Alle Vögel sind schon da

It's snowing! We have at least a foot already and it's still coming down. So far I've had hot chocolate, hot apple cider, and snow ice cream. Snickerdoodle dough is chilling in the fridge ("snickerdoodle" is the best cookie name ever). We might make bread.

Some brave souls have ventured out. I've seen one car struggle through the neighborhood. My brother-in-law tried to go out, but there were three cars stuck in the road so he turned around. He's sure he could get his pick-up through (or he could have five hours ago; I'm not sure about now) but he couldn't get around the stuck cars. I suspect by Monday morning the main roads and some secondary roads will be fine, but getting out of my neighborhood will still be iffy. I've decided not to worry about it until Monday morning.

It is pretty. And since we still have power and heat and I have nowhere else to be, I am happy.

I've been having some medication changes (yay for a smart, polite, patient-focused endocrinologist, boo to everything being switched around) which has left me feeling cranky and not very verbose. I say that, having written 56000 words of Nano, an xmmficathon fic and a good chunk of a very fun Yuletide request. Maybe I should say that I'm not feeling very post-y.

Anyway, I received for my birthday two movies which I will be unable to watch, as the director is from the Dogme school of wobbly film-making which makes me physically ill. Apparently, these particular movies are not so wobbly, but I also have a personal vendetta against the Dogme people for making handheld cool, thus shutting me out of a good many movies I would otherwise enjoy. If anyone would like either of these movies, I will be happy to post them to you anywhere in the world - I feel bad that I can't enjoy a gift, and I would like *someone* to enjoy them. The movies are: After the Wedding and Open Hearts, both starring Mads Mikkelson and directed by Susanne Bier. They are both Region 2 (Europe), in Danish with English subtitles.

ETA: DVDs are claimed!

So many things to mention. We bought Freja's first Christmas dress today. Remember when you were a little girl (Apologies to the couple of guys who read this. I'm sure you were never little girls. Or maybe you were. But that's none of my business. Anyway...) and you got a new dress for every major holiday? You always had your Easter dress, with the hat and the tights and the little white shoes. And you always had your Christmas dress, usually black or red and green - some rich color, often velvet - with the black mary jane-type shoes? Well, Freja's dress is all gold and shimmery, and it comes with a little sweater, and I SWEAR it looks like something that a politician's wife would have in her wardrobe. It's like it came from the new Jackie Kennedy Baby Collection. All I need is a pillbox hat and she'll be good to go.

(I should post a pic of the dress for you guys. Just wait a day, because I need some new batteries for the camera.)

We're also going to put up the tree this weekend. We'll have last year's ornaments (the Leaders of the World shrinky-dinks, the sausage garland, the bacon strip ornaments) and a few new ones this year (we're thinking about doing some Freja shrinky-dinks and handing them out to the grandparents, maybe glitter 'em up, make 'em all fancy...) and we also have some little photo frame ornaments that we painted up today. Some Christmas wreaths, angels, fat reindeer and equally rotund penguins. All so festive. :)

(I'll also snap a pic of the tree when it's done. My boy is of German descent, so the tree tends to end up being a collection of lights, garland, and ornaments piled into a conical shape.)

We also hit the local Barnes & Noble today. Seriously, if I had the spare cash, I could just walk through that place with a shopping cart. It's like going to the grocery store when you're hungry. Except that when it comes to books, I'm always starving. But even my boy mentioned how large the teen book section is getting, and also how everything looks like Twilight now. But kids are reading. So that's good. Thank you Harry Potter for making reading awesomely fashionable again.

Okay, baby's waking up from her nap. Off to feed and do a diaper change.

And Happy Hannukah!

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

It snowed! In my profile, anyway. Thank you everyone for the snowflake cookies - I think I had as much fun sending them as receiving them. It was quite the flurry on LJ yesterday.

It's actually deliciously cold today, and we're lounging around, eating the remains of lilacsigil's birthday pavlova, and playing Mario Kart. (We weren't supposed to open it until we'd finished our NaNo, but since we're both now over 56K and still going, it seemed fair to get our reward. We're saving the new Super Mario Bros for when we actually type "The End".)

I'm reading the Luxe series by Anna Godbersen, and it's made me think about why I can't engage with Gossip Girl, when basically both stories have the same premise, setting, and character archtypes. Luxe and its three sequels are set about a hundred years before Gossip Girl, though, and this apparently makes the difference for me. With Gossip Girl (the TV series, not the books), I keep trying to connect with the characters, but end up frustrated with their terrible ennui, and shout at the characters a lot. ("If your life is so unfulfilling, go, volunteer in Sierra Leone or something!") But with the Luxe series, even though the characters are just as privileged and pointless, I am engaged and interested in them. lilacsigil gruesomely suggests that it's because they could all die of cholera or polio at any minute. I would like to think that I'm not that morbid. Maybe the historical setting gives me something else to focus on besides the terrible, dreary ordeal of being rich and white in New York? Or perhaps it's the elaborate descriptions of corsetry.

Or maybe it's the fact that Gossip Girl apparently has early 80's Debbie Harry in the cast and this scares me:

( My Debbie Harry is pastede on yay! (Do we still say that?) )

On the other hand, I'm still really enjoying Mercy. It seems that the best thing for me to watch while riding the exercise bike is medical dramas, and there's well and truly enough to keep me going through the week: House, Mercy, Three Rivers, and I'm catching up on Nurse Jackie which is hilarious but not quite long enough to see me through one workout. Is Hawthorne any good? Are there any others I'm missing? (The soapier shows like Grey's Anatomy are too slow for exercise.)

Considering that I had zero expectations, Three Rivers is surprisingly watchable. It would be better if it were the Doctor Zero (from Wolverine) and Doctor Shane (from The L Word) show, but it works for me. It's incredibly self-indulgent and syrupy with its issue of the week - this week, racism!, next week - healthcare funding for refugees! And it does have unintentionally hilarious moments (the sight of the dewy ER intern sobbing as she washed the blood from her young patient's sneakers, or the heart-transplant Leader of the Pack storyline) but at least it entertains. And the medicine isn't too bad.

Oh, oh! Do you know what? We may actually have succeeded in our pathetic attempts at horticulture! We have tiny tomatoes on our tomato plant! CAN YOU BELIEVE IT? They're only the size of a fingernail, but they're there. On the vine. We may even get to eat them. And Project Eggplant 2.0 is going quite well so far - the plants are as big now as last year's were in February. I am hopeful that these skills we are nurturing will serve us well in the grim apocalypse times. (Because three fingernail sized tomatoes will surely feed us for weeks!)

Busy today. I got a lot of things done. I also posted to The Other Journal, a post that now takes me over 10,000 words.

Now, to celebrate with some much deserved sleep.