Yep, I’ve been gone, once again off to ski at Schweitzer Mountain, my home-away-from-home in northern Idaho. This time, Mr. Karen and I (along with Sock Monkey) flew out together since our truck was already out there. We got to the condo late Saturday night and skied the next six days before flying back home. One of our ski days was quite short due to Mother Nature being mean; it snowed four inches overnight, then rained, so we woke to a mountain that looked like it was covered in a soft blanket of drifted snow but which was actually iced over. Only two lifts were open that day due to the others being unsafe to load in the high winds that had kicked up, and it really wasn’t a good idea to ski on the ice crust, so we did all the groomed runs that were open and called it a day. If I were extremely Karen-centric, I’d say that all happened because the Universe wanted me to take a break; I was definitely losing some vim by that point in the week but the short day reinvigorated me. I had only one slightly dramatic fall, in which I was swooping down an empty groomed run, misjudged when to turn and ended up tumbling down the deep ungroomed stuff at the side of the trail; that got me some strained muscles and a bent pole but nothing ibuprofen and Mr. Karen couldn’t fix. The most painful thing was smashing my elbow into the center pole on one of the chairs when loading the lift; that bruise is still blooming. Those minor mishaps aside, it was a great week, with 13 inches of snow and plenty of opportunity to enjoy the beautiful mountain surroundings.

According to my stats pages (which I had to reacquaint myself with because I check them so rarely now, the novelty having long since worn off), my most viewed Holidailies entry this year was File Under “Old School”, about the ridiculously outdated job hunting articles I had in my clippings file. Hmm, if that’s the sort of thing people want to read, I have a lot more files where those came from. That entry did not, however, surpass the December views for the perennial favorite Harry Potter Fabric from 2006. I had no idea when I wrote that people would still be looking at it five years later. In among all the “harry potter fabric” search queries that brought people to my journal were a few looking for “sock monkey snow skiing”; maybe next year I should take one of my stripey friends out on the slopes with me.

Thanks to Richard and Jennifer for taking over hosting duties for Holidailies and getting the portal working again! It was so nice to be back there this year. For those of you I only run into during this month o’ writing, it’s been fun, and I hope to see you again in December 2012.

In ten Januarys writing this journal, the only other time I posted an entry on the 9th was in 2004, when I wrote Morning Routine.

Today would have been a good day to finally decide on my New Year’s resolutions, but instead of doing that I’ve been turning dirty laundry into clean laundry with the considerable assistance of my trusty Maytag appliances and changing sheets and painting my nails (only once today, no swatching or playing with nail art for my blog) and sorting things in the basement and handing the ladder up to Mr. Karen on the lower roof so he could check out a possible leak on the upper roof that he noticed when he’d been in the attic checking out a possible animal invasion and taking photos for my Flickr project (the winner was the sunlight through lace composition above, which I only thought to snap because I stopped for a moment while closing the blind when the light hit my nail polish a certain way and turned the plum color bronzey) and now writing an overlong sentence in this document that’s destined to become a journal entry. I might still come up with some resolutions, because Lord knows there are plenty of things I want to do, but a niggling voice in my head is telling me if I really wanted to do them, I would have by now.

In ten Januarys writing this journal, this is the first time I’ve posted an entry on the 8th. As with yesterday, it’s usually in the post-Holidailies downtime period.

I spent part of my Saturday afternoon in a shop with Mr. Karen, picking out a mat and frame for the Matterhorn poster we bought when were at Disneyland in October. The poster only has a handful of colors: blues, white, and grey with accents of orange, yellow, and brown. I think that helped when it came to narrowing down our choices from the many, many options in the store. None of these very colorful metal frames made the final cut, though we did try out several of them before deciding they were either the wrong shade or took the focus off the poster. We ended up with a textured white matte that reminded us of snow and a brushed silver frame (which was a late addition to the tryouts when it was pulled by the person who works in the shop once it was our turn with her). Now we get to wait two weeks or so to see if we made the right choices.

In ten Januarys writing this journal, this is the first time I’ve posted an entry on the 7th. But this year, Holidailies is still going, so here I am.