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Cold and snowy without. Warm, lively, and cozy within.
Friends, family, grandma, cousins, aunts, uncles & critters. Salmon, venison meatballs & gravy, lime tarts, cookies, coffee, champagne. Sparklers, banging pots and pans, dropping "the ball".
We'll be away skiing for a couple of days, followed by the annual sledding party. A few posts are drafted and ready to self-post from our holiday trip to Seattle.
Wishing you a good start to 2009.
Very little holiday decorating this year due to my lack of energy and enthusiasm for it, and that we were planning on being out of town.
Still, I'd been lamenting, loudly and often, the need for a little glitter in my life through this darkest time of year,
and so returned home to a house with lights strung around the windows and criss-crossed streamers hung with red tinsel. NEVER in all my life up until now would I have ever dreamed I'd actually LIKE red tinsel.
Thank you C. It's so good to be back home, and it finally really feels like Christmas.
We're even thinking of putting up a tiny tree for a little while.
We're official members now of the holiday travel snafu of 2008.
Well. To make a loooooong story a little shorter, we chose to return by train. And we still haven't chosen to fully figure out the numbers until right now: Let's see. What typically is a 13+ hour train trip turned into a 4 hour delay, followed by a 6 hour wait in the King Street Station, followed by 25 hours aboard the train itself, thanks to a long wait on the track in the Cascades for the freight train ahead of us to become unstuck.
Thank goodness for the new yoga mat from my brother, and the restoration project underway to return the station to it's original beauty. It would have been a far more dismal place to be without those!
And thank goodness we were forced to book a sleeper room for two and two seats in coach, as that was all that was available when we booked only a handful of hours prior to the intended departure. It was awfully cozy, squeezing all four of us into the room. (We never splurge on such things, but there were no flights available at all and no rental cars guaranteed with the snow tires required for driving over the mountain passes.)
And thank goodness for all those aboard, both passengers and Amtrak employees , who had nothing but good natured shoulder shrugs and smiles to share with eachother. Seriously, everyone was amazing, and the boys were troopers once again.
I can only feel for those who remained on board and those who boarded after us, with yet another derailment less than thirty miles ahead on the tracks. I can only assume that the elderly couple we had lunch with are still aboard now and am wishing the best for them in their travels.
With no yarn left to knit up and nothing but Uno and a deck of cards packed along (remember, it was supposed to be an overnight trip), there was nothing left to do after that but watch the BEAUTIFUL landscapes slide by and play old-timey "photo booth" with the camera. Also, lots of snow-play during our the stopover in Spokane. Spokane's skyline by night again:
More from the holidays to come. Hope yours have been nice.
In case you were wondering: by airplane. It was cheaper than the train, but not nearly as little as it would have cost to drive. Ironic that when gas prices would have made our trip west the cheapest it's been in years, the year we choose to be here for the holidays, the weather forces us to fly instead. Ironic that when we finally get some snow at home, there's more snow here. Oh well. We're here. It's snowy. So pretty. A brother to arrive tonight, and C to follow in a few days. Still not sure how we're getting back home. Ah well, not thinking about that too much yet.
I just KNEW that your extraordinary lacy, icy creations reminded me of SOMETHING I'd seen before....A ha!....which sent me right back poking around through the favorites files again.
Thank you Margie, and other Flickerers and bloggers, for bringing such beauty to our lives.
Snow and ice are pretty, yes, but they've finally arrived here FOR REAL, just when we're supposed to be heading for the coast tomorrow. Looking at flights and trains now. Planes, trains, and automobiles, here we go again.
Still finding similarities resemblances in my flickr faves.
Even when life isn't so clean and fresh as these pics, it's nice to pretend, if only for a minute, that it is or that it could be, when looking at these. It's almost like "having" something, for just a moment, while you're looking at it.
Trying to find another word for "similarities" somehow led me to this. : )
It was a little surprising to see how many similarities ended up in this mosaic after gathering together "browns" from my Flickr faves. I keep seeing more the more I look. It's become a bit of a game.
Taking a little breather for the moment from the Norway pics.
Just don't have the stamina for it at the moment.
Busy right now, but in a fun way. Gatherings with friends. Piano practice and recital. Baking cookies. Keeping the wood stove stoked. Going to yoga once a week. Caring for the animals, cats and dogs alike, all of them, on varying levels. Feeling like a great big slacker on the holiday front. Not decorating. Not sleeping, really. Feeling scattered. Winter's finally and suddenly arrived, sort of: bitter cold and windy but with little snow. Preparing to drive to the coast for the holidays (at least internally if not actually doing so). Looking forward to lengthening days and spending Christmas back at "home" this year. Wanting only to sit on the couch and read Christmas stories.
Just want to take a minute, too, to thank you all for your kind words and encouragements. Getting back to everyone, even a small handful of your comments, is, unfortunately, impossible. Please know that I read every single comment and enjoy hearing what you have to say, carrying your thoughts with me as I go about my days. Posting regularly, in all honestly, is exhausting, and I tend to carry a huge load of guilt about not being able to answer even the tiniest number of emails and comments. Trying not to, but I do.
So. How about a little dose RED, other people's red, for the holidays?
Out of sheer laziness (and frustration with uploading pictures the way I used to, but in the new Typepad compose), I'm trying out posting from Flickr today, for a change. Still, it required a bit of futzing around to get it to appear how I'd like.
Days, places, don't really come more magical than this.
It's not easy to look at these again without bringing on the tears.
It was a bittersweet day, being here with newfound relatives and both the E's, our son and my brother. Unfortunately, it's marked as well by the people who were missing: C, who was working madly back at home in Montana, my dad who was home with an ailing foot in Seattle, R who was sick to his stomach at the house down the valley, and my mom who sacrificed this day for me by staying back with him. E was starting to feel pretty gimpy as well by this time, except for when he was outside in the fresh air, and by that evening he'd be ill as well.
This is where we stayed when I was nine, in one of these small hytter further up the valley than where we stayed this time. These were the cabins where people used to stay only in the summers, for upland grazing of animals. In 1979 when we were here last, there were still some cows grazed up here, that were still called in from the surrounding hillsides in the evenings. They still are summer cabins, but for recreation rather than for work, and they still are without electricity. Even the buildings around where we stayed this time, further down the valley, are almost all cabins rather than full time homes.
If only this day could have been expanded into a week or more, or even more.
