Monthly Archives: December 2008

This is a really old picture of snow in Orleans at the Grandparents

I have something that I’d set aside to give to people at Christmas and I can’t find it. I keep thinking I’m going to find it but it wasn’t in the Christmas wrapping paper stash and it wasn’t in the Christmas ornament/doodad boxes. It seems like I would have put it in a place I was likely to look at this time of year.

It’s not stashed on the bookshelves or in any of the little boxes I have in the closet where I stash things. I’m not sure where else to look and not really in the mood to take on a more major search effort. The world doesn’t end if I don’t find it but now it’s bugging me.

Is there some rule that news reporters who stand outside to talk about the weather must be clinically stupid? I thought getting on television was a competitive job and you had to have some sort of skills or brains or something. There was a woman today who was so awful, I couldn’t stop watching. My conclusion was that she must be excellent at something else which I won’t mention on a family blog.

The weather people keep promising all this snow and ice and accumulations and we must be living in a special bubble because it’s been just fine here. Cold and frosty. I’ve been sticking close to home for nothing. I’m planning on running out and taking care of errands tomorrow.

Yesterday I ran around downtown doing some xmas shopping. My list is pretty boring off-the-shelf type stuff and I had a hard time finding anything that I was looking for and if I did, it came in one color. I’m trying to help the economy but I need better choices.

It’s already the 17th and I have no interest in starting the annual newsletter. This doesn’t happen very often. Maybe this weekend I’ll find a surge of energy.

This morning I turned on the TV to see if there was anything traffic related I should know about. The ruddy-faced weatherman announced that there was some cabin-fever in Stumptown. The roads were crowded but all the schools were shut down.

I penned him a polite note when I got in, informing him that teleportation hadn’t been invented yet and that people use cars to go to work, too.

I’m wearing what I consider to be my most heavy-duty wool pants. They’re also my vintage wool pants. My mom gave them to me a long time ago. When she first gave them to me, I still lived in California and didn’t understand how wonderful wool pants are.

But then for a long time I couldn’t fit into them. Now I can fit into them and I love wool.

The only thing is that they are the most high waisted pants on the planet. The waistband is bumping against the bottom of my ribcage right now. I didn’t like the low waistband thing for a long time. But now that I’m used to it, the high waistband is uncomfortable and for reasons I’m guessing are juvenile flashbacks, feels super dorky.

I went to Pendleton a couple months ago to look for new heavy-duty wool pants, assuming they’d updated the cut since these ancients ones I’m wearing were made. Nope. Up-to-my-armpits waistband. Maybe I should pen them a polite note.

This is how I took it and now I’m wondering if I should flip it. No, too lazy.

Bob and I are both home today. It’s sunny outside and according to our highly accurate backyard temperature measuring device, it’s 28 degrees. It’s also really windy. We don’t want to turn into winter lumps so we decided to go for a walk. We piled on layers of clothes, hats and mittens and headed out into the bright coldness.

What do you think this thing is for? It’s a retired tea kettle on a stick. It’s lined up with a couple of other bird feeders so I guess it’s a birdfeeder but not sure how that would work. Maybe it’s just outdoor art.

We originally thought we’d take this long route by Burnt Bridge Creek but we started heading east into the wind and our noses turned blue and it was so ugly we almost turned around right then.

But we thought we’d at least hang in for a couple of blocks and once we got around the first corner it wasn’t so bad. But we never made it to the creek.

The holiday load has been manageable so far. I’ve got a few errands left but nothing to freak out about. It’s the rest of my load that I can’t seem to catch up on. My email box is stacked and I owe from way back at the beginning of November. Every day I try to go through at least ten but by the end of the day at least twelve more have come in. I unsubscribed from every company email list I’m on because they were all sending me things every single day. Too much crap.

And I have a million of those little things you have to do that probably won’t take that long but you never seem to get to them. I need to find my camera book and figure out what magical combination of buttons I pressed that makes the display screen all wonky. I need to find all the stuff for our natural gas account and put it in the same folder. I need to update the family address list and distribute. I need to clean out this drawer in my bathroom where hair product spilled. I should probably go look for the lens cap to my camera. I’m 99% sure I lost it at home but I’m afraid it fell off when I went outside and walked around the yard and don’t really feel like bundling up and looking right now. I was hoping it would be on my desk but no luck.

I know, don’t you wish I’d go on?

This is Mt. St. Helens with an old farm that’s still in the neighborhood. There was a chainlink fence and I lifted my camera up over the top to take the picture and when downloaded it from the camera I was surprised by how well I aimed.

Yesterday the weatherman said we could expect 1-3 inch accumulations overnight. You can imagine my disappointment when I ripped the windowshade open this morning and saw this. It looks like someone shook a bag of flour out of an open car window as they drove by.

It picked up again later but there was never enough to cover anything.

I don’t know how Laura Ingalls survived that Long Winter. I ran out to the backyard to see how things were progressing. It’s windy and 30 degrees. I ran back inside and stood on the heating vent in the living room until I stopped shivering. Laura Ingalls probably wasn’t stupid enough to run outside in her pajamas.

Now I’ve also revealed that I never changed out of my pajamas today. Well, at 3:30 I took them off and put on sweatpants. But I’m wearing the sweatpants to bed so it wasn’t like I traded up.

Every time I plan to have a lazy day, the opposite happens. I guess there are worse problems.

I wrote most of the morning. Then I Bob and I had a hot lunch. Then I decided to bake a loaf of bread so I could make fresh bread Nutella toast when I felt like a snack while being inside on a snow day.

By the time I had the kitchen all cleaned up it was 3:30. So I changed into my sweatpants, as mentioned earlier, and then fired up a crackle log and sat down and watched a Firefly. It was the one where there’s a fancy ball and Kaylee wears this crazy pink dress and Mal has to swordfight this guy who wanted to make Inara his personal companion.

Now I’m cleaning off my desk while I wait for the bread to come out of the oven.

I think after dinner we might watch Iron Man from Netflix or we still have a million Life on Mars on the DVR. I guess it’s a half lazy day.

Erin’s workplace

Good News: my desktop computer is back home and working like a dream. No lost data. Yeah.

However, I didn’t expect to be running across town to pick it up this morning so my day is off to a crooked start. I gotta pull myself together and get on top of a few things.

Every year I buy advent calendars for the office. Wow, only $1 from Trader Joe’s what a screaming deal. This year the chocolates, in addition to being microscopically tiny, taste so horrible they could possibly be toxic. I had to eat a See’s Candy to get the taste out of my mouth.

So now what do we do? Do I open the window for each day and then throw the candy away? Do I throw the entire calendar away? That ruins the fun of the advent calendar. But then, the nuclear waste candy has already done that.

This is funny because last year I had three advent calendars (2 were gifts and extremely yummy) and I couldn’t eat the chocolate fast enough.

I’m overwhelmed by commerce right now. When I got back from three days offline over the long weekend I had about 30 emails waiting for me. Fourteen were from entities wishing I would buy something. Everyone wants me to buy things. Pendleton wants me to buy embroidered blankets, men’s bathrobes, wool pants. It’s a new thing every single day. Ann Taylor is smothering under the weight of all those sweaters that I should be buying two for the price of one.

I did finally succumb to Prana’s love taps because those 70’s cords are awesome.

* * *

You know those people who wander through Target, slowly pushing their carts aisle by aisle, the whole time jabbering on the phone? I’m not talking about people who are checking up on the shopping list. I’m talking about the people who seem to think that the whole point of Target is to provide a big red cart and mountains of product to look as one talks on the phone.

I think it should be legal for me to punch them in the face. Not only that, I think I should get paid for it. And all the other customers should stand on something and applaud when I walk by.