Sharon with a wee Kate, April 1987.
And missing you every single day. I love you, my beautiful sister. How is it six years already?
Month: December 2016
Light my fire
Kym! I do have a fireplace!!
It's one of the first things I pulled out of a box of Christmas decorations last night! A gift from one of the girls years ago — Ali, I think.
So I lit the fire…
Kate made me a drink* (vodka, campari, limoncello, orange juice, soda water)…
And together we trimmed the tree!
I never ran across our tree-top angel, though! Where could she be??
*She also cooked supper last night… and, to me, having my children cook for me on occasion is truly one of the pleasures of life.
Year in Review: 2016
It's that time again!
As I have done sometime in December for quite a few years: Year In Review. I do it in words (the first sentence of the first post of each month) and in pictures (a favorite posted photo from each month) — the two are not necessarily related.
In addition to (or, as a set-up for) BEGIN AS YOU MEAN TO GO ON, I spent some time cleaning things up at the end of the year.
I walked to the library on Saturday morning to pick up the latest addition to my Reading list: Mink River.
Way back before Christmas, it was decided that while Rusty was traipsing around the west coast, we'd have a girls' weekend in Chicago.
I lunched & shopped & hung out with my sister on Saturday.
Virginia Frances
Knitting: Too many things.
Anticipating… our first Farmers Market of the season tomorrow morning!
Ten on Tuesday: 10 Things On My Summer Bucket List
And now, a little shameless promotion.
I knit this adorable hat using leftovers from Gin's Elwood, and I couldn't be happier (except that I wish I'd knit it one size larger) (listen to the voices in your head!).
It's November, which means it's time for NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month) — little sister to NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month).
This is why.
I can't quite believe 2016 is almost over!
Weekending: O, Christmas tree
We finally brought the tree up on Saturday morning and I promptly took off all of the dead and half-dead strings of lights.
Well, not all. There is still one string near the bottom with the non-working half wadded up and stuffed near the trunk. I just couldn't bear to detangle one more string…
Then I went shopping and, among other things, came home with these:
There shall be an "amaryllis watch" at Chez Knitorious this year! It's been a few years and I'm really looking forward to it. They're your hardware store variety bulbs, so nothing special… except that they're amaryllis and that's special enough!
I took a nap, and then went over to babysit the grands.
There was some snoozing.
This was a pretty common photo op when Jun was a babe, but very rare with Gin. Everything's always go-go-go, we rarely have time to snuggle together.
After everyone woke up, I had some fun with Snapchat filters. Reindeer games!
We had our first official snow storm:
It started Saturday evening and snowed steadily through about mid-afternoon on Sunday, accumulating to 5 or 6 inches.
On Sunday morning afternoon, I finally got back to lighting the tree. First the top:
I'd been unable to find a string of 50 with a green wire, so there are 100 on just the top. We don't take the whole tree apart every year, but we do remove the top, so it needs a dedicated string of lights.
And, finally, 500 more new lights later. There's some unevenness, but it'll all work out in the ornamentation.
There was a mismatched string of LED lights on the tree, probably a last-minute addition last year, so I took them off and strung them up in the Garden Room! They always seemed jiggly and weird, but I didn't realize that they really were jiggly and weird until I went to take a photo. There's a video on my Instagram feed if you want to see for yourself.
Finally, we made paella for dinner last night. We used the guidelines in Mark Bittman's Kitchen Matrix cookbook (birthday present last month), which I've only just begun to explore. We loved the paella — and I believe we did achieve soccarat — but I can't wait to visit Valencia (home of paella) to see how close we really are to the mark.
I hope you had a great weekend!
Best Nine 2016
My #bestnine2016 on Instagram!
These are the Instagram photos from the past year that had the most "likes." Heh. There's a little bit of everything, including break dancing!! I love that the grandkids are there — both knit-related, too, other than the photo taken on Gin's birth day — Parcheesi is in there, my TTL Mystery Shawl, a bit of my house/yard, Alabama Chanin (on our way to the Rosanne Cash concert), and all the love from january_one.