Christmas and beyond

Like my parents before us, T and I have pretty much given up on surprising each other at Christmas. This year, we bought both of our presents at Barnes & Noble while we were together. On sale, too! We did have to wait until Christmas to open them, though. In fact, T waited until after Christmas, since his was too big to tote on our trip - and he couldn't have played with it, anyway.

I got a new Nook GlowLight Plus e-reader. I had the previous model, but it was getting tatty. Even though I have a tablet, I find that I read more on the Nook. It's smaller, lighter, and can be dimmed so I can read in bed after lights out.

T got a small 3D printer. Its a da Vinci Jr., and it appears to be the gateway drug of 3D printing. He's had some start-up woes with it. The software isn't working with Linux, and he couldn't even make it work with my half-Windows laptop.

Still, when I came home from work on New Year's Eve, he handed me this pendant.

My man made me jewelry!

 
Apparently there is an auto-print function that lets you print something without going through all of the set-up. XYZPrinting cagily realized that anyone who got this printer probably had a mom or wife who okayed it, and it would be smart to make your first print something you could give to her.

T thinks I should paint the pendant. I haven't decided. For starters. I need to find out what sort of paint to use. If I have to invest in model car paint or something, I really don't see that happening. But if the $1.50 craft paints from Michael's will do it, I'm game.

Also this week, his telescope finally came back from the repair facility in Mexico. It broke at the star party in July, and has been getting repaired for months. But now it is home. Between the scope and the printer, T has nerdy fun waiting no matter what the weather.

And I have books.

Reasons it may be spring

It was beautiful today. I didn't even wear a coat to church, just a light sweater. We saw people riding bikes, people in shirtsleeves, kids in shorts. The sun warmed up the car so much that we turned off the heater and cracked the window.

Katie, bless her heart, picked up a flea or two somewhere. God knows how - she never goes outside, so either one attached itself to one of us, or it wiggled in through a less-than-tight window. We didn't actually see a flea, but rather "flea dirt" - which is the nice term for "blood-tinged flea poo". The vet gave her a pill, and dosed her with some goop, and we are trying to clean any place where we thing dormant pre-fleas may be hiding, which means "every square inch of your house, including curtains, closets, and under the bed." Yay.

Would some pretty music be nice about now? Yes, it would. Here are Alison Krauss, Yo-Yo Ma, and "The Wexford Carol".

Left-handed

 T had a meeting at a coffee shop this morning, so I took my sadly-neglected sketch book for entertainment. I've seen a couple of things recently about drawing with your non-dominant hand, and decided to give it a go with an old and ornate chair in the shop.



It is a modified contour drawing. In a contour drawing, you look at the subject, not the paper, and draw with a continuous line. I glanced at the paper occasionally to make sure I was close to the right spot, and allowed myself to move the pen to different places sometimes.

We have Sirius XM in the car, and one of the classical music stations goes all Christmas-y in December. It's good stuff, too - not a Bieber or a Mariah in sight. Yesterday, they played John Rutter's Shepherd's Pipe Carol, which is a song I always look forward to hearing. I love how happy and lilting it is. I would join any choir I knew was going to sing this.



The song may be unfamiliar to you, so here is a link to the lyrics.

Not Scrooges after all

T and I haven't put up a Christmas tree for years. We have one, but it is too big for our living room, and we just never got around to replacing it. But this year, we found a nice, and smaller, tree at Target, and after church today, T said, "Let's go get a tree."

It came pre-strung with lights, but just white ones. T wanted colored lights, so we added a strand of those, and now it is extremely well-lit. It took us three trips to three different Targets to get it displayed just right, and we are quite proud of our ingenuity in making a table from plastic storage boxes and a gold tablecloth.

To celebrate our decorating prowess, please enjoy Miss Angela Lansbury singing one of her hits.

Don't be like the Pixie

The current scoop from Weather Underground:

Temperature -2.2 °F

Windchill:

-19 °F

And the Weather Pixie still isn't wearing a hat or mittens.

She's not going to be so smiley when she learns the hard way what the treatment is for frostbite.

Last night I did my Christmas thang and watched "White Christmas". None of the plot holes have been filled in the 54 years since it was released, but it's still my favorite holiday treat.