like time to enjoy their new kitchen with family and friends and a happy and successful new year.

D. M. & T. would like another successful year on the farm and for the food bank larders to always be full.

R. & S. would like a smooth and uneventful pregnancy and a healthy baby at the end of the nine months.

D.M.M. would like her Tiffany Bean on the proper length chain and for February and March to be unusually pleasant.

M. would like her kids and grandkids and great grandkid(!) to be happy and healthy and she wants a Democrat in the White House - now!

Actually, Santa, we would all like World Peace, good health, increased sanity and common sense in D.C., and just a little bit more of a cushion in our retirement accounts.

As for C. & me, thanks for everything!

Love,

Lee

P.S. Yes, everyone really has been almost entirely nice this year!

Take A Deep Breath

As an adult, I’ve come to feel two ways about Christmas. On the one hand, I get caught up in all the excitement: the planning, the cooking and making and wrapping the presents. On the other hand, a part of me holds back. I don’t like feeling manipulated by the retail juggernaut to buy, buy, buy! The closer we get to Christmas Day, the greater the tug of war between the two becomes. At some point, I have to mentally hold my hands up and tell both sides to shut up. What’s done is good enough. It’s time to take a deep breath, relax and enjoy the holiday with Chuck and the rest of my family. At the end of the day, at the end of the holiday, they’re all that really matters.

The Shortest Day

Early this morning at 1:08 a.m., we passed “officially” into winter here in the Northern Hemisphere. While it was still “officially” autumn, here in New England, we were already deep in the thick of winter. We have been in a cycle where we get a snow storm every few days and now seem to have more snow accumulated by the first day of winter than we had all of last year. Unfortunately that means we are also into a very messy and challenging phase of winter. Today we have been clearing our roofs of the snow load and knocking down icicles. Then we’ve shoveled some of the relocated roof snow farther away from the house. Why do all this work? Rain is coming tomorrow - a lot of rain. That rainwater is going to go somewhere. The first stop is to sink into the roof snow like a sponge, adding tremendous weight to the roofs. Then the rest of the rainwater needs to go somewhere and with the ground well frozen, after the snow on the ground soaks up what it can, the water will keep being drawn by gravity to a lower place. For us, in a worst case scenario, that can mean our cellar. So the more we do to ready the house, the better off we’ll be.

The up side? The aquifers will continue to be recharged and we shouldn’t have any water shortage problems come spring. Right now that seems like a somewhat distant up side. In the meantime, we’ve got a cellar drain, a crazy long roof rake, shovels, an ice spade and our backs are holding up fine - thank heavens for acetaminophen and arnica montana! Perhaps most importantly, this isn’t our first rodeo. When we moved into this house in September, fourteen years ago, we had a ferocious first winter. Tons of snow and no snow blower, heavy rain on top of snow and we didn’t initially understand the elegance of the cellar drain and then the furnace died. Welcome to life in an old house in the country. It was a baptism by fire - well - water, lots and lots of water; ice to rain and everything in between. That old saying: “a pint’s a pound, the world around” means that one gallon weighs eight pounds. And moving that much water, in any form, is a challenge. “Let the tool do the work” and “Let gravity be your friend” are words to live by right now in our neck of the woods. My rest break over, I’m off to do a little more of each before dinner. I believe I see a bottle of Prosecco in our future...

Thinking About Santa

I’m pretty sure that nowadays, Santa’s Workshop must be loaded with computers. And since it’s Santa’s Workshop, I figure he’s got nothing but Apples! My little workshop involves an Apple and this year I couldn’t get by without it. So how could The Big Guy do all he does without some Macs?

There’s the naughty or nice lists, the route mapping, the inventory spreadsheets, the toy design (which these days must be more like high tech design) and the elf payroll. Hey! I’ll betcha Santa and Mrs. Claus do all their personal and professional banking online!

Now that I think about it, I’ll bet the entire North Pole Operation is green. No, not global warming and ice caps melting green (although that is a serious worry!). I mean they’re probably environmentally responsible green. They have such an enormous customer base, it just makes good business sense to reduce, reuse and recycle. Maybe they use wind power or tap into those geothermal resources like Iceland is doing.

Perhaps after the holidays are over, one of the big news outlets could do an in depth interview with Santa and get a behind the scenes look at the whole operation. I know I’d watch. Wouldn’t you?

Armed With A Smile

Chuck and I ventured out into the retail world the other night. Eight days before Christmas is no time to be in and out of local shops, big box retailers and most certainly not a mall. But we needed a quick chat with a Genius at the Apple store, so we headed out to the Pioneer Valley. Which, if you’re going to do something as silly as shopping a week and a day before Christmas, isn’t a bad place to be so silly. I must say it all went rather smoothly. The individual stores in Hadley weren’t too crowded. We crossed a lot of little errands off our list. Feeling giddy with success we headed down to the Ingleside Mall in Holyoke.

First off, we actually found a parking space in sight of an entrance. Chuck slung the laptop over his shoulder and off we went through the slush and into the strangely electric, oddly artificial and perfectly normal world that is “The Mall”. The Apple Genius was accurately named and our minor confusion quickly resolved. Then we decided to venture out again into the main mall. It was crowded, but not bump-into-people-every-two-steps kind of crowded. We traveled from one end to the other (maybe 50 or 60 miles?) and found most folks very easy to deal with - even the guys manning the little kiosks who jump out in front of you to pitch their products. They’re good, but they were also tired and anxious as they watched the holiday profit making clock winding down. But our slightly exaggerated response, begging off because of exhaustion and hunger as we wished them better luck with their next customer, left most of them smiling.

I’m not a curmudgeonly person to begin with, but during the holiday season I am determinedly cheerful. I find that if you’re standing in a long line at a register and folks are sighing, moaning and muttering, that can really permeate the space. So I slap a smile on my face and start looking other people in the eye at the same time (I do avoid tipping over into a crazed appearance!). It’s very disarming. I also try for a polite and upbeat social exchange with the clerk. It is both heartening and sad to see their surprise and watch them visibly brighten when you ask after them.

If you still have shopping to do before Christmas, bring your best smile and be prepared to trot it out at the oddest moments. If nothing else, it will be an interesting social experiment and should help you pass the time in line!

“One kind word can warm three winter months.”
- Japanese Proverb

A Hula Hoop & Memories

It started with that song. I don’t mean the new Hollywood CGI movie version, but the real song, the original: “The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don't Be Late)”. It came out in time for Christmas 1958; my first Christmas. I liked it as a kid. But there are many more songs that I would classify as holiday favorites from my childhood. Because of the new film “Alvin and The Chipmunks” that song and all things Chipmunk are getting a lot of play here in the states. That led to my singing the line: “Me, I want a hula hoop” in that incredibly high pitched, potentially deeply annoying Alvin voice. Whenever I did, I felt transported back in time. I also felt simultaneously happy and sad. I don’t want a hula hoop. I don’t want to actually go back in time and be a little kid again. But I also don’t want the memories of all those childhood Christmastimes to fade. Yet after nearly five decades, bits and pieces must be falling away.

I can still see the green artificial Christmas tree. I can still feel the imitation branches and smell it as it emerged from storage every year. I remember the year we told my young nephew that he couldn’t open his presents until his great-grandparents Gagee and Gramps arrived. And when we all returned to the living room after ushering them in through the kitchen, J.R. had already begun tearing off the wrapping paper on his gifts! I can remember the annual banter between my Dad and his mother-in-law Gagee. He would hold the present which Gagee had carefully wrapped and placed a bow on top. It was a multi-sided tin of Yardley powder, which looked exactly like what it was. Dad wouldn’t even unwrap it. He’d just thank Gagee and they’d both laugh! I remember when we three kids would open a gift and rush over to thank our Mom and then our Dad. Dad would inevitably say: “You’re welcome. What’d I give you?” And he wouldn’t really be kidding, as Mom did nearly all the shopping. I remember Dad’s special gifts. Every year he would shop for one gift for my sisters Karen and Gail and me and one for our Mom. Mom would shop till she (and we) dropped. She would bake and cook and clean and wrap. Dad would buy us each one gift and in the instant that we opened them, it was as if the world stopped spinning ever so briefly. I remember that as I grew older, Mom would let me wrap many of the presents. She would even tape up the department store gift boxes and write my name on them so I could wrap and ribbon my own! I remember Mom’s cookies. But I am so lucky that it is no stretch for me to conjure up the tastes, textures and smells of the delicate butter spritz cookies, because nearly every year, my Mom still bakes them for us.

These little snippets from Christmas past run like a grainy, badly edited film in my head. I already treasure them. I want to preserve them. Thank you for indulging me. Thank you for helping me to do just that.

Love Your Letter Carrier

Well, at least be extra nice to them today! It’s time for my annual post on the amazing job the United States Postal Service does. Today is expected to be the busiest mail day of the year - maybe a gazillion pieces, give or take a gabillion! I’m afraid we contributed to the crush with a couple of last minute cards and a few special packages, all processed through our local post office.

I remain amazed that six days out of seven; cards, letters, packages (and unfortunately bills and third class mail too!) are delivered to our home. It wasn’t all that long ago that a note from a relative living far away, was a cause for celebration. In this age of e-mail, cell phones and well, blogs, a card or letter sent through the mail can still bring a smile to the recipients face. So grab a pen, put it to paper, stamp and post it. But you might want to wait until tomorrow!

"Wicked" Storm

We were lucky. The ice and freezing rain line held just to our south. Several more inches of snow fell overnight and through the morning. As the snow eased and the temperature rose into the upper 20s (@ -2 C), we only had a few bursts of sleet, not the dangerous ice storm so many others have had to suffer through. With the moon and stars beginning to emerge through the breaking clouds, we started to clear the dooryard and driveway. This photo captured the white plume from the snow blower and the last few flurries of the evening.

By the way, I know Chanukah has barely ended and Christmas is little more than a week away. Despite the nearness of both of these festive occasions, the original Broadway cast recording of "Wicked" has become my default playlist on the iPod! Can’t help it and I’m not really trying. Even if I cue up the The Roches’ Christmas album "We Three Kings" or the The Chieftains’ “The Bells of Dublin” or Barenaked Ladies’ “Barenaked For The Holidays” or even George Winston’s “December”, I pop around to my favorite cuts and then back I go to Wicked!

Distant Revels & A Rare Bird

After digging out from Thursday’s snow storm, we attended Friday’s opening night of The Christmas Revels at Memorial Hall in Cambridge. An annual tradition for us, this was one of the least accessible, yet aurally and, to a lesser extent, visually interesting Christmas Revels we’ve attended. This year’s Revels revolves around the peoples and winter solstice traditions of the Balkans. The music was both haunting and stirring as it soared through mostly minor keys, in close harmonies. But both Chuck and I felt as if it was an unusually distant experience, partly due to the language barrier and partly because of the somewhat closed staging. The performers seemed to be facing in toward one another, rather than out toward the audience. Despite a few shortcomings, we enjoyed the whole of the experience, including Lord of the Dance.

At the end of Revels we headed out onto the icy, slushy sidewalks of Cambridge and rushed over to Asmara for a late dinner of Ethiopian and Eritrean dishes. As always, everything was delicious. Stepping back out onto Mass Ave not long before midnight, unlike our little town, Cambridge was still bustling. We left Central Square and headed towards Harvard Square, enjoying all the city lights and holiday lights along the way. On our way out of town, we cut through some of the residential streets near Porter Square. We spotted the scene above and had to turn around and drive back. I quickly jumped out of the car and snapped a few photos of the animated pink flamingo! Not to slight the reindeer which was also animated, but he and his relatives are fairly easy to find in this area around the holidays. But a pink flamingo is a rare bird indeed in the winter months! Actually the plastic pink flamingo lawn ornaments were first created in 1957 in Leominster, Massachusetts. But this lighted, animated cousin appears to be a striking example of rapid evolution of the species!

So Close...

Chuck took this photograph while I was at the wheel. We were less than five miles from our house. We had hoped to beat the snow home, but obviously, we were unsuccessful! The snow is falling at an inch or two an hour. Before the storm is over, we’re expected to get between six and twelve inches of fluffy snow here in the hills of Worcester County. NECN Meteorologist Matt Noyes (truly the best weather guy in all of New England) is promising sun for us to shovel by tomorrow. Then another storm, more of a typical nor’easter, will arrive over the weekend. Yup. It’s definitely winter in New England!

I hope wherever you are reading this, you are safe and sound and happy...

We Just Said “No”

A few years ago, Chuck and I stopped exchanging Chanukah/Holiday/Christmas gifts with each other. We’ve known each other more than two decades and been celebrating holidays together nearly that long. We’ve navigated the challenges of our different religious upbringings and family traditions quite well. But it was the gift giving that never failed to give us fits.

We tried quantity - crazy. We tried just one gift each - Oy the pressure! We tried lists of suggestions - too much like grocery lists. We tried practical, frivolous and everything in between. At one point we realized that if we needed something during the year, we talked about it and we bought it. We liked the lack of pressure, the collaboration, the bargain hunting, the whole thing. Shopping for gifts for each other at the holidays seemed artificial and externally imposed. So we stopped.

I have to tell you it has been a relief. Neither of us has felt deprived. We still do whatever holiday traditions we want and enjoy. Like lighting the Chanukah candles all eight nights and singing songs together afterwards. Having our indoor/outdoor (now) LED tree on the porch. Going to Christmas Revels in Cambridge. And of course, celebrating Christmas Day with my family in Rhode Island - on whatever day we all agree to celebrate the holiday that year!

I hope your holiday season has just the right amount of peace and quiet; celebration and delight - however you choose to define it for you and yours!

The Eighth Night!

Designing is an odd process. There’s a certain amount of inspiration coupled with repetition and experimentation. There also seems to be a recurring theme of frustration! But I learned long ago (probably in my days as an auditor) that the best thing to do is to walk away, change what I’m doing or, if I can, sleep on it. That’s what happened a couple of weeks ago. I worked for a few hours on an idea for our Chanukah cards. I had a good feeling about it right off the bat. It was based around a hand drawn, hand colored Star of David I had made previously. But as I neared the end, I began to get that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Something was wrong. Everything looked flat and unexciting. I printed one out and it confirmed that my stomach should be thudding.

Big sigh, actually several big sighs. I had to fight the impulse to keep plowing forward. If I do that I end up in a worse place, like adding color, after color, after color of paint in a blob on a palette. Pretty soon all you have is a big, muddy blob. But I had a deadline. Chanukah was just a few days away. I headed to bed. Just before I dozed off, that defeated feeling pressing in heavier than any quilt, two different designs flashed through my mind. The weight lifted. It felt so clear and strong I didn’t even reach for my glasses and a pen and paper. I knew they would be there in the morning. There might even be more. I fell asleep immediately.

The next morning I woke up with the previous night’s ideas front and center. Sure enough, there were a few more tagging along as well. I headed for the laptop and was able to translate what I had in my mind into the computer. Not too terribly long later, (with Chuck’s assistance) our Chanukah cards began to glide out of the printer.

On this
the eighth night
Chuck and I
wish you all...







Original drawing, design and manipulations by LMR/Pink Granite. Software: Apple iPhoto 5 & Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 for Mac. Font: Papyrus.

Empty Nest

: : If there was any doubt left that it is most decidedly winter, the photo above will put that to rest. This nest was a snug little home tucked into our mock orange bush, all spring and summer. Now its small cup is filled with snow and covered in ice. Its former inhabitants, are most likely very far away. The only way I could snap this was to open up our bedroom window and shoot down from the second floor!

: : Last night’s sleet-snow mix, turned to mostly ice, which needed to be chipped off the back walk. We have an ice spade which gets a fair amount of use each winter. The first time I deploy it each season, I have to remember not to pound it too fiercely into the ice, sending shock waves up my arm! I need to let the tool do the work.

: : We read a tip many years ago about using kitty litter on ice to get traction. It does give pretty darn good traction right away, but don’t use it too close to the doors or you’ll track it in the house too easily. To clarify, that’s fresh, nothing-but-clay litter and perhaps most importantly, NON-clumping. Yes. But I only made that mistake once!

Of Holidays And Days

Friday we found the LED icicle lights. Saturday found Chuck up on the ladder stringing them along the porch. Today he tackled the edge of the barn. Now there are icy blue-white lights glowing and bobbing in the sleet-snow mix. We are safe and warm inside a house that smells of potatoes and olive oil transformed into latkes. Our stomachs are full of crispy outside, creamy inside potato pancakes and sour cream and apple sauce. Seven candles have burned and sputtered to tiny wax puddles in the chanukiah, on this, the sixth night. The Christmas cards are designed and ready to print. But that can wait until tomorrow.

I believe my Thanksgiving hangover is beginning to yield.

Much More Than Hay

Hay has been the main crop to come out of this field for the last several years. In the winter, when there’s a lot more snow on the ground than today, we enjoy cross country skiing here. We glide around the field, elevated above the earth on a cushion of snow. Then we used to cut through an opening in one of the stone walls and circle an adjacent field as if it were a track. When I saw the sky this evening, I decided to come over and snap a few photos. I’m not sure how long it will look like this. A “For Sale” sign has gone up and the hay field has become a potential building lot - just like the adjacent field did a couple of years ago. Now it has a very large, very handsome home on it and we no longer ski there.

One autumn, several years ago, a neighboring farmer and his family were keeping cows farther up the road. Their fences were neither strong, nor in good repair. So from time to time, we would look out to see a small, straggling herd of cows out for an exploratory stroll through, what was then, mostly corn fields. We would hurry over, pick up a stray cornstalk and slowly guide the gentle beauties back toward home. Inevitably, one of the farmer’s kids would come racing toward us to bring them the rest of the way back. We’ve had a lot of fun in these fields.

I don’t begrudge the owners the right to divide their land up and sell it as they see fit. They’re following all the zoning and building bylaws. It’s hard though, to watch a piece of land, through all four seasons, for fourteen years and not feel some sadness, as it now lies on the verge of a significant change. In fact, I know the owners are in conflict over their decision. But it involves family and finances and fairness and I do not envy their difficult choices.

Tonight, as I watched the cotton candy clouds scudding over the pond without a name, I hoped for heaps of snow this winter. Enough snow for us to glide around this field, sun glinting off the crystal flecks, wind buffeting our bodies and reddening our cheeks. Enough snow for us to fill our store of memories, before a “Sold” sign goes up and the big equipment begins to rumble and reshape this land.