Monday, July 13: I drove the car while Mr. Karen drove the rental truck across the rest of Washington state to our house. Well, our barn, because we wanted to unload some furniture destined for the apartment there first. It was a nice drive, and the mountains (Rainier and Baker) were out for us to […]
Monday, July 6: The fact that I now live in the land of dinosaurs at gas stations (one on the way to the freeway and one on the way to stores I frequent and one more along a major road I sometimes take to a favorite restaurant) has not dimmed my enjoyment at seeing them […]
Time for a Happy Color update, since it’s been a bit more than a month since the previous one. These six mandalas are some of my favorites I’ve colored in the last month: Groups I’ve finished since the previous update (most recent listed first; all counts include any friends I matched with the main […]
Monday, June 29: More driving, out of Montana and through Wyoming to South Dakota. Stopped at the rest area near Sheridan, which is up on a hill with a view. Tuesday, June 30: Yep, more driving, through the rest of South Dakota and into Minnesota. Made a stop at the Corn Palace, which was […]
Monday, June 22: The sunsets at the new house continue to delight. (How long before I stop thinking of it as the “new house” and it becomes just “the house”? Don’t know.) Tuesday, June 23: I mostly feel fine about missing out on limited edition Oreo flavors, but this one had lilac cookies. I […]
Monday, June 15: Turns out we have a couple cherry trees on the property. Tuesday, June 16: The house is starting to look a bit more like a home. Mr. Karen got the marble lamp setup and the sun hung on the wall. Wednesday, June 17: Caught a small bird sitting on top […]
Monday, June 8: Today’s new thing I saw in the yard were these delicate white blooming fronds (is that the right word?) that are hard for my camera to focus on. Tuesday, June 9: Biggest slug I’ve come across in the driveway so far. Wednesday, June 10: Mr. Karen and I did something […]
Monday, June 1: I spent time in the studio packing up stuff from the drawers of furniture we’ll be moving next month while Mr. Karen went to retrieve his sailboat from storage. Went back to the hotel and on our walk to dinner at a favorite restaurant we discovered a house I’d never known was […]
It’s been a month, so it’s time for a Happy Color update. The featured picture this time is a pattern from back in the day when the images used to be more like something that might have been in a paper coloring book back in the day, maybe one of the first wave of “adult” […]
Monday, May 25: Last day of the conference. This year my room had a view of the overflow hotel and some retaining ponds. Tuesday, May 26: I didn’t plan for my fake nails to match so well with my friend Nikki’s new car (which they had wrapped) but they sure did. Wednesday, May […]
Monday, May 18: Among the critters on the property are snakes. This little one was next to the deck in back of the house. Tuesday, May 19: Finished packing for a trip which involves flying, a conference, a road trip, and a couple days in Idaho before heading home. I’ve taken to taping down […]
Monday, May 11: The menagerie of dog toys found around the property continues to expand. We’re up to five now, including a set of twins. (There were only two animals about a month ago.) Tuesday, May 12: Mr. Karen used his skills to make what we’re calling a “fan door”, which will let us […]
It’s been a few weeks since my previous Happy Color update, so it’s time to share what I’ve been up to coloring-wise. The featured image this time is one I decided to color after seeing it posted in a Facebook group. Groups I’ve finished since the previous update (most recent listed first; all counts […]
Monday, May 4: The septic project has reached the “excavator in view of the bathtub” stage. Tuesday, May 5: Another color of rhododendron is blooming in the yard. The bees seem to be enjoying the flowers. Wednesday, May 6: Finished my light blocking cardboard construction for one of the bedrooms, all made from […]
Monday, April 27: Drove back home from Spokane with another carload of boxes and stuff. Strong winds messed with my gas mileage, so I had to stop earlier than planned to fill up. In consultation with the website that shows gas prices by exit along major highways, I stopped at a new to me place […]
Monday, April 20: Sunsets from the deck continue to be a delight at the new place. Tuesday, April 21: Continuing to enjoy finding new blooms in the yard. The internet tells me this is a salmonberry bush (link is to site run by the US Forest Service, currently being gutted by the Trump administration, […]
Monday, April 13: Many folks my age downsize when they move to have less maintenance and less yard work. Mr. Karen and I have done the opposite, and thus welcomed a new member of the family, a bright pretty blue riding mower. Tuesday, April 14: Big day: work started on the new septic system. […]
Happy Color Update: A Bit Past Mid-April 2026
It’s been about a month since my previous Happy Color update, so let’s review what I’ve been up to. This update’s featured images are two hearts I just liked the colors of; they weren’t paired with each other but I think they look good together. Groups I’ve finished since the previous update (most recent […]
Monday, April 6: The view at the new house continues to delight. Here it’s the golden hour. Tuesday, April 7: Bought some things for my office corner in the kitchen, including a wee garbage can with ears on the lid. Feels more like home now. Wednesday, April 8: I was on stand by […]
Monday, March 30: Went to the storage space and loaded up the car. I was able to get Mr. Karen’s desk chair in there (he’s been using a broken one that no longer adjusts in height) and still get the space filled by unpacking one of the boxes and putting the individual items in the […]
Monday, March 23: Ventured out to the Habitat ReStore to look for shelves for the new house, there are relatively few closets given the size of the house and a several of them lack sufficient shelving. Got lucky and and found two units that would work, one for the undersized linen closet and one for […]
Monday, March 16: Kicking off my birthday week with a honey lavender mimosa at a brunch place that was a favorite before we moved here and now is a mere 15 minute drive from the house. Then since we’re still working on the whole moving thing, we had to go get our car registration switched […]
Happy Color Update: A Bit Past Mid-March 2026
Not quite six weeks since my last Happy Color update, during which in addition to coloring, I did a whole lot of life stuff I don’t usually (see photo diary entries for more on the moving house saga). I also did something with Happy Color I don’t usually do: deleted it from my phone. More […]
Monday, March 9: The friends who were kind enough to let me stay in their guest bedroom for the weekend had to leave the house before I managed to get myself packed up. Their dog felt it necessary to come outside and supervise me loading the car. There’s an electric fence, so they said it […]
Monday, March 2: First morning waking up the new house was greeted with a glaze of frost on the fields around the barn. That melted away as the sun rose higher in the sky and the mountains came out to be seen, which seemed like a good omen. Had a busy day following up on […]
Monday, February 23: The previous owners of our house were still working on getting their animals moved out, so I got to say good morning to the turkey on our way up to the house. Had some running around to do to get a form notarized for the county for the new septic system; the […]
Monday, February 16: Of course it was snowing when our moving pod was scheduled to arrive, because nothing about this process has been easy. When the driver called to say he was up on the mountain, he sounded very skeptical that he could make it up our road. I passed my phone to Mr. Karen, […]
Monday, February 9: Mr. K and I had a late lunch at a favorite restaurant in town on a sunny afternoon. Tuesday, February 10: Helped Mr. K bring the big ladder up from the garage so he could take down the sun decoration on the fireplace wall. Wednesday, February 11: Had my oral […]
It’s been a not quite a month since my last Happy Color update, so I could have waited a bit to do another but decided I wanted a distraction from the aftereffects of the dental surgery I had yesterday and the fact that many of my internet friends are heading to Wisconsin for a get […]
Monday, February 2: Moving things down to the garage continues. Case in point: the face plate for the Murphy bed rests in the kitchen temporarily on its way down from one of the guest rooms. Tuesday, February 3: Started the day by breaking one of the small dishes I use to prop up colanders […]
Monday, January 26: The place in town that does the Idaho version Detroit-style pizza changed their pans, so now instead of the long skinny rectangles that were unlike any Detroit-style I’d had in the Detroit metro area, there are two sizes of rectangles with a more authentic aspect ratio. Tuesday, January 27: Came home […]
Monday, January 19: Drove home from Portland. Decided to take a closer look at an abandoned structure at an exit I often stop on this stretch. I expected to be stopped by a gate, but no, I was not, so I drove through and parked my car and wandered in the chilly wind for a […]
Monday, January 12: Drove home from BC. My friend and I didn’t happen to stop at the rest area with the view of the lake but did get a bit of a sunset view from the one we did stop at. Tuesday, January 13: Still way too much brown showing on the slopes for […]
Monday, January 5: The seller countered our offer and we countered their counter and then I went down to town and then Mr. Karen texted me that our offer was accepted and it seemed surreal. Tuesday, January 6: So busy doing I don’t quite know what that for my picture of the day I’ve […]
It’s been a little over six weeks since my last Happy Color update, so time to do another even though the state of my in progress tab is nowhere near as organized as I’d like. That’s not surprising given how much has been going on with the house purchase process and the condo sale process […]
I decided to keep doing my photo diary project in 2026 because if nothing else, I like looking back at the entries sometimes. Thursday, January 1: Start as you mean to go on: eating frozen yogurt with yummy toppings. Friday, January 2: Looked at three more houses with varying views and varying issues. […]
Wrapping up last year with a few more photos. Monday, December 29: More house hunting, with a visit to a property that’s not quite what I envisioned this next step for us would involve but which we very much liked. A bit concerned that some of that like on my part is due to the […]
Good morning and Happy New Year. I’m the first one up, so have booted up my laptop to do an entry before things get busy. I’ve just updated my StoryGraph for the last of my reading in the old year, though since my 2025 wrap up was generated before I woke up this morning, those […]
October, November, December Bonus Content
A few extra photos from the last quarter of 2025. The font on a public bathroom in St. Augustine caught my eye in October. Sunset on Halloween heading east on I-90; I’m not sure exactly where this is, probably in South Dakota. Wherever it is they’re building a new water tower to supplement the […]
Since this installment is already a day late and there are only two more days in the year, I thought about holding it and just making one entry for the last 10 days of 2025, but decided to just go ahead with last week and let those few days be their own thing later. Monday, […]
I was planning to do a photo diary entry today, thus being on time for the second week in a row after weeks of not, but alas I have been out for Mexican food with family and had a margarita that didn’t stint on the tequila, and apparently I am a lightweight when it comes […]
Ooops, I didn’t do an entry yesterday for Holidailies. I thought about it, at least twice, but not at times I wasn’t about to do something else that took priority, like meeting with the real estate guy or sitting down for dinner with the family remaining after some have had to leave over the past […]
Today I have another few photos that didn’t make the photo diary entries in their respective months. In July, I snapped this fuchsia plant in a hanging basket on Kathy’s porch as Mr. K and I got ready to leave after our short visit on which we took our first steps to scope out the […]
Hoping all of you celebrating Christmas have a wonderful time! Once again, Mr. Karen and I didn’t put up our own tree due to traveling at the holidays (and this year, also having so much work to do to get the condo ready to sell that we didn’t need more stuff to do). I do […]
I’m the first one awake at my sister-in-law Kathy’s house this morning (my brain decided six hours was enough sleep) and decided to get up and shower rather than lounge in bed as is my usual practice at home (there are five people taking turns in one guest shower, with two more folks coming today, […]
My clementine this morning had a festive holiday sticker on it. I had to look really closely to see it was a Christmas ornament, an ornament with a face smiling out from a peel being unzipped. The personification of a clementine, I think. ***** On this date in 2024: A Week in Photos: […]
Monday, December 15: So busy getting ready for the photos to be taken of our condo for the listing that the only photos I took were of the 1982 Tupperware brochure I wrote about yesterday. Tuesday, December 16: I was up early to do last minute preparation for the photographer and real estate agents […]
Probably Too Much Information About Lids
If you were wondering how many types of lids there were to Tupperware containers in 1982, I can help with that. There were five: Classic Round Seals, Instant Seals, Square Rounds (Rectangular and Square Seals), Push-Button Seals, and Duo-Seal Closures. How do I know? Because I found a brochure documenting them in yet another box […]
Today my share is two dolls that came from my sister-in-law’s husband’s family that came to me because to pass them on to my grandnieces but as these things go, I have not done that yet (and now they are probably not young enough to play with them and not old enough to appreciate the […]
In April, we went to Walt Disney World, getting more use out of the annual passes we’d bought the previous fall. People rightly say the Disney park experience has gotten more expensive and less relaxed in recent years. That said, I still appreciate the attention to detail Disney puts into things. For instance, these seats […]
Monday, December 8: Time to change my nails. The lettering on the box is flashier than the nails in this case. Tuesday, December 9: Stopped on the way home from Spokane to get gas and saw this eye catching display of stuffed animals at the truck stop. There are capybaras! I did not buy […]
Along with the 60s knitting booklet, I also saved two small diaries from my mom’s stuff. They were her father’s, my maternal grandfather whom I never met because he died two years before I was born. I remember my mom telling me she missed him most when milestones like that happened. The earlier book […]
Mr. Karen and I had the real estate agents and their photographer here this morning to take pictures for the listing when our condo goes up for sale next week. I don’t remember being around for the picture taking when we sold our house in Michigan; I think we might have been in Idaho by […]
Monday, December 1: This cubby used to have CD racks in it, but those have been packed up, making room for Grogu to make a visit. Tuesday, December 2: I always enjoy seeing animal tracks in the snow, pondering what visitors came by. In this case, it’s pretty clear. Wednesday, December 3: A […]
Just a few pictures that didn’t make the photo diary entries in February and March. I read the headline recently about how consumers are hurting the economy by not upgrading their phones (MSN article), which yes, I am doing. But I’m also still using my iPod, so I’m not even using my old phone to […]
As I’ve been decluttering so we can list our condo for sale, I’ve come across plenty of things I’d forgotten about. Case in point, the Bernat Opalette pattern book from 1966 that had ended up in my bedroom closet in a bag next to the backpack where I’d shoved all the paperwork related to my […]
Monday, November 24: Went to the endodontist in the medium-sized city, and got the bad news that I need not just the problem tooth pulled but the wisdom tooth next to it (which yes, I still have). I did get a souvenir CD with images of the inside of my head (okay, not a souvenir […]
The Facebook algorithm served me up this Western Electric color chart the other day. Ah, color. (No purples, but still.) I’m sure not every phone came in every color. Nonetheless, the large number of colors is impressive: 36 (only 7, or about one fifth, of them black, grey, white, or clear). Compare to the latest […]
Monday, November 17: The Brussels sprout “trees” show up at my grocery store only around the holidays. I never buy them though I do like seeing them. Tuesday, November 18: It should be more snowy by now. The resort originally announced a November 21st opening date, but pushed it to November 28th because not […]
I mentioned in my latest photo diary that my friend and I had browsed some interested shops when we were in Vancouver for our quick weekend trip. As a way to not buy all the things, I took some pictures of items that called out to me. First up, a stuffie called on the tag […]
Monday, November 10: Take your beauty when you can, like this sunset from the parking lot of the strip mall where Mr. Karen and I went to dinner after retrieving a bunch of our mail from the post office. Our mail shouldn’t have been at the post office but our vacation hold got mixed up. […]
I haven’t been knitting recently, but I have been watching videos about the Game of Wool tv show, so the YouTube algorithm guessed I like knitting and served me up a video about the Musselburgh hat, which is apparently a super popular knitting pattern. Two and a half years ago when the video was made, […]
Most weeks, I take at least a few more pictures than I need for my photo diary. And being me, I keep almost all of them, which means I have alternate views and bonus content from the weeks I’ve documented. Today I have a few to share from this past January. Every year Deschutes brewery […]
Monday, November 3: Back at home, the balloons we brought from Florida explored their new space. Not nearly as snowy as it was when I left on October 12th (that week is covered in this entry). Tuesday, November 4: Oh look, more snow. Wednesday, November 5: Back at the dentist for a cleaning; […]
Yesterday Miriam did a post about some items she’d clipped from magazines to comment on, which reminded me I have a folder of clippings sitting on my desk that I set there to write about during Holidailies. As I’ve probably mentioned before, in saving magazines and clippings therefrom, I take after my mom. When my […]
I updated my book log last night so this seems like a good time to review where I’m at with my reading goals for this year and decide which I’m going to try to achieve and which are not going to happen. I’m looking good for both of my overall goals: 63 books and 20 […]
Yes, I’m still tap tap tapping away with my stylus on the Happy Color app, so it’s time again for an update of what I’ve finished and what I’ve got going since my last entry on the subject. This installment’s featured picture is a collage of four of the patterns I recently finished. They’d been […]
Welcome to those of you popping in thanks to Holidailies, which yes I am doing again. Rather than post an introduction and/or reflection on this online journal/blogging collaborative project, I’m just going to plow ahead with what I’d likely do if it weren’t Holidailies time: continue to work on catching up with my daily photo […]
Monday, October 20: Mr. Karen and I spent this Disney day at Hollywood Studios, where we did the usual rides and attractions and ate lunch at a new to us restaurant (Woody’s Roundup Rodeo BBQ) and exchanged a purple balloon with a deflated ear for a new one. Tuesday, October 21: Started our day […]
Monday, October 13: Got up in my airport hotel way way too early and got on 6:10 am flight to Seattle, where I saw this balloon arch at one of the gates as I made my connection. Landed in Orlando three time zones away early enough to start my drive to the Gulf of Mexico […]
Monday, October 6: Flew home from Denver. I allowed plenty of extra time to get to the airport since I didn’t know how city traffic and the rain that was falling would impact the drive, so I ended up in the terminal early and found a spot to relax a bit on the level above […]
Yes, quite a gap in photo diary entries, thanks mostly to travel (I was at home for only 7 full days in the month of October). Time to start catching up… Monday, September 29: Was feeling the autumn vibes and decided to put a deep red polish on my toes to replace the more summery […]
It’s past time for another Happy Color update (previous one is here). I’m just back from a three-week trip on which I took my laptop thinking I’d do some entries from the road, but as it turned out, I booted it up exactly once to try and fill out a form that a) seemed to […]
Monday, September 22: My impulse purchase arrived: a t-shirt with proceeds to charity produced by the Corner Tap in Cubs pictcher Colin Rea’s Iowa hometown, inspired by the Cubs’ announcers Boog Sciambi and Jim Deshaies riffing on the Corner Tap’s offer of free drinks for every two strikeouts Rea makes in his Wrigley Field starts. […]
Monday, September 15: Got my flu and COVID vaccines. The pharmacist used this new type of bandage which she stuck on first and then did the shots right through the film in the center. Certainly eliminates the problem of knowing where to put the bandage after. I wasn’t entirely sure I’d be allowed to get […]
Monday, September 8: Clearest view we’ve had in a while. Tuesday, September 9: Liminal space in a grocery store nearing midnight. Wednesday, September 10: When the color depositing shampoo deposits more color than you expect, including on your pale pink treatment coat you’ve applied in hopes of getting your nails back in shape, […]
Time for this month’s Happy Color update (previous one is here). This month’s featured pictures are two of the separators I decided to finish since I have so very many separators in progress: Groups I’ve finished since the previous update (most recent listed first; all counts include any friends I matched with the main […]
Monday, September 1: Our visitors headed home and then Mr. Karen and I went down to enjoy a bit of the last day of the festival, which is much more quiet than the first few. They were out of most of the ciders, but one of the ones they still had was very nice. […]
Monday, August 25: Mr. Karen and I went up to the top of the mountain to treat ourselves to lunch. (We did get food, just started with two of the fancy cocktails.) Tuesday, August 26: Brick pattern in the entry way to the building my friend has her studio in down in the city. […]
Monday, August 18: On my way to the airport to head home from my trip, I had enough time to stop by a favorite shoe store in Detroit. Driving there, I noticed the Mammoth (The Saving Place) building was being torn down. It had been closed long before I started going to the shoe store […]
Monday, August 11: Time to re-blue my hair. Did silver mixed with dark blue and a touch of shade diluter. All are products I brought on clearance, so if it turns out to be the perfect color, I’m out of luck re-creating it, but that’s okay. All the blues seem to fade to the same […]
About a month since I did a Happy Color update. Decided to share these two completed images from places as I’d shown them in progress in my most recent photo diary post. I see now that I put them in the opposite order from the in progress shots but these things happen. Happy Color didn’t […]
Monday, August 4: I appreciate that my grocery store leaves notes like this. Not a cyber attack affecting stock this time, but an equipment failure. Tuesday, August 5: Made a birthday cake with two flavors. In a dinosaur pan because why not. Wednesday, August 6: Drove down to the city for my ladies’ […]
Monday, July 28: Went huckleberry picking with Mr. Karen. Took a tumble down a slope and stained my pants and ripped a couple new small holes in them, but didn’t lose any berries from my bag. Tuesday, July 29: Saw these striking white flowers at the side of the road. Not sure if they’re […]
Monday, July 21: I’m betting I’ve used this fiber art piece in the lobby of one of the hotels in the village as my photo of the day before, but here it is again as it’s the only one I took on a quiet day punctuated by a walk to get the mail. The whole […]
Monday, July 14: Mr. K and I took the lift up to the top of the mountain and did a short ramble along the ridge and one of the trails. Lots of wildflowers to see, one of which was a resting spot for a butterfly. Tuesday, July 15: I didn’t take photos, so I’m […]
Monday, July 7: Weeds? Or wildflowers? Doesn’t matter, I’m taking a picture. Tuesday, July 8: Drove down to the city to spend some time in my friend’s studio there. Happened to get stopped at a light where I could snap a photo of this sculpture (?) that I’ve driven by a lot but never […]
Monday, June 30: Relaxing day with Kathy and Kent, including more touring the city, a stop at the frozen yogurt place, and seeing the new apartment that one of their sons recently moved to. Tuesday, July 1: Mr. K and I drove home. Stopped at the most picturesque rest area on the route. The […]
So much coloring since my last Happy Color update. Watching baseball off the DVR continues to give me ample time to tap away with my stylus filling in pictures on the app. Here’s a recent favorite pair, one from dailies, one pulled from my summer group in progress: Groups I’ve finished since the previous […]
Monday, June 23: It’s sweet corn season. Tuesday, June 24: Spent some time poking around real estate sites, as Mr. Karen and I are starting to think more seriously about phase 2 of our retirement years. Our condo on the mountain has served us well as a base for skiing and hiking and other […]
Monday, June 16: The Happy Color app informed me it was time for the International Day of the African Child, so I colored two pictures in recognition of that, including this one from the Holidays tab. Tuesday, June 17: Spring run off is still happening, at least in this little creek that crosses the […]
Monday, June 9: Stopped at the grocery store on my way home from the dentist and saw this product I hadn’t noticed before: Mayochup Saucy Sauce. Mayochup? We call that fry sauce around these parts. When the dispensers in the lodge aren’t empty, I mix my own fry sauce on the ski days I take […]
Monday, June 2: Helped Mr. Karen put the sailboat in the water. I mostly sat in a lawn chair and read him steps from the checklist he wrote until he needed my assistance with one of them (primarily when we got to the raising the mast part, and also the making sure the boat didn’t […]
Monday, May 26: Enjoying one more sunset from my hotel room before I check out and move to a cheaper than the conference one for a night before heading home. Tuesday, May 27: I am a sucker for quirky buildings, so when I passed this one I had to turn around and pull into […]
Happy Color Update: Almost mid-June 2025
Time again for another Happy Color update; it’s been a few busy weeks since the last one. Before getting into the stuff I colored, I need to talk about the “Similar” feature that was added to the app. This is a new option under completed pictures (except for Daily, Bonus, Good Cause, Collections, and Stories—which […]
Monday, May 19: Another sign of spring here: the stairs on the side of the house emerge from their snow cocoon. Tuesday, May 20: Mostly I spent the day packing for a trip, but I did take time out to play with the new trick I learned on my phone: removing the background from […]
Monday, May 12: Mr. K and I continued our drive home via a route we don’t travel very often, heading west from Kansas through Denver, Colorado before turning north on a non-interstate highway that took us through Winter Park and into Wyoming, where we stopped for the night in Rock Springs and it became clear […]
Time again for another Happy Color update; it’s been almost a month since the last time. With long stretches in airplanes and the car and such on the trip, I got a lot of coloring done in recent weeks. I was especially delighted by these two “similar but not the same” images which I found […]
Monday, May 5: Our first day this trip at the Studios. With all the other things we wanted to do plus Star Wars fans showing up for May the 4th Be With You day over the previous weekend, I decided it was prudent to buy the Lightning Lane MultiPass, so we got to do a […]
Monday, April 28: Still not feeling well, but had plenty of over the counter meds from the last time I wasn’t feeling well. Went ahead and packed for the trip we’d planned months ago, counting on being able to push through and get on the plane the next day (masked, of course). Tuesday, April […]
Monday, April 21: Still in the part of spring when it snows (or in this case graupels) sometimes. Tuesday, April 22: Stopped to admire the view from the mountain road on my way back from town. Wednesday, April 23: As the snow melts, objects are revealed in the places where it was piled […]
Monday, April 14: And so begins the least enchanting time to be on the mountain, the day after the lifts shut down for winter season. Brown spots can be seen on some of the ski runs, and the snow banks along the road are receding and look dirty from the sand kicked up by the […]
Happy Color Update: Three Weeks into April
Time again for another Happy Color update, almost a month since the last time. I thought about waiting until my In Progress queue was more organized but decided that might mean no update for this month at all, so here we are. I reached a milestone recently: Happy Color surpassed Photos as the app using […]
Monday, April 7: Day at sea filled with music. First show we saw started before noon; the last one went until around midnight. Tuesday, April 8: Port of call on this day was the cruise line’s private island in the Bahamas. There was no dock for our big cruise ship (though it looked like […]
Monday, March 31: You guessed it: more driving. This time from Wentzville, Missouri, to Kennesaw, Georgia. We made it through St. Louis fine; glad we’d decided to do that in the light while relatively well rested, as the tricky exit that I missed that last time we were through continues to be tricky (something about […]
Monday, March 24: New Coke flavor (Orange Cream) dropped and of course I had to try it. I like it. I wish they’d do some oddball flavors that aren’t so sweet (lavender Coke anyone?) but realize those probably wouldn’t be popular. Tuesday, March 25: Noticed the art on the window of the parking attendant […]
Monday, March 17: I’m fortunate to have views like this to take pictures of. Tuesday, March 18: I refreshed my birthday flowers, taking out the ones that were wilting and snipping the stems of some others to create more variation in height. Wednesday, March 19: Reason number 4042 I love my husband: he […]
Monday, March 10: I took no photos, just screenshots, of which this meme is my favorite. Tuesday, March 11: Walked down to the village to get the mail. It’s quiet after the lifts close, empty but for the groomer heading up one of the runs. Wednesday, March 12: Bit damp and foggy out […]
My Happy Color in progress page is as organized as it’s been in a while, so much better than it was the last time I documented it. My most recent finishes are eight of the patterns that I’d been using as separators between groups, dinking away at them for months (maybe years in some cases) […]
Monday, March 3: Decided to treat ourselves to a fancy dinner complete with cocktails in the village (this restaurant used to be the fanciest on the mountain but now the newer one has taken that crown) for no particular reason other than it had been a long while since we did that. Tuesday, March […]
Monday, February 24: Mr. Karen has gotten quite good at making Chicago-style deep dish pizza. Lately he’s been doing small ones in a cast iron skillet as that’s just about the right amount for the two of us. Tuesday, February 25: Bit of a sloppy day out on the slopes; spring is coming. […]
Monday, February 17: Since we’re a Costco family now, when I needed a Band-Aid, I turned to this box of 198. Tuesday, February 18: Sunny day for skiing. Wednesday, February 19: Went to a new friend’s house for the first time and met their pets, including the cat who was way more interested […]
Monday, February 10: Looking at the ski hill as the last rays of sun are just kissing the trees at the top of the ridge. Tuesday, February 11: Twilight from the parking lot at my studio. Wednesday, February 12: Snow against the back window is at the stuff is getting trapped between the […]
Monday, February 3: One of my favorite ski runs dumps out to this junction where the choices are go on the path through the woods to the beginner lift or get on the last remaining slow double chair on the hill (if it’s open, which it usually is not). I noticed that the sign here […]
My Happy Color In Progress tab is feeling sort of out of control at the moment, so it seemed like a good time for me to document it for my own purposes. I last did this about a month ago, and while I’ve finished one of the categories I had then, I’ve added more than […]
Monday, January 27: Sunny day on the slopes. The snowcat skiing operation that runs out of this building just on the other side of out of bounds was bought by the resort this season. Maybe someday that terrain will come in bounds, but for now it’s a hefty upcharge to go out there. I’ve never […]
Monday, January 20: On this inauguration day in the US, I chose socks to express my mood.
Monday, January 13: Quiet day at home. I liked the hint of pink in these clouds over the ski mountain at the end of the day, viewed from my dining room. Tuesday, January 14: Finally my cough let up enough that I felt I could go out skiing. I only did three runs so […]
Monday, January 6: Walked down to the village with Mr. Karen and got the mail as the last few folks made their way down to the lower parking lot at the end of the ski day. Tuesday, January 7: Another day, another walk to the village to get the mail, this time after dark […]
I just got done re-ordering my Happy Color In Progress tab, and it’s more organized than it’s been since I last posted about it. I’d created a couple small groups of pictures in the intervening weeks that really belonged in existing groups of pictures, but I didn’t want to take the time to redo the […]
Wednesday, January 1: Started the year as I mean to go on, taking a walk. Mr. Karen and I just went to the village and back, and I definitely felt out of condition compared to before I got sick. I’ll get back there. The holiday period means renters all around, and the folks next door […]
Over the weekend, I was getting close to finishing reading my first book of 2025, so I knew I’d need to roll 2024’s log into a new page to free up that space for this year’s reads. Just making that new page and copying over the text was easy enough. Except my practice for years […]
I see that the portal is still open, so seems like reflecting on Holidailies 2024 is a reasonable thing to do. If I manage to finish these thoughts and get them posted, I’ll have 21 entries, which is both pretty good considering how many days I was away from home during that time and well […]
Monday, December 23: Went with Mr. Karen to pick up the dresser we decided to have refurbished (but not refinished, due to cost) after no one else in the family grabbed it from his mom’s storage unit when we were dispersing the furniture. Here it is all wrapped up for transport (the mirror was already […]
The only measurable goals I set for myself for 2024 were the two I put into StoryGraph: read 62 books, read 20 thousand pages. As of right now, I overachieved the first, finishing 69 books, and underachieved the second, with a touch over 18 thousand pages. I was hoping to finish one more book today, […]
Monday, December 16: Had to be out of the condo by 10 a.m. but our flight out wasn’t until 6:30 p.m., so we used that time in between to go to Disney Springs and see Moana 2 and explore the Coke store (all three floors … as far as I can recall, I’d only ever […]
Back when Mr. Karen and I were working, if I could manage to get the time off, we tried to go skiing somewhere between Christmas and New Year’s. Of course this meant we were joining hordes of other folks doing the same thing, but since Mr. K’s job had that whole period as a holiday, […]
Last year on this day, I wrote an entry about cleaning off the card table that serves as my desk, noting that I found more things that didn’t belong on it than did. I’m happy to report that this year, that’s not the case. The table is full, but not overly so, and most of […]
Monday, December 9: Started the day with breakfast at Boma at Animal Kingdom Lodge, then went over to Animal Kingdom park to see more stuff there. That stuff included the always mesmerizing DiVine (look closely in the photo below) wild egret hunting for lizards and sometimes catching them while a CM explained the circle of […]
When the friend that’s gone with Mr. Karen on several music-themed cruises in past years couldn’t make next year’s, I decided I’d go, because it’s generally good to try new things and if those things are something your spouse enjoys, so much the better. It’s not necessary to be joined at the hip to have […]
Merry Christmas to those of you celebrating! Please enjoy these trees I’ve seen in my recent travels (Mr. Karen and I didn’t put up one at our house this year due to those travels). In front of the Space Needle last month: At the light maze inside T-Mobile Park, also last month: On […]
On the road to spend the holiday with family, Mr. Karen and I paused at a truck stop that had a Taco John’s and grabbed some dinner. While waiting for our order to be done, I pondered the Christmas Tree set up in the lobby area. Noticed a Jack in the Box ornament on […]
Monday, December 2: Spent a good chunk of the day packing and otherwise getting ready to go to Walt Disney World in Florida with Mr. Karen. Very mixed feelings about that. Ron Desantis and his GOP supporters are awful, using tax money for evil. Why would I want to support that? But I live in […]
For years, taking a headache powder has been my go to for a stubborn morning pain in my brain. When I was working, I had more days like those, but still occasionally as a retired person I need the extra boost of some caffeine-containing pain reliever. The last time I looked to buy a new […]
Monday, November 25: Drove home across Washington state. Parts of the drive were quite foggy, like this stretch where I couldn’t see the highway from the rest area I stopped at. (Contrast with the view when Mr. Karen and I stopped there back in October.) Tuesday, November 26: This snowperson was hanging out in […]
One category of images that I had to delete from my phone to make room for the new iOS was screenshots of ads that get served up to me by algorithms that are not as targeted as they could be. I find it comforting that big tech doesn’t have me entirely figured out. Case in […]
I favor a certain brand of truck stops … sorry, travel stops … so on a road trip I get to see variations of the same merchandise in different locations. The state quarter zip tops for Idaho and Washington are a recent example. Same style, just tweaked for the local markets. In Idaho, they had […]
Time to get back to catching up with photos of the days before I left on my most recent trip. Monday, November 18: Out on a walk in the neighborhood with Mr. Karen, came across this little snowperson constructed from plow chunks on the side of the road. It made me smile. I thought the […]
So hi, I did indeed lose the thread with Holidailies. Mr. Karen and I just got back from nearly two weeks away, and unlike some other Decembers when we’ve traveled, I decided to leave my laptop at home and not try to keep up my daily posting here. I’ll share more about the trip in […]
I am a packrat born of and raised by packrats, so it’s no surprise that I accumulate clutter both physical and digital (see yesterday’s entry about cleaning up excess browser tabs, for example). My phone regularly tells me I have no storage left. I delete just enough photos that it stops telling me that and […]
I had something else in mind to write for today, but when I was updated the “on this date” list at the bottom of my draft document, I saw that I seem to have started a tradition of clearing out tabs on my phone browser during Holidailies, and I sure need to do that again […]
Regular readers will know that my goal is to post a photo diary update every Monday. Regular readers will also know that I do not meet that goal rather often. Thus here I am today with photos from mid-November. Monday, November 11: Another rainy day when exercise took the form of walking all the aisles […]
The calendar reminder I set myself last year worked: I went looking for Holidailies sign up before December started, so here I am ready to go on the first day. Apparently Holidailies is 25 years old this year, which seems both impossible and very cool. I didn’t participate for the first two years as I […]
Monday, November 4: Winter weather continues here on the mountain. Tuesday, November 5: Started the day with hope, went to vote, took long stroll with Mr. Karen in town amidst the fall colors, had a nice dinner with a blue margarita, then returned home and saw my hope evaporate as the evening wore on […]
A look back to last week, when I had way more hope than I do right now. Monday, October 28: Went to have dinner with my new-ish friends who live next to the water. Stopped at the same spot as when I visited them the first time; now the lake has been drawn down for […]
Monday, October 21: Enjoying the fall colors in Kathy’s yard on the way to and from Joan’s storage unit to keep going through the remaining stuff in there. Tuesday, October 22: Had lunch with Kathy and Kent at a place that had this gorgeous mural on the side of their building. We’d driven by […]
Monday, October 14: Brilliant autumn day spent doing mundane things. Mr. Karen and I headed to town to get our flu shots and COVID boosters, then went our separate ways for the afternoon. I spent mine in the studio, going through a few boxes. I’m happy to report I was able to actually put most […]
Monday, October 7: Today was the day for taking the boat out of the water for the winter. We allowed ourselves a week before the deadline set by the city we rent the dock space from to allow time for addressing any issues that came up, but it went pretty darn smoothly. Mr. Karen worked […]
Monday, September 30: Left the retreat house just after breakfast to drive home. None of the journey was on an interstate, but fortunately there were a couple roadside rest stops on the two lane highways I was on. I snapped the shot below from the one along the Clearwater River. Tuesday, October 1: I […]
Monday, September 23: Went to dinner at a new friend’s house and stopped for a few minutes along the way there to take in the river from a view I’d not seen before. Tuesday, September 24: Work going on to replace some rooflets on our condo building revealed glimpses of an earlier look the […]
Monday, September 16: End of another day on the mountain. The storage box for the ongoing renovation across the street is still there. The rec district van that runs the bike shuttle on weekends is parked until it’s time comes to work again. Work trucks in front of the building belong to the guys renting […]
Monday, September 9: My mom had housedresses when I was growing up, and for the past several (five? ten? I’m not sure) years, I’ve had them, too. Something to wear in the mornings when I’m not ready to shower and dress yet. The first one I recall designating as a housedress in my head was […]
Monday, September 2: Our guests left after brunch, heading off toward their next adventures on the road. After saying goodby to them, Mr. Karen and I headed down to the village to enjoy the last day of summer season on the mountain. The cider and seltzer tent at the festival was shut down entirely, not […]
Monday, August 26: Some days, like this one, I don’t do or see anything photo-worthy except during the half hour or so it takes to walk down to the village and get the mail. Even then, the photos aren’t necessarily worthy, like this one of a wildflower that has the focus not quite where I […]
Monday, August 19: I was surprised driving to town when *NSYNC’s Bye Bye Bye came on the radio and my eyes filled with tears. I bought the album that song is on the summer after it came out because I was doing a lot of driving between Michigan and Illinois and sometimes singing along to […]
Monday, August 12: I happened to be the passenger as we came over the pass into Idaho on our last day of this road trip, so I snapped a photo. We had to come this route so we could pick up my car at the airport in Spokane (no such thing as an Uber to […]
Monday, August 5: Reunited with Mr. Karen near the Detroit airport so I could turn in my rental car before our road trip home together. Visited with his sister Faye and her husband in the afternoon before hitting the road for serious. Stopped for dinner at an Indian restaurant in Indiana; a sign outside exhorted […]
Monday, July 29: Went huckleberry picking and got rained on, which I knew might happen but I was not quite prepared for how much rain there would be. My pants got soaked (because I hadn’t worn my rain pants) which soaked my socks which would have been fine otherwise since I did wear my water […]
Monday, July 22: I saw this balloon stuck in a tree along the mountain road and brought it home. It wasted no time flying up to the top of the house and plastering itself to the fan in the window. Tuesday, July 23: Still doing Happy Color. I especially liked this interesting flower of […]
Monday, July 15: Summer is construction season. This pile is debris from the pool area that was taken out from behind one of the condo buildings in the village. Coincidentally, it’s sitting in the parking area where Mr. K and I pulled in the first time we visited the mountain to ski. Tuesday, July […]
Monday, July 8: I am spoiled by the views where I live. This is just typical summer twilight scene from my driveway. Tuesday, July 9: Rode the lift up and did a short hike at the top with Mr. Karen. The beargrass up there is just starting to come into bloom, as illustrated by […]
Monday, July 1: Remember when the installer ran out of floor tiles because the estimator didn’t estimate properly how many we’d need to deal with all the nooks and crannies in this old condo? (June 18 if you don’t recall, and there’s no reason you should.) Well, the order for the additional tiles we’d need […]
Monday, June 24: The floor project was far enough along that Mr. Karen could install the new baseboard heaters. Just how old the ones he was replacing were is evident in this sticker he found on them: it warns about making sure to have the heater clear of shag carpeting. Tuesday, June 25: It’s […]
Monday, June 17: Work on the floor in our home continued, with the actual flooring starting to go in some areas while others got more leveling goop on them. On my way to town to escape that mess, I stopped to take some photos of the beargrass blooming about halfway down the mountain. Tuesday, […]
Monday, June 10: Big day that came about a month later than we’d hoped: got Mr. Karen’s sailboat in the water. The delay wasn’t on our end; it was due to the lake level not being brought up for summer on the usual schedule because of a problem with the dam that controls it. By […]
Monday, June 3: Made it back home. Took the less scenic route as we had to pick up Mr. Karen’s vehicle at the airport in Spokane, and apparently I found this so uninspiring that the best photo I took all day was a selfie on the couch as I was winding down scrolling social media […]
Monday, May 27: Last full day of con activities. A couple of my friends and I went to dinner at a conveyor belt sushi place that had opened since last year’s con, then we walked over to an H Mart that was also new. I almost bought this footwear spray just because of the cute […]
Monday, May 20: On the road again, solo this time (but only for the first part of the trip). Left my mountain (which still had some snow on it) a bit after noon and made it to Laurel, Montana for the night (somewhere I’d never stayed before in all the times I’ve been on this […]
Monday, May 13: Watching a Cubs game off the DVR while Mr. Karen and our guest were out adventuring, I got to see a double rainbow during a rain delay (though this picture of it doesn’t show it to best advantage). Tuesday, May 14: When it’s the end of the day and I haven’t […]
Monday, May 6: Woke up to snow that had fallen overnight, but that melted away and left a gorgeous if chilly spring day, seen here from the road that leads to the mailboxes in the village. Tuesday, May 7: I tried a new to me discussion group that some of my friends are in, […]
Monday, April 29: Had to run some errands in town, so Mr. K and I took the opportunity to have dinner down there, including our first ever indoor s’mores experience. The flame could light the marshmallows on fire, so in that sense it was a reasonable facsimile of most of my campfire experiences. The chocolate […]
Monday, April 22: Snow has mostly melted off the forest path back from the village, with only the part where it gets packed down still having any significant coverage. Tuesday, April 23: Went with Mr. Karen to get the sailboat out of storage. These vintage RVs and other modes of transport were lined up […]
Monday, April 15: A day spent catching up on stuff around the house didn’t lead to any good photos, but I did spend some time coloring the last of the Marvel images in the Happy Color app that I’d started before they got pulled from the menu. I am not super familiar with the MCU, […]
Monday, April 8: Eclipse day! I might have to write a separate entry about this experience; for now I’ll just say we got to see it with only a few wispy clouds in the sky. It was worth all the stress and driving. Picture below was taken at 2 in the afternoon during totality. It […]
Monday, April 1: Another day when I neglected to take any decent photos, so a screenshot from Happy Color will have to mark the day. Happy Color thinks balloons are a big part of April Fool’s Day for some reason. I wish this were true as I like balloons way better than pranks. Tuesday, […]
Monday, March 25: I had a chunk of time between when I had to check out of my hotel and when I had to return the rental car for my flight home, so used a bit of that to wander through one of the convention spaces at the hotel I’d been staying at. I feel […]
Monday, March 18: Warm enough to ski without my fleece neck gaiter (and yes, my helmet chin strap is too loose here). Tuesday, March 19: Spring greens to play with, along with some black that looks more like deep greyish brown to me but I can work with that. Wednesday, March 20: Flying […]
Monday, March 11: This is one of those “oh it’s bedtime and I don’t have a photo for today” shots, of one of my favorite Disney Parks souvenirs: a do not disturb sign that at first glance doesn’t look like a Disney souvenir. It’s from the Tower of Terror, a thrill ride (sorry, attraction) with […]
Monday, March 4: You know there’s been a lot of snow when the balcony is full to the top of the railing and folks are clicking into their bindings in front of the house to ski down to the resort. Tuesday, March 5: Had put it off as long as I could but finally […]
Monday, February 26: Went out skiing with our friend and houseguest Wendy (and her friend joined us for some runs, too). Tuesday, February 27: Feeling under the weather so took a COVID test in case I needed to start isolating. Fortunately it came up negative. Unfortunately I’m not as confident in the tests as […]
Monday, February 19: Still finishing up the Valentine’s pictures in the Happy Color app. Tuesday, February 20: This stand up pencil case turned out to be the perfect size to hold my computer glasses and a bottle of glasses cleaner, along with a lens wipe cloth. A little thing, but nice to not have […]
Yeah, I’ve fallen behind here. Catching up starting now. Monday, February 12: Driving home from Seattle I happened to be at the rest area with a view right at sunset. Tuesday, February 13: Made a huckleberry pie just because I could. Wednesday, February 14: Valentine’s Day on the slopes. Thursday, February 15: […]
Monday, February 5: Didn’t ski but did walk to the village with Mr. K to get the mail. The apres scene outside the newest restaurant was subdued thanks to low weekday crowds and slightly gloomy conditions. Tuesday, February 6: Did ski. Continue to enjoy the views even though I’ve seen them and seen them. […]
Monday, January 29: My favorite view, showing the sunlight on the mountains across the way. Tuesday, January 30: Ski day. This is the view from the top into the back country, with a blanket of clouds in the valley beyond. As an aside, when we were in the process of buying our condo, Mr. […]
Monday, January 22: Recovery from the broken pipes across the street continued. On this day, there was an assortment of service providers onsite. Tuesday, January 23: Melted cheese on Triscuits is a favorite snack of mine. I went a bit overboard with the cheese this time. Wednesday, January 24: When it’s getting late […]
Monday, January 15: It’s been extremely cold, which has caused a lot of burst pipes, including some across the street from us. Lots of activity over there the day after the incident, with clean up crews and a plumber on site. Tuesday, January 16: Another effect of the cold is the lake finally has […]
Monday, January 8: Time to pack away the Christmas décor for another year, including these figurines that one of Mr. Karen’s aunt gave us the year she celebrated the holiday at our house. Though Department 56 collectible figurines aren’t really our style, we’ve held on to them and display them most years. She obviously put […]
I will get caught up with my 2024 photo diary soon, but today I want to natter on about Happy Color again, as it’s still occupying a fair bit of my discretionary time. This morning I was reviewing what I had in my In Progress tab. I do my best to keep the images in […]
Yes, I’ve decided to keep going with my photo a day project into a new year. I like being able to look back at the little everyday moments that would otherwise get lost. Monday, January 1: Still holiday crowds about (with a different vehicle than last week blocking my garage when I woke up) and […]
Monday, December 25: Quiet Christmas at home with Mr. Karen. We pulled out the Christmas glasses for the occasion. In my head, I remember getting these at a Ponderosa steakhouse, but I can find no evidence on the internet to back up that memory. Ponderosa did have Christmas glasses, branded with both Pepsi and Coke, […]
Sitting here on the first day of a new year, I’m undecided if I want to task myself to accomplish anything in particular in the next twelve months. I want to do things, sure. For instance, I’d like to end 2024 carrying less weight, both physically in pounds and stuff and mentally in the energy […]
Despite the poor snow conditions, the holiday crowds are here on the mountain for New Year’s Eve. On the plus side, this means more dogs for me to see walking by my windows. On the minus, I had to trudge out into the yard earlier to pick up the the beer-related trash that blew off […]
It feels like lots of my internet friends have gotten COVID this month, with pictures of positive tests showing up on Facebook again and again, and one of my small group of n person friends was also sick with it a few weeks ago. When I got COVID for the second time this past summer […]
Yesterday I wrote about the clutter on my desk (to which I’ve added since today’s mail and a plastic bag). This morning I was thinking about the clutter in my bathroom. I guess if I use the things it’s not really clutter, but I use a lot of things and maybe don’t need so many. […]
I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that both my parents were people who liked to save stuff. Dad was more organized about it than Mom but both held on to things that probably should have been let go of. I inherited that trait and/or learned it at an impressionable age. Which is why I’m sitting here […]
Laundry is one of my household tasks (Mr. K has dishes, so we each have a thing to do that piles up if we don’t keep after it). I am old fashioned and do separate loads for different things. Clothes get sorted into lights, brights, darks, and sport fabrics. Towels are done on their own […]
Monday, December 18: Got my 2023 COVID booster shot. I’d been considering trying to get the Novavax, as I’ve read some things that seem to point to it giving a different, perhaps better, type of protection, but I couldn’t find it locally and didn’t want to wait any longer, so got the Pfizer. Tuesday, […]
Merry Christmas to those of you celebrating! Please enjoy some holiday art done by Mr. Karen as a wee lad. Mixed media Christmas card: construction paper, paper doily, glitter, and gummed star. Santa portrait: construction paper, paper plate, cotton balls, and crayon. Unclear what the purpose is of the slits in the center where […]
This is prime time for me to be working on the holiday pictures in the Happy Color app, with more showing up every day. Among the ones I colored today were the only two which said “Christmas Eve” on them, both bonuses from prior years. The first one was filled with classic imagery: a gift, […]
I’m pretty sure I haven’t shared this ornament before, as it’s fairly new (within the last few years) but if I have, here it is again, a ceramic mushroom made by the significant other of one of our nephews and given to us by Mr. Karen’s sister Kathy. The stem is attached the to cap […]
I changed the sheets on two beds today (the king in the main bedroom and a twin in one of the guest bedrooms), and while I was shoving pillows back into pillowcases (a total of twelve pillows into ten cases because two of our small pillows are too flat for comfort so they get a […]
Despite conditions that have deteriorated since my last outing, I went skiing today, mostly because I needed some exercise and thought it would be helpful to retain some muscle memory for when the season really gets going. It was a somewhat dismal experience. I knew when I saw so much grass exposed in the village […]
I’m having what feels like a busy day, with three things to do (make yogurt, grocery shop, work in the studio). How I ever worked and also did non-work things is hard to fathom at this point. I know it happened, I just don’t recall how. I suppose Holidailies is a fourth thing, but it’s […]
Monday, December 11: Walked to the village to get the mail and was not at all heartened by the water running along the side of the road. Sounded more like spring than the start of winter. Tuesday, December 12: I put an orange slipcover on the couch to brighten things up (and made gluten-free […]
One day last week on which neither Mr. Karen nor I skied, it got dark before we remembered we hadn’t gotten the mail (not surprising, since this time of year it feels like it gets dark approximately three or four hours after we finish breakfast). We decided to walk down to the village and collect […]
My relationship with the Happy Color app (last chronicled about two weeks ago), like all relationships, sometimes has its frustrations. This week I’ve run into two of them, which, because it is Holidalies, I’m going to write about. First, in the old bonus pictures for Christmas that I’ve been working on, I found a triptych […]
When Mr. Karen and I went through our Christmas stuff before we made our big move from Michigan to Idaho, I kept all the Eeyore ornaments, because I’ve liked that sad donkey since I was a small child. They don’t all go on the tree every time we put it up, but there’s always at […]
The other day we had leftover beef barley soup for dinner, and I decided to make some biscuits so it wouldn’t be just the same meal as the first time. I went to the cupboard to grab a box of mix. I double checked the expiration dates to make sure to pull the oldest one […]
I skied today for the first time in over a week. I didn’t realize it had been quite that long. It’s been a very slow start to the season for both me and the mountain. On this same day last year, I posted about skiing on the back side of the mountain; this year, barely […]
With the novella I finished last night, I met my 2023 reading goal of 61 books. Go me! I had mere seconds to bask in that achievement, as just below showing that achievement on my stats page, The StoryGraph informed me I’m only 73% complete with my pages goal of 25,000. “5,592 pages more until […]
Today I fought back against the gloom engendered by short winter days and poor snow conditions by putting a new slipcover on the sofa. Which I will show you, but only after giving you a history of all the couches I have owned as an adult. Not because I get more ad revenue that way […]
Monday, December 4: Time to shovel the balconies. Tuesday, December 5: This awfulness is why the shoveling had to be done the day before. This much rain soaking into the snow could be bad news for the load on the balconies and definitely was for skiing; the lifts were shut down for the day. […]
During busy travel months, I often have two tubes (or bottles or jars) of my skincare products open at the same time, one in my bathroom and one in my toiletries kit that gets taken on the road. Mr. K and I don’t have any trips planned for a while since it’s ski season, so […]
Most days I have cereal or yogurt and granola for breakfast. Saturdays, though, are a free for all. Depending on what we have on hand and how we feel, we might eat steel cut oats or eggs or pancakes or French toast. On one of his trips this year, Mr. Karen picked up a waffle […]
I took this screenshot of part of an image I was doing in Happy Color earlier this week, as the red, green, and white(ish) spiral one to the left of the gingerbread person’s head reminded me of the pinwheel cookies I made in high school that were those colors. I think I got the […]
In yesterday’s post, I shared that Mr. Karen had put up Christmas lights both outside and inside. Since then, he put up more lights inside, and today we put up our tree and some of our holiday display items, so we’re all merry and bright around here. The tree needed more attention than usual this […]
Monday, November 27: First ski day of the season! Only one lift open and one run groomed, but it’s better than zero and zero. Mr. Karen wore some classic orange and blue Olin Mark IV skis from the late 1970s/early 1980s. Most of those have long since been trashed or turned into furniture or shot […]
This is the fourth consecutive Holidailies that I’ve been spending a fair chunk of my “casual gaming” time on the Happy Color app. A while back, I did try the Dazzly app, in which you drop “gems” into spaces to make designs, but the free version was hampered enough by ads and premium-only images that […]
One of the rules for my photo diary project is I limit myself to one photo per day (because it grew out of a 365 group on Flickr). Once in a great while I decide a collage of several images counts as one photo but mostly I make those sometimes hard choices. But writing more […]
Last year during Holidailies, I was inspired to close a bunch of tabs on my phone browser. I went through a similar exercise in this past April, but since then I have not done a good job keeping my number of open tabs reasonable (on one screen is my definition of that), even though there’s […]
Monday, November 20: Provided logistical support (putting things in piles/trash/recycling as directed) while Mr. Karen and Kathy went through some boxes of family photos. A lot of the oldest ones weren’t labeled, or if they were had names that weren’t familiar, and the elders who might have known who these people were and what the […]
Because the Facebook algorithm is not perfect (at what I want—I bet it’s pretty good at what advertisers want), I didn’t see anything about Holidailies 2023 until I used my human brain to go look at their page this morning. I’m just glad I remembered on December 1st, so I can start on time this […]
Monday, November 13: Did some errands in the medium sized city and came across this symbol painted in a parking space from the opposite side it was meant to be viewed from. I thought it looked like a happy alien or maybe a frog wearing a superhero mask. Tuesday, November 14: Finally time for […]
Monday, November 6: Winter happening out my back window. Tuesday, November 7: The ice and snow on the pavement made an interesting pattern. Wednesday, November 8: It may be looking quite wintery up on the mountain, but it’s still autumn down in town. Thursday, November 9: Mr. Karen returned from a short […]
Tuesday, October 31: Saw snowshoe hare tracks in the snow out the back window. Wednesday, November 1: Lots of construction projects scrambling to get things buttoned up before real winter arrives. This dude was just driving up our street in his boom lift, as one does. Thursday, November 2: More snow. I liked […]
Monday, October 23: Drove down to the studio as the sun was setting and walked around the end of the building to get this view (technically I was on the lumber company’s property but they weren’t working at this end at the time). Tuesday, October 24: Snow starting to pile up on my car […]
Monday, October 16: Quiet day at home. The Happy Color app informed me it was World Food Day, so I colored some pictures for that in between doing laundry and such. Tuesday, October 17: In celebration of leaving the house, I wore these new Baby Yoda socks I’d been saving. Wednesday, October 18: […]
Monday, October 9: Another day of staying home and doing wound care. Happy to be feeling a bit better each day but still sad at all the things I’d planned to do that won’t be happening. The only photos I took were not fit for posting, being gross wound progress shots, but I did color […]
Monday, October 2: When I got home from my trip last week, I was feeling tired, which seemed appropriate. I gave myself permission to not jump back into all my usual social activities and just stuck close to home, getting a start on unpacking and laundry and such. Except I was still feeling tired at […]
Monday, September 25: Enjoyed the spots of fall color near the hotel on my way to the airport. Fall in my part of Idaho is more of a golden affair, so I especially loved seeing the reds and oranges. I was disappointed at the airport that the tunnel of fascination wasn’t working properly but the […]
Monday, September 18: Another day on the road. We took time out to see the world’s largest gavel and later to explore a park that had confusingly marked but picturesque trails. Tuesday, September 19: On our way through metro Detroit, we hit up a few favorites: Grand Traverse Pie, The Henry Ford museum (wanted […]
Monday, September 11: On the road all day, from Butte to Casper, Wyoming. We got off the interstate for about half the day to see different scenery than we usually see. We even got to the Wind River Canyon (below) while it was still light out. Tuesday, September 12: Mr. Karen and I are […]
Monday, September 4: Last day of Fall Fest brought fall weather. Mr. Karen, his sister, and I left it too long to go up the lift for one last ride and ended up being in the clouds at the top. Ah well, that’s how it goes sometimes. Tuesday, September 5: I was busy with […]
Yep, you guessed it … I’m in catch up mode again after taking some time away from my computer. Monday, August 28: Went up the road past a bunch of new houses to some still-vacant land and found what might be our last huckleberries of the season. Tuesday, August 29: Went to town to […]
In this installment, Mr. Karen and I finally get home from our summer vacation. Monday, August 21: Woke up to a view of picturesque Wisconsin farmland (see below), went to the cheese shop conveniently located close to the hotel, then got back on the road. The best pies in each state list has been updated […]
Fourth week of my summer vacation. Monday, August 14: Another sea day, with more relaxing and looking at the water, more watching ballet class, more dressing up for dinner (but not as dressed up as a gala night, of which there were two during the week). Also more walking on the promenade deck, which meant […]
Third week of my summer vacation. Monday, August 7: Mr. Karen and I joined a small group of IO Earth fans on a field trip. Our first stop was the band’s practice/studio space, where we saw where the magic happens (and a few locations where they shot parts of their videos as well). Then it […]
Monday, July 31: Another driving day. I always appreciate it when highway rest areas have extra features to explore. One we stopped at in Ohio on this day had a pollinator garden, which seemed to be well used by bees. We laid our heads in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Tuesday, August 1: Continued our drive east, […]
Hey there. Mr. Karen I went gallivanting across the country and the across an ocean and back again since I last wrote here, so I have some catching up to do, a week at a time. Monday, July 24: Mr. K and I loaded up the car and left our mountain. The weather was fine, […]
Monday, July 17: At some point the guy the condo association (grand name for five families) hires to cut the yard once a summer will show up. In the meantime, I’m enjoying the wildflowers growing next to the driveway. Tuesday, July 18: Woke up feeling a bit more stuffed up than ususal. Thought it […]
Monday, July 10: A deer stopped to take a rest behind our house. If I hadn’t heard it walking through the brush to get to the well screened spot it chose, I would have never known it was there. Even knowing it was there, it was hard to see. Good job, deer. Tuesday, July […]
Monday, July 3: Picked some more huckleberries then went to the village and rode up to have lunch at the top. Tuesday, July 4: Had a blessedly quiet holiday up on the the mountain. Apparently all the loud folks were in town where the fireworks are shot off near the beach. Wednesday, 5 […]
Monday, June 26: Oh happy day! The first huckleberries of the season are ripe enough to pick, and Mr. Karen and I went out and got some. Tuesday, June 27: Went down to town and saw this big puffball near where I parked my car. Wednesday, June 28: Did more huckleberry picking and […]
Monday, June 19: Tried a new to me macrame pattern, the Aztec Sun Bar, and really liked the look of it. I also got lost in the rhythm of tying it once I got into the groove. The second band went much faster than the first had. I liked these so much I didn’t undo […]
Monday, June 12: Sitting at the dining room table, I saw a dark shape outside I thought was a big dog roaming. Nope. It was a bear, just taking a stroll through the neighborhood. Tuesday, June 13: Rainy day. Mr. K and I did get in a walk to the village and back between […]
So yeah, my catching up fell behind again. I’ve been busy offline, as will be described as I continue to get back on track here. Monday, June 5: Driving, driving, driving. We woke up in Brandon, South Dakota, and zipped across the rest of the state and into Wyoming, where we stopped for the night […]
As will become clear almost immediately, I was traveling again and not posting here. In a bold move, I didn’t even take my laptop with me. The catching up begins now. Monday, May 29: Last day of the conference. These wall sconces in some of the classroom spaces are more interesting than most, what with […]
As will become clear almost immediately, I was traveling again and not posting here. In a bold move, I didn’t even take my laptop with me. The catching up begins now. Monday, May 22: Left home to head east in my more fully loaded than usual car thanks to the 4-drawer filing cabinet and four […]
Monday, May 15: Took a walk to the village with Mr. Karen and there was so much to see I had a hard time picking a photo for today. We went up the road past the lifts to the seasonal stream raging with spring runoff and then came back down and took in the view […]
Tuesday, May 9: Much less snow on the mountain upon my return from my trip than there was when I left. Ah, spring. Wednesday, May 10: Not surprisingly, the snow level outside the back window has also dropped significantly. Thursday, May 11: Still catching up on things from being gone, including coloring pictures […]
Monday, May 1: Spent some time in my studio in town. As I was getting ready to leave, I noticed the light outside and took a few shots to remember. Tuesday, May 2: More and more brown showing through on the mountain. Wednesday, May 3: Flew to Philadelphia for a craft conference. Connected […]
Monday, April 24: Spring melt is going on in earnest now, but there’s still plenty of snow left out my back window. Tuesday, April 25: Like I said, spring melt. This is in the village, water splashing into a puddle as it melts off the roof above. Just a week or so ago, there […]
Modern life seems to require having an assortment of cords close to hand, and because I’m sometimes at home and sometimes not and unwilling to buy duplicate sets of connectors for all my devices, my cords get carried from place to place. I had been doing this in a quart size ziptop plastic bag that […]
Tuesday, April 18: We’d made an effort to eat up all our perishables before we left town the previous week, so it was time to go grocery shopping. The super happy, super cute tortilla chip on this box hasn’t yet gotten me to buy this brand, but it definitely catches my eye every time I’m […]
Monday, April 10: We usually get a big icicle hanging from the spot in our roof where our unit was joined to the rest of the condo building. Most years, it forms and falls off several times, but this year, it grew into a very stout column, then detached from the roof. With the warmer […]
Monday, April 3: With the recent snow, the back window has been topped off. In other years, the snow has piled up right against the glass, but this year there’s been a gap so some light does get in. Tuesday, April 4: Someone had fun altering this run name to fit the “famous potatoes” […]
Yes, I fell behind again. It’s gonna happen. Monday, March 27: Mr. Karen adjusted the bindings of these garage sale Volant skis for me and I tried them out on the slopes. I liked them. Tuesday, March 28: Bluebird day on the mountain. Wednesday, March 29: Went to a fundraiser for the avalanche […]
The last update of the browser I use on my phone shows the number of open tabs. I do not like this feature. Yes, I know I usually have a lot of tabs open. No, I don’t want to see the exact number. If I know the number, I want to to do something about […]
Monday, March 20: Trying another of my birthday presents from Mr. Karen, some fancy loose teas, though they might also be potpourri looking at this photo. Tuesday, March 21: A rare day when I felt confident in changing over to the sun lens on my ski goggles. Spring is here. Wednesday, March 22: […]
Monday, March 13: Our friend Wendy decided to stick to her originally scheduled departure despite still testing positive for COVID. We gave her some more good masks, and I took her to the airport. I was glad the heavy rain held off until I’d dropped her off. I pulled into the cell phone lot and […]
Monday, March 6: Our houseguest Wendy unfortunately started feeling sick over the weekend and tested positive for COVID. Mr. K and I both tested negative, which was both a relief and a puzzle, since one or both of us had been with Wendy pretty much the whole time we were out and about since she’d […]
Monday, February 27: Weather cleared enough that I was able to get to town to do some stuff. On the way home, I was unsurprised to have to wait for a train. The second train going the other direction, which you can just glimpse between cars of the closer one, was a bit more novel, […]
Monday, February 20: I finally saw my brother for the first time since before the pandemic started. I was so happy. Tuesday, February 21: After all the travel and socializing, I was still negative for COVID so felt okay about getting on a plane for home. Wednesday, February 22: Thanks to weather (and […]
We interrupt your regularly scheduled photo diary update, which was previously interrupted by me busy getting the house ready for a guest that Mr. K and I pick up a bit later today in Spokane (assuming her air travel does not go awry), to bring you crafting news. As seen in the last few weeks’ […]
I intended to post this update yesterday but instead spent that time figuring out how to get this website working again. A WordPress add-on I’ve used for my archives page for years had failed, which WordPress interpreted as a critical error. Most of the pages on this website were locked behind an error message, including […]
So yes, I’ve fallen behind in my photo diary. Catching up starts today. Monday, February 6: Like a lot of creative people, I accumulate notebooks. This one has an interesting sensory cover with squishy hexagons and glitter in a liquid filled plastic cover. You can squish the hexagons and slide them around a bit. […]
Monday, January 30: Didn’t ski because it was very cold and there’d been no new snow, but Mr. K and I did bundle up and walk down to the village in the late afternoon to get the mail. Things were looking pretty picturesque. Tuesday, January 31: Another super cold day with no fresh snow, […]
Monday, January 23: The road/shoulder outside my house is the widest and flattest space on our street. People use it to turn around and head up the hill instead of trying to make the super sharp turn to the next road up. The folks in the condo building next door use it to park when […]
Monday, January 16: Due to holiday crowds on the mountain and having some hotel points expiring at the end of the month, Mr. K and I took ourselves down south an hour or do for an overnight getaway. We found a new to us Indian/fusion restaurant that was very good. After the mango lassi and […]
Late this week with last week’s photos due to my schedule, such as it is, being disrupted and that throwing me all off. Monday, January 9: Out on the slopes. Haven’t gotten nearly as many ski days in this year as some because … I’m not 100% sure why. Lack of vim, I guess. […]
Yes, this week has eight days. Similar to how the last one in 2022 had six. Sunday, January 1: Mr. K and I mostly spent the day inside, avoiding the holiday week crowds on the mountain. We did walk down the village to get some fresh air and pick up the mail we’d not gotten […]
Monday, December 26: Two of the nephews collaborated on making eggs Benedict for breakfast. Tuesday, December 27: Joan’s wedding dress. Ice blue satin under white lace. Brought out so the sister who hadn’t been around when we found it at Thanksgiving could see it. Wednesday, December 28: Drove across Washington state and home. […]
With this entry, I’ll wrap up another year of Holidailies participation. I didn’t obsess about it as I’ve done in some past years (obviously, what with not remembering to sign up until December 2nd) but will finish with 29 entries for 32 days, which is not too shabby. It’s also not sustainable. Still, I would […]
I wrapped up last year’s Holidailies with some pictures from and words about the Happy Color app, which I noted I was still engaged with after more than a year. Well, Happy Color and I continue to be a thing. These past few months, I’ve mostly been focused on holiday pictures: first Halloween, then Thanksgiving, […]
I did not go skiing today. Decided I’d rather avoid the crowds than join them, so I stayed in and did four loads of laundry (sheets and towels might happen tomorrow) and watched some shows off the DVR and colored a fair few pictures on my phone. One plus about all the people here this […]
The weather cooperated and Mr. K and I were able to drive home over the pass yesterday. There were a few sloppy and/or slippery stretches but all in all the journey was smooth. It still being Christmas week, there were approximately five times more cars within a stone’s throw of our house than there usually […]
I’ll likely finish a few more books before the year officially ends, but it’s close enough to 2023 to reflect on my 2022 reading. I gave up Goodreads this year in favor of just using StoryGraph, and I haven’t missed that part of the Amazon ecosystem. I haven’t double checked my data entry yet, but […]
Family Christmas continued yesterday with a Boxing Day where the only boxes were those of old photos from Joan’s storage unit that Mr. K and his sisters sorted through before we heading out for dinner at a Mexican place with all but one nephew who had to work. We did choose a restaurant close to […]
Monday, December 19: Picture perfect day on the mountain, but very cold and windy (to the point the National Weather Service issued a warning). I stayed inside. Tuesday, December 20: New ornament on our tree this year, an Idaho one found in the clearance section of a souvenir shop in Missouri on one of […]
There are no children at this year’s family Christmas, so no rush to get up and get going. I’m typing as quietly as I can since one of the nephews is sleeping in another part of this semi-open concept space. A few other people are awake and moving about in a restrained manner while we […]
Ice Is Nice If You Don’t Have to Drive On It
Winter travel in the mountains being what it is, Mr. K has been studying weather forecasts for about six different locations in order to plan our trip to be with his sisters and other family for Christmas. He found a window and we made it to our destination safely, arriving after they’d had their big […]
I needed to top off my little bottle of purse ibuprofen, so I grabbed the bathroom bottle, but that only had enough tablets in it to fill little bottle, so I had to get the big bottle from the linen closet to refill the bathroom one. It’s the circle of life. I recently found […]
Aging comes for us all if we’re fortunate to live that long. I am now “travels with a nightlight” years old. I’ve been that old for a few years now, actually. My travel kit has had a small flashlight in it for years and years, but now that nighttime bathroom trips are pretty much a […]
After reading Theresa B’s post about tabs, I was inspired to go through the ones open on Chrome on my phone and clean them up. Some of the tabs that I decided to let go of: Amazon link for very high platform flip flops with small rhinestones in a pastel rainbow arrangement on the sides […]
Having already missed the first day of Holidailies, it seemed much less consequential when I decided last night that I wasn’t going to write an entry for the 18th. Just wasn’t feeling motivated. Today, though, today I am writing, because it’s time for my weekly photo diary. The structure and subject is there; I just […]
Mr. K and I finally got around to putting ornaments on the tree tonight. We’ve been busy skiing and stuff. I took a few photos after we were done, but worried that I’d shared those particular ornaments before, so did a quick search of my past Christmas tree posts, which reminded me of some ornaments […]
On our Thanksgiving week travels, Mr. K and I went to a Fred Meyer because it has a better bathroom than the Jamba Juice it shares a parking lot with. Getting ourselves a treat at Jamba Juice before navigating through Seattle has become something of a tradition when we drive that route. Near the door […]
Today, a week after I put one of my quilts on a guest bed, I put another in the main bedroom.
Early in the ski season, I aim to do something new every day I’m out on the slopes. Explore a run or wear a pair of skis I haven’t been on since last season, ride a newly opened lift, and so on. Today I did several new things, including skiing two runs on the backside […]
Mr. K and I started putting up our Christmas tree tonight after dinner, the tall skinny pre-lit one my mom gave us because she thought we should put it in our front hall. I say started because we never got to the putting on ornaments part due to struggles with the lights. More struggles than […]
It feels a little strange to be doing a week in photos entry when I’ve written so much here during the week, but I anticipated that and have made sure to have enough photos so I won’t just be re-using ones I’ve already posted. Monday, December 5: Cold and windy ski conditions along one of […]
I thought about writing about snow again today, because with 28 inches in the last 48 hours, there’s a lot of it around. But I decided to take a break from pictures of the snow and instead share a picture created by the snow. Specifically the snow that failed to slide right out of our […]
There was a pause in the snowfall yesterday afternoon and evening, but it started back up overnight and has just kept snowing. I believe I may have called this storm into being by RSVPing to a Christmas party a friend is hosting in Spokane tonight. I think I’ll still be able to go, as the […]
The marker on our front deck showed around seven inches of new snow overnight (on top of the foot that was already there), and the resort snow report said there’d been eight inches on their marker. This mean Mr. K and I skipped the more leisurely parts of our morning routine so we could get […]
For the first time in the over six years since we moved the last of our stuff out here from Michigan, I have one of the bed quilts I made on one of the beds in our condo. It’s my first quilt, finished in 1989, and it’s in one of the guest rooms, finally on […]
Okay, I know I shared several pictures of the view from my front windows just a few days ago, but look what it was doing last night: How could I not take some pictures? How could I not share? That would take more restraint than I posses when faced with such a view during […]
The holiday catalogs have been piling up; one more arrived today from L.L. Bean with a Christmas tree and a dreidl and other winter/holiday icons on the cover interspersed with the clothing they’re known for. I think that’s cutting it a little close to get an order in for Christmas, but then again I came […]
Monday, November 28: Snowy day on the mountain. This is me in the locker room after being out on the slopes for the afternoon. Mr. K and I are the only ones I’ve seen wearing masks in the lodges this season. Tuesday, November 29: Went into town to spend some time in my studio. […]
The big Christmas tree in the village has made several appearances in my journal during holidays. In 2015, it was tall and skinny. In 2017, it was shorter and wider. In 2021, the aspect ratio was similar to 2017, though the shape was a bit more shaggy. I’m sure those aren’t the only three instances […]
One of the selling points when Mr. K and I bought our condo was the views out the front windows. The number of photos I’ve taken from my own house/driveway is ridiculous, and I have no intention of stopping, especially since it changes season to season and sometimes day to day within a season. Scroll […]
Continuing what seems to be a recent theme of me getting distracted and failing to do things I’d planned to do or wanted to do or should have done, I am just now starting Holidailies 2022, a day late. Sure, that can happen, but the unusual and slightly worrying thing about it happening this year […]
A day late for this update not because I wasn’t near a compute but because I got distracted by other things. Undiagnosed ADHD or just aging? Who knows. Monday, November 21: Mr. K and I loaded up the car and drove to western Washington to spend the holiday week with family. The landscape between Spokane […]
A day late for this update because (spoiler alert) I was on the road most of the day yesterday. Monday, November 14: Okay, so this is a bit embarrassing. I took no photos this day. Not even any screenshots of pretty pictures I colored in my app. The only thing I added to my photos […]
Monday, November 7: It’s been cold enough that the resort has been making snow. Tuesday, November 8: Went to vote and this good doggo was waiting outside the polling place for their human. Wednesday, November 9: Nice view on my way to get the mail in the village. Thursday, November 10: Documenting […]
Monday, October 31: As per usual at the change of seasons, we had a warm up and winter retreated to higher elevations. Tuesday, November 1: One of the souvenirs we got in Florida this time is a keychain representing a popcorn bucket that is itself representing a balloon. I accidentally knocked it off the […]
Monday, October 24: Mr. K arrived home after his solo road trip portion of the trip we started together in mid-September. He brought a friend: the Mickey Mouse balloon we’d gotten at Walt Disney World near the end of our time there. It had accompanied him up the east coast then to Michigan (both metro […]
Monday, October 17: Always a bit of excitement to see a new nail polish display to share on my nail blog, though this one was missing the three new colors so that was a disappointment. Tuesday, October 18: Though the weather is turning colder, this bush was still blooming full throttle. Wednesday, October […]
Monday, October 10: Had to take my car in for some work, which meant I had a few hours to wander around, which led me to this unused loading dock behind what used to be our JCPenney store. Tuesday, October 11: My favorite view again, this time with me in it. Wednesday, October […]
Monday, October 3: Last day in the parks and we packed a lot in: breakfast at Animal Kingdom Lodge then on to Animal Kingdom, then Magic Kingdom, then Epcot just to ride Guardians of the Galaxy during the bonus hours for deluxe hotel guests. Tuesday, October 4: Time for me to fly home. […]
Monday, September 26: We got off the boat earlier than we’re often awake, which left us plenty of time to drive over to Walt Disney World, check into our hotel, spend some time in Epcot, have a nice dinner back at the hotel and then spend a bit more time in Epcot. I got this […]
Monday, September 19: Sometimes on road trips, the best photo of the day is a blurry landscape out a dirty car window. This shot in Nebraska shows Chimney Rock, one of the landmarks along the Oregon Trail. In its glory days, it was even taller than it is now. Tuesday, September 20: Our hotel […]
Monday, September 12: I know I haven’t developed the skills (plus maybe don’t have the right equipment) to get good photos of the moon, but that doesn’t stop me from snapping away regardless. Tuesday, September 13: Mr. K and I peeked into the fancy new locker room in the village on our way to […]
Tuesday, September 6: Practiced a decorative tie on my own thigh. I still find working with fiber like this very meditative. Knowing I’m going to undo it in a few minutes means I’m not worried about getting the pattern perfect. Wednesday, September 7: One of my tasks on this day was to clear this […]
Eight days in this week due to the Monday holiday; I didn’t want to split up the long weekend. Monday, August 29: I took no photos, just some screenshots, like this one of a very colorful parrot I did in the Happy Color app. Tuesday, August 30: Pulled these fake nails out to put […]
Monday, August 22: Went to the studio and had to wait for a train to pass to get home, as often happens. It’s possible to avoid having to cross this track, but both alternate routes are longer, so usually I just wait. Tuesday, August 23: Went to get some maintenance on my luxury bones. […]
Tuesday, August 16: I continue to enjoy this view while I can. No sign of construction on that lot so far, so looks like I’ll have at least one more winter unobstructed. Though I suppose they could pour foundations next month or something. Wednesday, August 17: Another deer visitor in the yard. Thursday, […]
Monday, August 8: Playing around with my phone camera. I think this was the “stage light mono” setting in portrait mode. Not sure why I have one sleepy eye. Maybe it’s always that way. Tuesday, August 9: The thimbleberries are starting to ripen. I’ve never picked these in any quantity. They don’t seem to […]
Monday, August 1: Picked my first huckleberries of the season. This is the latest start I’ve gotten since I started paying attention to which spots ripened when. We had a cool spring, so maybe that’s what’s kept them from being ready until now. (Though since I was gone the two weeks before, perhaps they were […]
Monday, July 25: Checked out of the rental house and drove to Chicago, where we checked into a hotel then met Kathy and her husband and her husband’s brother and his wife for Chicago-style pizza. We went from the restaurant to Wrigley Field, while Kathy and hubby went to the hotel, joining us at the […]
Monday, July 18: Mr. Karen and I hit the road heading for Illinois. We chose the more rural and scenic path for the first part of our journey, stopping for a picnic lunch in Paradise, Montana, with the view shown here. We passed through some wildfire smoke around dusk and made it to Billings for […]
July 11: Somehow the only photo I took on this day was this shot of one of the lamps above our breakfast bar. No one even ate at the breakfast bar. July 12: I walked down to get the mail while Mr. K and our guest were relaxing after mountain biking. It took me […]
July 4: Ended the previous week with a Happy Color screenshot, so starting this one the same way. This is one of the 4th of the July pictures, or in this case, the 4tm of July. I don’t think it’s a U.S.-based app. July 5: Unlike yesterday’s screenshot, this is an actual photo I […]
June 27: Alpenglow at dusk over the lake and main village parking lot, which is a construction site for the second (or is it third?) summer in a row. June 28: Drove to western Washington to do some family stuff with my sister-in-law Kathy and her crew. Snapped this at a rest area before […]
June 20: It was one of those days when I hung out in the house puttering on my to do list and didn’t take any photos until late in the day, and then only a quick snap so I’d have something to put here. This is a close-up of the wall hanging that Mr. K […]
June 13: Touched up my roots with light purple for an ombre look. Little did I know at the time that this particular purple would fade to blue within a week. (And yeah, my elbow does look awkward in this shot.) June 14: Yep, that’s snow. Not unusual for spring on the mountain. […]
June 6: I had a bad headache and was extra tired (delayed effect of COVID? travel hangover? got back to exercise too soon? I do not know). Didn’t take any photos, but did save this one from the internet, which made me chuckle. June 7: Found enough energy to tackle some laundry, thinking of […]
May 30: Last day of the craft conference, and I met this service dog for the first time all weekend. He was a very good boy. I very much wanted to pet him, but refrained. May 31: Checked out of the conference hotel, got more COVID tests, tested negative, checked into a less expensive […]
May 23: Left our rented condo and started driving north. Since Mr. K was still positive for COVID and I was still negative, we wore masks in the car and ran the Corsi-Rosenthal box as we drove.
May 16: Had breakfast at our favorite hotel, the Polynesian, then visited the Magic Kingdom, where we happened to show up during the afternoon parade. We headed out to have dinner at a different hotel (you take the reservations when you can get them) before calling it a night. May 17: An Epcot day, […]
May 9: Our trio’s park of the day was Disney’s Hollywood Studios, focusing on the Star Wars stuff but getting in some other attractions, too. May 10: On our last day with Ben, we visited both Animal Kingdom and Epcot, finishing the night with Harmonious on the World Showcase lagoon. May 11: Took […]
I truly intended to be more caught up by now, but nope. Just gotta press on from where I’m at. May 2: I dropped the guys off at their ship then cruised around the nearby area for a while in case there was a problem and I needed to get back to the port to […]
Hello, I am back. While I was away, I missed my 20th Online Journalversary, avoided getting COVID despite sharing a vacation condo with someone who had it, then got COVID myself when I was just a few days from getting home. Thanks to vaccines and boosters, it was a mild case. Now I’m just going […]
April 19: Snow well into April is normal here. April 20: State of the mountain. Some folks will hike up to do a run now that the lifts are closed for the season, but that’s too much work for too little reward for me. April 21: When I pulled my car out, I […]
I delayed this week’s entry by a day since yesterday I drove most of the day coming home from a long weekend away. [CONTENT WARNING: feet] April 11: Went to the studio to mess around for a while and stopped at the grocery store to grab lunch. Saw this display there; the bunny is not […]
April 4: There was a bit of snow overnight that freshened things up outside. April 5: Ice is a danger during the warmer weather spells of spring. April 6: Found these “fact sheets” filled with misinformation about vaccines and global warming in the restroom of the grocery store when I went down to […]
March 28: Ski days are drawing to a close so enjoying them while I can. March 29: One of those “slice of life” moments when I noticed the sun hitting my jeweled flip flips just right to cast dots of color on the wall as I packed up to spend some time in the […]
March 21: On the way to the locker room to gear up for skiing, saw two real estate dogs in their office. March 22: Second day in a row seeing this interesting vehicle in the village parking lot. I looked the name up later; it’s a winter clothing brand. March 23: After two […]
Mostly, I’m glad I decided to to these photo a day diary posts, as it gets me at least some documentation of how I’ve spent my days in a place that’s under my control (unlike doing it on Flickr). One downside is that it’s harder for me to do the type of trip reports I’ve […]
I wasn’t at home last Monday. I intended to post when I returned, adding a few days of photos to my usual weekly update so all of my trip would be in one entry. Obviously, that didn’t happen. So there I was last night, trying to figure out if I wanted to do that planned […]
Late with this entry today but at least it’s still Monday. Not bad for having houseguests. February 28: Laid Joan to rest per her wishes. It was a small family event, led by one of the older generation who had been encouraged to go into the ministry by Joan’s late husband. The low headstone in […]
Yes, this entry is off schedule. I just couldn’t manage to post this past Monday. February 21: After a week of mostly grey skies and rain, the sun was shining when we left my sister-in-law Kathy’s house. I snapped this shot of her crocuses blooming as we were heading out to get in our car […]
February 14: It was a grey day mostly filled with the sad task of starting to clear out the assisted living apartment where Joan had died, but Mr. Karen and I did stop at store to pick up some supplies. The minute or two I spent looking at all the Valentine’s flowers was a bright […]
I omitted some important information from Monday’s entry, because at the time I posted it, the information wasn’t mine to share publicly. Now I can. When I woke up early enough to see the sunrise glow out my front window on Saturday, there was no reason I could pinpoint. A handful of hours later, Mr. […]
February 7: Mr. K and I didn’t ski and didn’t get around to walking down to get the mail until it was getting dark, and then we decided to take the route that doesn’t go through the main part of the village so we wouldn’t have to take off our Yak Trax. All that combined […]
January 31: The new hotel continues to get closer to being done and ready to open; the sign with its previously-announced name went up this week. It will take a while for me to adjust to this dark presence where once there was open space. February 1: A single rubber duckie made from snow […]
January 24: Back to skiing. It’s nice to have a sunny day now and then so I can see where I’m going, especially after being off for a week like I was this time. January 25: Look closely and you can see the snowshoe hare tracks out in back of my house. January […]
I don’t usually post on weekends (unless it’s Holidailies) but today I am because there were a few more photos from my trip to western Washington that I wanted to share before the next weekly photo entry on Monday. Someday I’ll do more text-rich entries. Regarding this trip, I don’t think some of the words […]
January 17: We’d been waiting for a window to go to western Washington to see Mr. Karen’s mom so he could take care of some financial things for her before the end of the month. We got one, serendipitously when the MLK weekend/week crowds showed up on our mountain. To maximize our drive time while […]
January 10: I was going to kick off this week’s photo essay with yet another view out my front window, but instead I offer this abstract composition that I managed to create while turning away from the window. January 11: Went out and skied in the snow storm. Glad to be wearing a pair […]
The Facebook group where I did my photo a day project last year seems to be defunct now. The group is still there and accessible, but no one has started a 2022 thread, and I don’t feel any need to be the first to do so. On Flickr, there’s a 2022 successor group to the […]
During last year’s Holidailies, I wrote an entry about how much I was enjoying the Happy Color app. Over a year later, I still am. The transition from Android to Apple when I got my new phone went fairly well. I was able to transfer my completed photos and able to re-download the bonus photos […]
There was no new snow and it’s still very cold and the mountain is even more full of holiday visitors than it was yesterday, so I’ve stayed snug in my house all day. I looked out at the bluebird sky and watched the tiny skiers make turns down the runs, shedding plumes of “cold smoke” […]
I did go skiing today. It was still very cold (though not as windy), and it still felt like an effort to get all layered up and put on my Yaktrax and walk down to the village. I did get a bit of a boost from debuting my duct tape patch on my ski pants; […]
I didn’t ski yesterday, choosing to go down to town for the first time in a week. I got some groceries and spent some time in the studio, where I fixed a loose board next to the door to my unit (and bruised my backside in the process when I fell over trying to pull […]
I take more photos in grocery stores than most people, I think. Recently, this display of children’s winter hats and gloves caught my eye. Very gender binary to my eyes. Pink and purple and turquoise for girls. Blues and black and grey and red for boys. Not surprising. I’m sure that’s what sells. On […]
When I checked the snow/conditions report this morning, about a half hour before opening bell, it said one of the lifts would have a delayed opening due to a search and rescue operation. That’s unusual. Was an employee lost? Who else would be out there that early? I thought about the helicopter we heard last […]
One of my favorite ways to ease into the day is going downstairs and sitting sideways on the couch, looking out the window at the mountain. This week, we’ve had so much snow that all I could see this morning was the chest high pile of the white stuff on the balcony outside. Special today, […]
The only Christmas decoration Mr. Karen and I put up this year is the fiber optic Christmas tree Joan gave me some years ago. It’s starting to show its age a little bit, with some branches not being as solidly attached as they once were and some of the stars dropping off the ends of […]
After a challenging day yesterday when most of the lifts had to go on wind hold, today was pretty much an ideal day for skiing up here on my mountain. It snowed and snowed and snowed some more, but did not blow so all the lifts kept spinning all day and every run was full […]
Mr. Karen and I reached a milestone in our relationship this week: we used the last of the container of pumpkin pie spice that we’ve had in our cupboard approximately forever. I don’t remember exactly when we bought it, but based on the amount of brown used in the design on the tin, I’m guessing […]
This will make it the third year in a row I’ve used my December 22 entry to share one of my favorite views on the mountain, looking across the valley to the Cabinet Mountains in the distance. I took this alpenglow shot of the view earlier this month. You may notice a for sale […]
On this shortest day of the year, I have a photo I took a few weeks ago of the morning light reflecting off one of the condo buildings in my neighborhood. As the days get longer, I am less and less likely to catch the sun in this position. Our bedroom has both blinds and […]
I just updated my book log (and my Goodreads and StoryGraph accounts) so I wouldn’t have to do an even bigger catch up at the end of the month. Last year, I read 116 books; this year, I’m at 76 and will probably finish in the 80s. What accounts for the drop? I’m not sure. […]
I find I am not quite done writing about my trip. There’s still a part of me that wonders if we made the right call going when we did. Yes, the COVID risk levels in Florida were less than Idaho when we went (and are now as well), but in Idaho we don’t mingle with […]
One month ago today, it was raining, and Mr. Karen and I checked out of our hotel in Florida City and drove down to stay with friends in the Florida Keys for a few days. I took far fewere photos during this segment of our trip, so I’m going to blast through it in just […]
One month ago today, Mr. K and I set an alarm so we could be out of the condo by the 10 a.m. check out time. We made it, barely. Then we did one more thing at Disney, lunch at Splitsville in Disney Springs. It was quiet when we arrived since it was early in […]
One month ago today, Mr. K and I had our last park day for the trip. We visited the two we hadn’t the day before, starting with Animal Kingdom. Soon after our arrival, we were graced with the presence of Divine, the living plant character. We looked at some animals, including a safari where […]
One month ago today, on our second to last full day at Walt Disney World for this trip, Mr. Karen and I skipped the farewell event for the podcast meetup and bopped around the world doing a combination of old favorites and new things. We started at Epcot lunching around the world (Food & Wine […]
One month ago, it was the most busy day of our WDW trip, thanks to several events that were part of the podcast meetup for Disney Dish. Setting an alarm was necessary, as we had to be at the entrance of Epcot earlier than we’d been anywhere else the whole trip so far. It was […]
One month ago today, Mr. K and I took a break from visiting the parks and attended two events that were part of the Disney Dish podcast gathering: a lunch at Homecomin’ at Disney Springs and a walking tour of the Springs led by Jim Hill, one of the podcast co-hosts. The meal was family […]
One month ago today, yes, Mr. K and I were still at Walt Disney World. Either we didn’t do a whole lot or I was tired of taking photos or both, as I’m having a hard time remembering what we did and my pictures don’t give a complete narrative. I know for sure we started […]
One month ago today, it was another relaxed day for Mr. Karen and me at Walt Disney World. It was less wet than the day before but still some showers around. We started with lunch at Animal Kingdom Lodge, the side where you can see the savanna from the restaurant (and walk out to a […]
One month ago today, it was raining in Orlando again, so Mr. Karen and I had a pretty relaxed day. We did go to the Magic Kingdom for a little while, doing mostly indoor stuff like looking at shops, including the rainbow wall of M&Ms. To mix it up a little, I switched from my […]
One month ago today, me, my compression socks, and Mr. Karen headed to Epcot. We did a thing or two there before getting on the monorail to the Ticket and Transportation Center, from which we made our way to the Magic Kingdom. No, this was not the most efficient way to structure our day but […]
More Animals and Fireworks But Not Simultaneously
One month minus one day ago, when we got back to the condo after our day of park and resort hopping, I saw something I’d hoped not to: signs of exercise induced vasculitis, also known as “Disney rash” on my legs in the form of red splotches from ankle to knee. I’ve gotten it before […]
One month ago today, Mr. Karen and I stepped up our WDW touring and did our first park hopping of the trip as well as a fancy dinner at one of the hotels. We started our day at the Magic Kingdom. Soon after we walked in, we caught one of the character cavalcades that were […]
One reason I take so many photos is to remind myself later what I did on a given day. One month ago today, I didn’t take very many photos, so I can only account for part of my day, most of which I would probably have remembered anyway. It began with lunch at a waterside […]
One month ago today, we had a park reservation for Animal Kingdom, which we’d chosen for this particular day because we also had a breakfast scheduled at the Animal Kingdom Lodge. We woke to rain. Lots and lots of rain. We went out anyway, slogging our way across the parking lot at the lodge dodging […]
One month ago today, Mr. Karen and I got up earlier than usual so we could make our breakfast reservation at the Poly. Yes, we’d just eaten there the day before at the Kona Cafe, but when the reservation finder finds you an Ohana spot, you take it even if it’s not your ideal date […]
On our second park day, Mr. Karen and I headed to the Magic Kingdom. After our long walk in from the parking lot (the trams weren’t running when we were there) and before we got onto transportation to the park, we went to a late breakfast/early lunch at the Polynesian Village Resort. Because were were […]
One month ago today, Mr. Karen and I started the Walt Disney World portion of our Florida vacation. It’s been four years since we were at WDW (together, anyway; Mr. K spent a day on property with a friend in 2019 I think it was), and of course there have been changes, some pandemic-related, some […]
It’s Holidailies time once again, when I attempt to write every day from December 1st through January 1st. Based on my recent activity, this seems like very much a stretch goal, but based on my past few Decembers here, it’s definitely do-able. I have a plan for the first few weeks already, though this plan […]
I’ve been back from that trip to the south I mentioned last time for not quite a week now. I’ll write that up soon (I’ve just started going through the hundreds of photos I took), but in order to not let November go by without any entries here, I just want to recap my quiet […]
I’m getting ready to take a trip into the sunshine before ski season starts, so decided I’d better get down a few notes about the trip I took in August that I never got around to writing about. We’d planned this journey earlier in the summer, before the Delta variant was rampaging all over, but […]
One sunny day in mid-July, I took a photo of my phone as Mr. Karen was driving us down the mountain into town, because I thought it might be the last day I had my beloved Android device. This phone had been with me since summer of 2015, a refurbished replacement for the one that […]
Of course I meant to write here in August. And of course I meant to write here in September. But I did not write here in August or September. I have things to write about, certainly I do. And I like having written, as it helps me remember things I don’t want to forget. The […]
Grand Tour of Idaho, Part 8: Reflections
I find I have a bit more to say about this trip. I’ve covered the where we went and what we saw, but there’s more to it I want to remember. We were in a different hotel almost every night, which gave us the chance to experience a range of responses to the pandemic at […]
The morning of Day 9 found us in Idaho Falls once again; this time we checked out of the hotel and took a walk along the river before heading out for our last full day of touring. The falls in Idaho Falls are low but wide, with park and garden settings to stroll through along […]
In an earlier draft of my plan for this trip, the morning of Day 8 had us checking out of our Idaho Falls hotel and staying the next night somewhere near Grand Targhee, a ski resort we really liked a lot and had talked about retiring to. That plan changed when I discovered that the […]
Okay, so clearly I am way out of practice doing trip reports for longer journeys. I’m not even sure what I got distracted with since I wrote Part 4 early this month. (Well, this past weekend it was a wine festival, complete with getting ready for the first overnight guests we’ve had since before the […]
I am back after the holiday weekend with the continuation of my June trip report. Day 5’s plan called for six more counties, so we headed off through the scenery. There is a lot of scenery in Idaho, to be sure. After a very short tour of the tiny town of Fairfield, we pointed […]
Day 4 of our Idaho counties tour had us doing a drive by of the capitol building in Boise before heading off to to new to us places. I was happy to see Pride banners on the light poles; Ada County where Boise is has a higher percentage of Democratic party voters than most. Coincidence […]
Our first stop on Day 3 was Tamarack Resort, which we accessed via back roads that turned out to mostly not be paved. They also mostly had no great scenery to look at, unless you are into signs of rich people starting to build huge houses where before there were ranches and farmland. We first […]
Emboldened by the success of our short trip to western Washington in May, Mr. Karen and I decided to go on a full blown vacation earlier this month, taking a road trip around Idaho that had been on my list for a while. The goal: set foot in all 44 counties while seeing things both […]
As some of you are experiencing and others of you have no doubt heard about, there’s a heatwave in the northwest US. Even though it’s cooler on the mountain than it is in town, and cooler in town than it is in the city, it’s still plenty hot on the mountain. We don’t have air […]
Thanks to vaccines, Mr. Karen and I were able to finally go visit his mom and other family and friends in western Washington for the first time in months and months. I carefully selected a sock monkey to join us, and we drove over on Monday, stopping for Jamba Juice along the way. Jamba Juice […]
The last day of ski season here was April 11th. The plastic flowers appeared in the village that last weekend as they’ve done every year in my memory. As sometimes happens, they got dusted with snow as nature gave us a blast of winter to remind us what we’d be missing. Just prior to […]
The biggest development since my last entry is that I’ve had two doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. I am so relieved. I’ll feel even better in another eight days when I’ll be considered fully vaccinated, and better yet later this month when Mr. K gets his second dose, and probably over the moon 14 […]
Pandemic life continues here on my mountain as it has been. I ski, I read, I risk my health going to the grocery store with more and more people going unmasked even though we still have a mandate in this health district (5 northern counties). I continue to delight in taking pictures of odd little […]
It’s been a month, so I figure it’s past time I post an entry here. The thing is, I don’t feel like I have much to say since my life over the past month has been the same as my life in the weeks before, with the exception of the big change that I’m no […]
When I looked at the weather forecast on Monday, I was sure I’d be skiing today. It called for snow on Monday night, snow on Tuesday, snow on Tuesday night, many many inches of snow. The first two parts were correct, but last night things took a turn and the snow came down as rain […]
In my first journal entry last year, I wrote “I hope for fewer stressors in the 2020s”. Ha ha ha ha ha—I am certainly not off to a good start there. I definitely did not forsee a global pandemic. I know I’m immensely privileged to have been able to weather it with relative ease. Sure, […]
Woke up on this last day of 2020 to about 8 inches of fresh snow that fell overnight, adding to the foot or so that we’d already gotten in this current current cycle. That was a positive. Despite all the fresh snow, I thought about not skiing, the better to avoid all the holiday […]
I first dyed my hair in college, pulling strands through a highlighting cap to get a “frosted” look. I don’t remember doing the cap much beyond graduation and am not sure if I took a break from coloring entirely for a while after that. I do know (because I wrote it down) that by 1988, […]
I spent a few hours in my studio this evening playing with nail polish. A brand sent me a half dozen bottles to swatch and post on my nail blog. I had done three of them earlier this month, so pulled out the other three tonight. I did swatch them individually, but the real fun […]
A week ago I was skiing in rain and fog. Today I was out in the sunshine above the clouds, with surrounding hills poking up through them like islands in the sea. The nice weather combined with the holiday week brought a whole lot of other people out to ski with me. There weren’t […]
In this installment of “Mom Thing I’m Keeping For Now”, I have a knitting booklet from 1959 featuring Vita-Spun yarn. According to the ad on the inside front cover, this yarn “does things no other knitting yarn has ever done before”. It’s a 93% wool, 7% textured nylon blend that stretches and springs back. […]
There was a free preview of DogTV on our satellite provider over this Christmas holiday, which we discovered when Mr. K was clearing messages off the system. He tuned to it because it was good for a few minutes of entertainment the last time this happened. There were scenes with a dog sitting in front […]
1. I started my day with Christmas Tea. I’ve been working on the box all month (and regretting I didn’t get any of the other seasonal flavors, though checked just now and they seem to be available online, so maybe I’ll treat myself in the new year). 2. I’m wearing red and white striped […]
The universe gave me a Christmas present today: a bright shiny penny in the snow just where I stopped and clicked out of my bindings at the end of the day. Maybe it’s the same penny that was on the floor of the locker room the other day; I didn’t pick it up then, so […]
It’s been a long time since I caught first chair on a ski day, preferring to sleep later and have a non-rushed breakfast, but it’s not unusual for me to be on the mountain late in the day, skiing up to board lifts as the lifties are rolling up and stowing the signs and rope […]
I’d already picked out my photo for the day and had uploaded it and was ready to paste the link into the document file for this journal entry when I looked at last year’s entry for December 22, and it was this same view from my condo, taken on a day I’d decided not to […]
Today was the kind of ski day that inspires visitors to write unflattering reviews of my home mountain. The temperature hovered around freezing most of the day, so the precipitation varied along the cold rain to wet snow spectrum, which meant goggles covered in water droplets and soggy coats and pants and gloves. The higher […]
Mr. K put up Christmas lights on our balcony that faces the street, as he’s done often in years past. Due to where the electrical outlet is, either an extension cord is needed to span the distance between the outlet and the balcony railing or lights trail across the balcony floor. This year it’s lights […]
My big accomplishment of the day was ordering a couch. Estimated delivery time: 17 weeks from now. The fabric on the left will be the fronts of the accent pillows; everything else will be the fabric on the right, which is not any of the first five swatches Mr. K and I brought home. It […]
Remember the rogue ornament flying above my Christmas tree? Well, this happened: Mr. K pushed on all the lights on that side to see if one had come loose. Apparently not, as it remained half lit. So then this happened: The plastic star-shaped sleeves around the lights are very sharp and pointy, and […]
We didn’t get as much snow overnight as either the forecast predicted or I wanted to justify waking up to alarm instead of whenever I felt like it, but what we did get was enough to nicely freshen up the slopes and make things look more wintery. Only the top two steps on the […]
My standards for what constitutes a busy day have changed a lot since I retired. Today I woke up around 10, had breakfast around 11, skied a bit in the afternoon, came home and showered, went to town to drop the rest of the holiday cards at the Post Office and get other fabric swatches […]
I stopped sending Christmas cards some years back, so many years I don’t recall exactly when I stopped. 2010, maybe? This year I decided since I am not spending any time in December traveling or hanging out with friends or going to parties, etc., I’d sign up for a holiday card exchange one of my […]
Mr. K and I didn’t ski today, using this lull before the 11 to 21 inches of snow we’re forecast to get on the mountain over the next few days to go down to town to get groceries and to look at more couches. I think we’ve found our new couch; we brought back five […]
I updated my book log today with the five books I’ve read since the end of November. A good portion of the time I haven’t spent traveling and hanging out with friends this year thanks to the pandemic I’ve spent reading. As of today, I’ve read 108 books this year, way past the goal of […]
Ski season continues; we need more snow, both for more fun and so more terrain can be opened to spread the people over more space. There have been a few changes at the resort since I wrote my previous entry about skiing during COVID times. These big signs placed near the entrance to the lift […]
Last year at this time I was enjoying the heck out of Baby Yoda memes despite never having seen The Mandolorian. Mr. K noticed and for my birthday this past spring, he got Disney+ so I could see the baby. We watched the first season in pretty short order, then the waiting for season 2 […]
A Couple More Things I’m Not Getting Rid of Just Yet
I poked through a couple more boxes of stuff I brought back here after clearing my mom’s house after she died and found a couple more things (like last week’s ashtray) that I’ll be keeping around for a while. The first is for purely sentimental reasons: a set of drapes my mom made for my […]
I don’t have a detailed story to go with today’s picture. I was walking home from skiing, happened to walk past the entrance side of the parking lot shack, and saw this wee snowperson on the porch. It was maybe 8 inches tall. It made me smile then, and the picture makes me smile now. […]
Because we’ll be home all of December this year, Mr. K and I decided to put up our big tree. It’s seven feet tall, which is fine because we have a very tall ceiling in our living room. The best part is it’s narrow, which is ideal because we do not have a lot of […]
I mentioned in my Holidailies intro this year that I sometimes retreat into my coloring app. It’s pretty much taken up the time I formerly spent on Pokemon Go and the various Candy Crush variations (I haven’t taken them off my phone yet, but neither have I touched them in months). I found it through […]
Yesterday I got caught up with my photo a day project through the end of November, which means I saw the photos I took on Thanksgiving, which means I was reminded that I wanted to document what I think is the meal with the most dishes we’ve had at home since we retired (after all, […]
Last year on this day I skied for the first time in the season; today I’ve already gotten seven days in—the early snow was better and let the resort open sooner and also since we’re not traveling now thanks to the pandemic, we were here for opening day (last year we were in western Washington […]
The kitten rescue project (see yesterday’s entry) gave me a chance to walk a particular trail over and over again, morning and night. It was interesting to see those familiar surroundings change from fall to winter (bouncing back and forth a few times until winter settled in). I got particularly enamored of stopping to look […]
I sometimes think about quitting all the local Facebook groups I’m in, or at least muting them so I’ll only see them when I specifically go looking, since there are so many folks around here who cause my blood pressure to rise from their assholery and/or willful ignorance, but if I’d done that, I wouldn’t […]
I’ve written a lot about clutter in this journal. It’s a problem for me. I was raised by two people who liked things and collected things, and the apple that is me fell right under that tree. When Mr. K and I moved from Michigan, we did get rid of some of our possessions before […]
Today I embark on my 19th year of writing in the Holidailies collab (it’s in its 21st year, but I didn’t have an online journal those first two years though I read many). That seems ridiculous. When I started this journal back in 2002, I don’t think I would have believed it if future me […]
I’ve been struggling some recently. Nothing huge, nothing dire, just lack of motivation to do much besides play on my coloring book app and watch tv (we’ve somehow gotten up to three streaming services with the addition of a three-month trial of HBOMax to the Disney+ and Netflix we already had). But I couldn’t let […]
Given that I did my end of summer wrap up in mid-September, I was planning to wait a bit longer to report on fall, but I delayed too long because this is what it looked like when I went for a walk Sunday morning: This isn’t our first snow of season, either. That came […]
The weekend before last, I left Idaho for the first time since the pandemic began. Mr. K and I loaded up the car, including items like Lysol multi-purpose cleaner (“EPA approved to kill SARS-CoV-2 on hard, non-porous surfaces in 2 minutes”) that were not on my packing list in the Before Time. The reason for […]
It’s been an odd summer, what with the pandemic: no road trips, no festivals up on the mountain, no house guests. There was plenty of huckleberry picking, though. It was a good year for berries, and between the two of us, Mr. K and I picked 36 pounds of them. Most of those are in […]
The pandemic has definitely been good for my knitting. Only a month after finishing the UFO socks, I’ve completed another project, this one from start to finish rather than picking up sometime in progress. I worked on it while watching baseball (Mr. and I decided that buying the MLB package from DirecTV was worth it […]
One of the things I ponder from time to time is when does a walk turn into a hike. In Michigan, it was easier. If I was on a sidewalk most of the time, it was a walk (or a jog if I was going fast enough). If there was dirt under my shoes and […]
My dental hygiene routine has gotten more complicated since I retired. When I was working, brushing twice a day and flossing once and chewing gum in between was pretty much the extent of it. But now more of my time is under my control, and I’m with a dental practice filled with helpful people who […]
I felt so good finishing up the years-old work in progress baby blanket a couple months back, I picked up another one, a pair of socks with a long history. My mom bought the yarn with the idea that she’d make her brother some socks, but unfortunately her arthritis had progressed to a point where […]
One of my retirement projects has been developing my grilled cheese skills. It’s an ongoing effort but far enough along that I decided to share where I’m at. (Please note: developing my food photography skills is not one of my retirement projects.) I don’t remember learning to make grilled cheese, but somehow I arrived in […]
Yesterday Mr. K and I did something more grand than one of our usual hikes—we started at one mountain peak and walked down and up (and down and up) to get to another, slightly higher mountain peak, one I’d never made it to the top of before and Mr. K had only summited once, and […]
The resort opened for the summer season this past Friday. Given that most of the stuff going on happens outside in spaces where it’s generally easy to stay away from other people, Mr. and I felt okay joining in. Our first step was stopping to pick up our passes, which would turn out to be […]
It’s now been three months plus a few days since the last time I left my home county. I’ve put gas in my car once in that whole time rather than filling up a few times a month on my trips to Spokane to see friends as I was doing in the Before Time. One […]
One of the advantages of living where I do is having nature right here. The other evening, I took a walk by myself (Mr. K had taken one earlier when I was occupied with a task I wanted to finish up). I headed out from our front door and just a few minutes later was […]
When I shared the hat I knit earlier in the pandemic, I mentioned that my knitting stuff wasn’t in good order and had some ideas for the first steps in remedying that. I’m pleased to say I managed to find the motivation to make it so. I retrieved the things that were up in the […]
I woke up this morning to this scene outside my bedroom window: So, yeah, just a normal spring day on the mountain. We had snow earlier in the month, too, but in between those times, the mountain was ticking off more and more of the more typical “signs of spring” boxes. The trees budding… […]
Two months ago today, I made my last trip down to Spokane to hang out with friends. It was another day or so before I really realized it had been the last time I’d see any of them for quite a while. I haven’t done that great a job staying in touch online … trying […]
I finished a bit of knitting the other day, a simple cap that’s a sibling to the one I did last fall to donate to a charity drive. I don’t remember when I started this one, just that I had the pattern and yarn and needles still in a project bag together from doing the […]
As some of you saw on Facebook yesterday, in the before time, I would have finished up my ski season on Sunday and then flown out on Monday (yesterday) for the big trip Mr. Karen and I had planned to Australia, New Zealand, French Polynesia, and Hawaii. Obviously none of that happened or is going […]
Well, I had a bit of a scare earlier today when an update to the code behind my website meant all of my journal entries were throwing error pages and I couldn’t log in to the site to see why that might be. For a while, I was thinking I might have to start over […]
I skied my 55th day this past Wednesday, and that’s all the days there are going to be because the mountain shut down for the rest of the season when the lifts closed that day, more than three weeks earlier than they’d planned. Thanks, COVID-19. It was the right call, but I’m still sad about […]
I kicked off March doing something I would have put on my bucket list if I’d ever gotten around to making one (and maybe not even then since this was more in the realm of “it would be nice but I’ve no idea how that could happen”): training with an avalanche rescue dog. I was […]
Things I didn’t do in January: 1) Write any post-Holidailies journal entries 2) Make New Year’s resolutions (other than putting a goal of 58 books into Goodreads) Things I did do: 1) Ski and ski some more 2) Take a trip to the non-inland Northwest to visit Mr. K’s mom in her new assisted living […]
The 2010s were rather eventful for me. Mr. K and I retired and moved from an urban/suburban lifestyle in the Great Lakes region to a much more rural one in the Inland Northwest. My mom died, and my brother and I cleaned out and sold her house. I totalled my car (and got sued in […]
Fall Road Trip Loop, Part 5: The Long Road Home
Trip Report Tuesday almost had to be postponed, as there was a mountain-wide power outage earlier and the internet was slow to come back up after the lights came back on. Thank goodness all is well now and the New Year’s Eve revelry can proceed as planned. Anyway, on to the conclusion of my November […]
Mr. K and I had a town day today, spurred by having to take my car in to the dealer for its 90 thousand mile service appointment. As it worked out, we dropped it off twenty minutes before the first showing of the day of The Rise of Skywalker at the movie theater in the […]
Today I finished my latest big catch up for my photo a day project, posting something like three weeks of photos in the last few days … it goes much quicker when I’ve not been traveling and taking dozens and dozens of photos. Looking through the albums for this year, there’s a certain set of […]
I’ve failed to make any noticeable dent in the process of sorting through the stuff we brought from Michigan and stashed in the storage studio in town (or the stuff I brought from my mom’s house, which included stuff she’d brought from her mom’s house and my dad’s house), but this fall I did unearth […]
Starting Christmas Eve and finishing Christmas evening, Mr. K and I put together a jigsaw puzzle, seen above after our first session (it took three overall). It wasn’t the one we’d put under the tree from our recent trip, but one we’d gotten on our previous trip to Disneyland during the 60th anniversary celebration. […]
I keep thinking I need to do a goal update entry, but then I think how little I’ve done compared to what I wanted to and put it off a bit longer. I have had one success, though: with the updates I just put into goodreads, I surpassed my goal of reading 57 books by […]
Mr. K put up lights on our front balcony, so when we walk home from skiing at twilight (which is just after the lifts close this time of year) we have cheery colors to greet us. From the inside, most of the them are hidden by the railings (or the snow piled up … we’ll […]
Fall Road Trip Loop, Part 4: Disneyland Resort
This whole road trip started with the idea that we’d go to Disneyland for the first time since 2015, and our hotel reservations in Anaheim were the only ones we made ahead of time. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get into our preferred hotel for the whole time, so our first night in Anaheim was at a […]
I found my happy place on the slopes during the last few runs of the day, doing laps on the triple on the front side, which accesses terrain on the top third or so of the mountain, where the snow was best because it had stayed cold. This was also where the fog was […]
After slogging down the mountain through the heavy wet snow yesterday, I took today off. Of course as these things work out, today the weather was calm and they were able to open more lifts and more terrain and it would have been a much better day to ski, but hey, at least I […]
Earlier this month, I was lamenting that I’d lost a pair of sunglasses I’d bought on vacation and the Chums I’d attached to them that were a gift from Mr. Karen way back when. Since then, I finished unpacking the last suitcase from that trip and they failed to turn up there, so I pretty […]
I know I write about the weather a lot. It’s a major factor in how I spend my days in winter, and I’m gonna write about it again today, because Mother Nature done me wrong, raining all over the snow we got yesterday and last night. I know it’s not her fault; I know she’s […]
Throwback Thursday: Some of You Will Be Able to Hear This Photo
Here I am in my junior year of high school (1978/79), working in the yearbook office. We’d type the copy and crop the photos with grease pencil and do layout sheets on special gridded paper and collect groups of pages done this way into packages that we’d mail to our publisher/printer several times during […]
I’m taking today off from skiing, resting my legs for the 26 to 44 inches of snow in the forecast between tonight and Saturday evening (there’s a chance of more snow after that, too, but no inches associated yet). I’ll go work/play in the studio in town and give blood at the drive at the […]
Fall Road Trip Loop, Part 3: Onward to California
Previously on Trip Report Tuesday: Mr. K and I drove away from Grand Canyon West through a forest of Joshua trees. We had a couple nights free before we had to be in California for plans we’d made there. The fastest route was going via Las Vegas, but we’ve been to Las Vegas before, so […]
Today, as I do many days during the winter, I put on layers and walked down to the village, got my skis and boots out of the locker we rent in the lodge, and hit the slopes. The mountain was not showing her best face today; there wasn’t any fresh snow, it was more […]
Weetabix posted earlier this month about her skincare routine, which inspired me to lay out the products I use on my face (and neck/decolletage) to share here today. (Not including what I use for cleansing or the heavier duty sunscreens I wear only when needed.) I don’t know that these are the best possible products […]
I sometimes read Mr. Karen’s magazines after he’s done with them, which is how I recently learned that I’m polluting the environment when I wash our clothes. Well, some of our clothes. The majority of our stuff is cotton with a few wool garments, and those are okay. It’s the synthetic fibers that are the […]
As per usual, I haven’t accomplished as much this year as I’d hoped/planned/intended, but one thing I did do was settle on a recipe for huckleberry crisp that I’m happy with. Mr. K and I pick lots and lots of huckleberries on the mountain when they’re in season and freeze most of them so we […]
Today was the day I’ve been looking forward to in this young ski season: we got enough new snow for the resort to open some more terrain. Below you can see the difference out our back window; two days ago the baby tree was a recognizable tree shape, while today it’s almost completely covered. […]
Mr. K and I put up our big Christmas tree last night. It’s the same prelit artificial tree we’ve had since my mom decided we needed it for our condo here, with ornaments chosen from the same assortment we’ve had since we moved out here, so it looks pretty similar to how it did the […]
Fall Road Trip Loop, Part 2: Now This Is a Canyon
Picking up where I left off last Trip Report Tuesday, the fourth day of our trip found us waking up in a retro fabulous hotel in Page, Arizona with a view of Lake Powell. Unlike chain hotels being built today where right angles rule, this place was awash in acute and obtuse. The doors from […]
After we got back from our extended Thanksgiving weekend trip I went to the studio (what I call the place we rent in town for storage and hobby stuff that requires more space than we have in our condo) and dug out our Christmas boxes and brought them back up with me. So far, all […]
Yesterday, a chair appeared in front of our neighbors’ house. It’s a nice chair, a Adirondack style with skis used to construct the backrest portion, sort of a skier’s throne. I have questions. I don’t know who left the chair there, as the neighbors have not, as far I know, been up yet this […]
When Mr. K opened the blinds in the bedroom this morning (after first opening the drapes … I like a very dark place to sleep in, so both blinds and and drapes are “blackout”, though the drapes do not meet my standard for that term), we were greeted with the very welcome sight of fresh […]
I spend a distressing amount of time looking for things I’ve lost. Sometimes they turn up again (like my camera … twice); sometimes they don’t (like the mate to this glove). Right now, I’m feeling annoyed with myself over two missing things (well, three, but two of them were a unit the last time I […]
Today, finally, almost a week after the mountain opened (and four days later than last year), I got my first day in for the 2019-2020 ski season. It was a bit warm (right around freezing), and foggy, and there’s not much terrain open yet, but it was still so so good to get back out […]
It’s a little after 7 p.m. but feels much later. Whether that’s the road lag (Mr. K and I got home from our extended Thanksgiving weekend sojourn last night) or general malaise from my lingering head cold or what I do not know. I do know is that I feel like I got a fair […]
Fall Road Trip Loop, Part 1: It’s Not a Canyon, Really
To avoid being on the mountain during one of the less entrancing times of year up here (between first snow and the lifts opening), Mr. K and I embarked on a road trip south to Utah and Arizona and California. Even though Idaho and Utah border each other, the fastest way to from our place […]
Things I have done since sitting down to write this entry for Holidailies: 1) Looked at Baby Yoda memes. Note that we do not have Disney+ and are not planning to get Disney+, so all I know about Baby Yoda, I know from memes. I love them anyway. (Do we know Baby Yoda’s pronouns? I […]
It’s the 20th year of Holidailies and my 18th year participating. I figured I might as well give it another go—after all, I had success with it last year even though I’d only written 14 posts in the first eleven months of 2018 (this year I’ve done 15, so I’ve got even more momentum—I kid). […]
I am so out of the habit of writing anything but trip reports here that I completely failed to mention something significant I did at home last month: I knitted something. Started it and finished it. A friend was having a charity drive for hats and gloves and mittens, and I used that as motivation […]
This journal seems to have turned into nothing more a travel diary in recent times. Going through the photos from trips makes me think I should write about them, at least a little, so I can look back and remember them later. This is especially true since I have given up on doing physical photo […]
Somehow it’s been a month since I last posted. It’s just been in the the last couple days that I’ve managed to catch up with my photo a day postings on Flickr (and Facebook, because some of us in the group are doing it in both places this year), so now I feel I’m finally […]
Here I am squeaking in with one journal entry for August. By rights it should be a monthly check-in on my resolutions for the year, but as I’m sure surprises no one reading this, I haven’t been paying them any attention. Instead I’ve been enjoying my mountain (so many huckleberries to pick and trails to […]
Last entry, I shared that Mr. K had checked off a bucket list item. This entry brings more bucket list fulfillment, this time for two of my friends and former co-workers from Michigan, who came out west to see the outdoor quilt show in Sisters, Oregon. We’d been talking about this even before I retired […]
A month ago, I got on a plane and then another plane and then emerged in Chicago. As air travel in the cheap seats goes, it was fairly pleasant, with an empty middle seat next to my window one on the way to Salt Lake City and then a middle seat in an exit row […]
Hey, look at me writing a journal entry in an even-numbered month; that hasn’t happened all year up to this point. As per usual, retirement is busier than I ever expected. True, sometimes it’s busy with things that may seem non-productive, like watching a snowshoe hare out the back window, seeing it munching on the […]
Okay, the title is a bit of a cheat, as this trip extended into May. A week after I got back from my solo long weekend jaunt, Mr. K and I did another whirlwind concert and family trip, this time with more whirl. The driving force for this trip was seeing Thank You Scientist in […]
The weekend after Mr. K and I did our whirlwind concert and family trip, I set off on a solo road trip to a conference. Neither the conference nor my hotel in western Washington were especially conducive to photos, but the scenery on the way there and back was quite nice, since I took the […]
The day after the lifts closed for the season, Mr. Karen and I went down to the village and cleaned out our ski locker. We drove back home, unloaded the skis and poles and boots and such, then loaded up our luggage and left town. We left late enough in the day that we completely […]
One of the ski mountains in the area re-opened yesterday for a free ski day, but I finished my season on closing day of my mountain back on April 7th. That was also my 57th ski day for the season, which means I met my goal to ski my age, despite missing time with my […]
I mentioned in my last post that I’d taken a trip in February and would be happy if I managed to write about that before March ended. Since I want to be happy, and it’s almost the end of March, here I am writing. I left my mountain on a Thursday in mid-February, the ankle […]
So yes, once again I am failing at journal writing. Here and on paper (not that I had any goals around writing on paper … that’s so sporadic now it’s hardly a thing for me anymore … my gel pens are drying out and I don’t even know where most of them are). Time for […]
In what appears to be a tradition, as this is the second year in a row I’ve done, I am now ready to write down my New Year’s resolutions on the last day of the first month of the new year. I’ve had some things in mind, and have been doing some of them, but […]
Mr. Karen and I had a New Year’s Eve party for two in our living room last night rather than going out anywhere. We did still get to see some fireworks, though. Someone in the lower village was launching them, which mean from our perspective they were below eye level, but they were still pretty […]
I didn’t do well at all with my goals for 2018. I didn’t set them until the end of January and haven’t done a check-in about my progress since the end of March. It’s been a busy year for me, with lots of travel (looking at my loyalty account with the hotel chain I stay […]
I spent some of today dealing with the holiday crowd on the mountain, and since it’s not usually crowded here, my waiting in lift lines skills are not well developed so I got a bit cranky, especially when I decided I some fries would be a good thing and that line was wrapped around a […]
I was surprised to see this intended-to-be-encouraging message on the wall of a bathroom stall at the ski resort, as there’s usually not anything to read other than ads for upcoming events that get attached to the backs of the doors. Someone took a fair bit of time to write this out … who? why? […]
I’ve finally gotten through all the photos I took during my travels in November and uploaded a subset of them to Flickr (yes, per my earlier entry this month, I know I’m most likely going to have to move them elsewhere, but I’m still putting off figuring that out), so I’m ready to write a […]
Somehow it’s gotten to be my bedtime so I can’t write the entry I’d planned for today, so instead I’m sharing my new glasses, seen here the day I picked them up but before I realized they were too tight and squeezing my head (I’ve since had them adjusted and they’re better but not quite […]
I had a new and scary experience skiing yesterday: I fell into a tree well (the snow equivalent of quicksand). As these things go, it was not bad: my head and shoulders were above the snow the whole time; some skiers and snowboarders die when they fall into tree wells head first and can’t get […]
I hope all of you who celebrated Christmas today enjoyed however you chose to spend the day. A few days ago, Mr. K and I filled the cavity in our ceramic tree with its rightful residents; Joan had this holy family at her apartment and when we mentioned we had the matching tree, she sent […]
One one of my trips this holiday season, I saw a spin on the “donate money and we’ll put up this token” charity drive idea that some stores do. In this one, instead of writing your name on the shape picked to represent donations, the people giving colored snowflakes. The result was much more interesting […]
This morning, Mr. K and I had steel cut oats for breakfast, which I cooked in the Instant Pot. After skiing, we had egg salad sandwiches made with eggs I hard boiled in the Instant Pot a couple days ago. In our freezer, there are containers filled with vegetable stew and beef barley soup that […]
I am still not caught up with selecting photos from my November trip, but I’m far enough along to share the one below, which is a great example of a poor font choice. I came across it in one of the Sunday school rooms at the church adjacent to the hall where we celebrated Thanksgiving […]
We slept in after our late arrival but did get up and going in time to spend the afternoon out on the slopes, which were noticeably whiter than when we’d left. Today, my happy place was high on the mountain, where the snow hadn’t melted and refrozen as it had at the lowest elevations. […]
Round about this time a year ago, I wrote a journal entry about how I hadn’t posted the day before due to a winter storm that knocked out our power and internet. Today, I am writing an entry that will be about how I didn’t post yesterday due to a wind storm. This year’s storm […]
As of last night, I thought that the thing that might keep us from heading home today was the weather, specifically the weather on the pass between here and there. Nope. The thing that kept us here was a call from Kathy before we were quite awake, saying Joan’s doctor had called and based on […]
When the big moving truck got unloaded into the storage unit on Saturday, we were just concerned about getting things in there, not what was going where (and the mover guys were not even especially concerned about things being right side up). Over the past few days, we’ve taken some pieces of furniture and several […]
I’m still going through the photos I took during my travels in November, but I’ve gotten far enough to complete another episode in the continuing series “Things I Held in My Hands but Did Not Buy”, this time featuring shoes. I took a break from the road at a strip mall that had a Nordstrom […]
We lucked out with the moving truck coming yesterday … today it’s been raining on and off (right now it’s storming pretty good) and there’s rain in the forecast for the next few days. I’m so happy we were able to do all that unloading in dry weather. I’m less happy we’ll likely have to […]
I still haven’t managed to get through all the photos or tell the story of the trip that created the contract that was completed today with the delivery of Joan’s household goods to her new city; maybe now that they’re here, I’ll be able to focus on that. Right now, I have the story of […]
Because family comes first, Mr. K and I left all the fresh snow on our mountain this morning to drive to western Washington. Our travel companions for this trip are Scarf Monkey and Theo the guinea pig, the latest addition to my stuffie collection. Tomorrow morning the truck with the rest of Joan’s stuff […]
I may not have granite countertops or a two thousand dollar Christmas tree, but I have this view from my driveway: I was clearing the 18 inches of snow that’s fallen in the past two days off our truck, and shoveling the piles of snow around it because the guys who plow the driveway […]
I did a bit of holiday decorating this evening. This is one of two ceramic trees we found in Joan’s basement. We packed the more classic green with multicolored lights one for her and brought this one home for us. It had a bag of the red pegs stuffed in the cavity, but we’d […]
I thought for sure I’d written here before about the rich people’s catalogs I get, but a Google search didn’t turn up the entry I thought I remembered. A keyword search on my hard drive did find it (apparently all my pages aren’t in Google, which is fine, though less convenient for me when I […]
In packing up my mother-in-law Joan’s condo, we found so many photos. Some were in albums and some were loose. I found the latter as interesting as the former. Like this shot below from a church function in the 1970s: so many white chunky sandals! The white chunky sandals also appear in this view […]
I said yesterday I was ready to do it again tomorrow, and today I did it. Ski, that is. There wasn’t any new snow overnight or any new terrain opened today, but that’s okay. “All snow is good snow,” as Edie Thys Morgan’s dad used to say (per her column in an old SKI magazine […]
As it turned out, I was right to post yesterday morning, because we were indeed delayed at IKEA and got home last night late enough that I would have missed the midnight deadline for Holidailies if I’d waited to write my entry (midnight my time, not Holidailies time, which is Eastern time zone for some […]
If all goes to plan today, I’ll be spending most of it on the road heading home, so I thought I’d best post this morning in case we get delayed and I can’t post tonight. And delays are quite possible, given that one of our stops on the way is IKEA, and while I have […]
Today, for the second day in a row, Mr. K and I spent most of the day with his mom at her new home in the senior living community. I took a break after lunch to walk over to the mall nearby and try to get her some particular items she wanted from one of […]
Over on my nail blog, I have a series called Nail Wheel Wednesday, in which I am attempting to swatch my entire collection of nail polish onto nail wheels—flat plastic plates with fake nails attached around the circumference. I don’t manage to post every week but I did get something up today, this group of […]
I haven’t managed to write up our November trip yet, but Mr. Karen and I are on day one of our next journey. This one will be much shorter, a mere day’s drive from our house in Idaho to my sister-in-law Kathy’s in Washington. We got up early (for us) this morning in order to […]
The first thing I do when I sit down to write for Holidailies is update the list of prior years’ posts by adding the one from last year. Thus I saw that a year ago today, I was skiing seven inches of fresh snow. This year, not so much. I decided to take a day […]
Last Holidailies, I wrote about how I was still using Flickr. That’s true today, too, but I’m wavering. When I uploaded photos there yesterday, it was with a doubt in my mind about whether I’d have to redo that work somewhere else. Flickr has a new owner now, Yahoo having sold it to SmugMug (a […]
Today is the first day of Holidailies, so here I am refreshing my memory on what it’s like to write in this here online journal of mine. It’s also the first morning I’ve woken up in my own bed since November 6th—I’ll tell the story of the trip that took me away from home for […]
October is nearly over, so it’s about time I get to recapping my September travels, which were a followup to the August ones I wrote about at the beginning of this month. After the family trip in August, when we and Mr. K’s sisters took their mom, Joan, out to Washington state, Joan found a […]
I didn’t manage to write about our August trip before we took our September one; no time like the present. Compared to our ten day July trip that I wrote about last time, this was a longer and more complicated journey. Mr. K and I set out on August 9th and drove to his sister […]
As I sit here inside typing away on my laptop, outside hints of fall color have started to show up on my mountain. Summer season is over, having wrapped up with the super popular Labor Day weekend beer (and cider and this year komboucha) festival. Now the tourists have gone home, and the lift has […]
In my entry about finding my camera, I mentioned I was on a road trip. I’ve been back a couple weeks now, so it’s about time I jot a few notes about that trip. Unlike the previous road trip, this one was a solo effort, unless you count the sock monkey and stuffed octopus that […]
Remember when I lost my camera for the second time, and this time it was really, really gone? And I had this fanciful theory that it got carried off by a bird of prey? Well, now I have a new fanciful theory: there is an interdimensional wormhole in my car. Because more than a month […]
Time flies. Here it is three weeks after I got back from my last trip with barely a word from me. Since I’ve been home, I’ve done a few more days of skiing and some snowshoeing and some walking and a lot of moving stuff around in the studio and a fair bit of Netflix […]
l lost my camera. Again. The same one that slipped out of my pocket while I was huckleberry picking in August of 2016, only to be found, still working, by someone else hiking on the mountain top a week later. This time, I think it’s gone for good, and with its case this time, a […]
Goals: What Happened to February and March?
At the end of January, I made some goals for 2018 and set some milestones for what I’d do in February. Then I did a bunch of non-goal things, like skiing and going on a road trip that included more skiing (I’ve been on the slopes more days than I’ve ever gotten in a season […]
So yes, I should have done a goal check-in for February by now, and set some tasks for myself for March, but obviously I have not. What I did do was go with Mr. Karen to Utah and Colorado. He’s taken a trip like this, to meet up with friends and ski, a couple times […]
I finally finished an object, a scarf I started so long ago I couldn’t remember when that was. Thanks to Flickr, I could look it up. Apparently, it was about two years ago. Mid-February of 2016, I had three balls I’d wound by hand (because who knows where my ball winder was at that point, […]
All month I’ve been telling myself I really should make some New Year’s resolutions. Now it’s a few hours until the first month of 2018 is over, and I still haven’t made a list of what I want to accomplish this year. I’ve been doing stuff, sure, some of which would apply to goals I […]
Yeah, I still haven’t made my 2018 resolutions. I’ve been too busy skiing. We’re having a crazy good year for snow, with 263 inches so far. To put that in perspective, the historical average for a full season here is 300 inches. Since I last posted here, there’s been more than four feet of snow. […]
Though I haven’t made my 2018 resolutions yet, I’m sure there will be one about writing here more, so I’m not exactly off to a good start with that. My main excuse this time, as is often the case, is travel. On January 2nd, Mr. Karen and I loaded up the truck and headed west […]
I found the top of this champagne bottle—not just the cork, but part of the neck of the bottle, too—in the snow on the top of our truck when I went out to clear it off and dig it out in anticipation of leaving the mountain tomorrow for the first time in days. Someone […]
I ended the year as I mean to go on: skiing. The day started sunny and then the clouds rolled in, as they often do. I was happy I captured the view below while there was still some blue in the sky. Of course it’s not possible to ski until midnight, so Mr. Karen […]
At the beginning of this month, I listed the things I was going to do in the remaining weeks of the year to support my 2017 goals. Since it’s almost the end of the month, I’m going to go ahead and check-in to day with where I’m at. 1. Photo projects: I’m going to catch […]
We’re experiencing another storm cycle; so far we still have both power and internet. Yesterday I stayed inside and enjoyed the snow through the windows. Below is what it looked behind our condo as the daylight faded, shot from the room I use as my office when we don’t have houseguests (then it functions as […]
According to various articles on the internet (so you know it’s true), Flickr has been dying for at least five years now. The Yahoo acquisition was going to kill it, or the changes in features, or Instagram, or other things. I vaguely recall being so angered by some change at some point that I signed […]
Updating the previous years’ links, I saw that one year ago today I shared my first venture into yogurt making (yep, that wonderful Instant Pot was my enabler). Coincidentally, this morning I put my latest batch into containers. Making yogurt wasn’t a “one and done” like some other things I’ve tried making. It’s something routine […]
Fall Road Trip, Part the Fourth and Last
In the previous installment of Trip Report Tuesday (which was on Thursday but it couldn’t really be helped), Mr. K and I spent two weeks in Orlando. Then it was time to head home. We’d been gone over a month at this point, and as much as I like traveling, I was ready to be […]
Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrated today; I hope it was all you wished for. Mr. K and I had a quiet day together, skiing in scattered snow showers and then making a festive dinner (with gravy, even). We’ll join family at New Year’s, weather permitting. ***** On this date […]
The big Christmas tree in the village is looking particularly festive this year, what with all the snow decorating it from the big storm. I see a lot of families taking photos here, but when I snapped these shots, it was late at night—well, late by tiny mountain village standards, so a touch after 10 […]
About 95% of the time, Mr. K and I alternate between two breakfasts: yogurt with labne (if we’ve been to Spokane recently; I have yet to have success making my own) and granola or cold cereal with milk and fruit. Once in a while we’ll get wild and have eggs or pancakes, but mostly it’s […]
I decided not to ski today and have instead been sitting at the computer catching up on things like my weekly photo project. I’d been leaning toward not doing it again for 2018, but putting together my creation for last week’s theme (from photos taken last week, so it’s legit) I started to lean the […]
When I was in high school, if we wanted a special font for a project, we couldn’t just go to our computer and play with the word processing software, much less search the internet for more options. Instead, we bought stuff like these Formatt sheets from Graphics Products Corporation. Each letter had to be […]
Trip Report Tuesday has moved to Thursday this week due to the storm-related power/internet issues I had. On the previous Trip Report Tuesday, Mr. Karen and I had made it to Cordele, Georgia. From there, we continued driving south to Florida, arriving in Orlando in late afternoon. We checked into our condo, unloaded the car, […]
I missed posting yesterday. That storm cycle I mentioned did indeed bring a lot of snow for skiing. It also brought power and internet outages starting last night. First, just our internet went down, then it came back up, then as I was writing my journal entry for yesterday, the power went out, taking the […]
As expected, my neck and shoulders and adjacent muscles are sore today, but with the help of my friend Vitamin I (also known as ibuprofen), I skied for a while this afternoon, not pushing myself on speed or steepness but just aiming at keeping my ski muscles active. We’re in the start of a storm […]
I took a fall while skiing today and hit my (helmeted) head kind of hard, so I’m trying taking it easy tonight and rest up for the snow that’s coming over the next few days. Of course I had to do a bunch of Googling about signs of brain injury, none of which I seem […]
Going to run errands in town this afternoon, my route took me past the fairgrounds, where there was an event to show off the progress on the vintage carousel some folks are working on restoring. I’d seen the horses early in the year at another event so stopped into this one;. I’d read on Facebook […]
I had a pleasant day cleaning and drinking cocoa … wait, not quite. There was no cocoa, and it wasn’t cleaning but rather tidying, though some garbage was generated in the process so I suppose the room I was working in is technically cleaner, except the house as a whole is not because the garbage […]
Today I have a photo I found in my mom’s house not in the clean out after she died, but in the clean out in October of 2013, when I took a week off work to help her get her house ready for sale because she’d found a senior living place she said she liked. […]
Government Overreach is in the Eye of the Beholder
Several days back, I wrote about the Agricultural Census mailing Mr. Karen and I got here at our definitely not agricultural condo. For me it was a goof, a form that I shouldn’t have gotten. The letter acknowledged that it might not apply and that filling out the first few questions on the form would […]
On Trip Report Tuesday last week, Mr. Karen and I had made it from Idaho to Illinois, where we visited with Mr. K’s mom, went to Great America, and I worked with my brother on the last bits of cleaning out Mom’s house. On a Thursday, Mr. K and I headed out from his mom’s, […]
Most mornings, I have tea. A while back, I switched things up and started using a special canister to store my current everyday morning variety (right now it’s Earl Grey, previous to that it was Irish Breakfast; I go for whatever black tea catches my eye at the store when I need to restock). I […]
I’m taking a second day in a row off from skiing, because there’s been no new snow and the weekend crowds are here—such as they are, which is not very crowded at all, but my standards have changed now that I’ve been spoiled by not having to wait in lift lines hardly at all ever […]
I played around for a while on Lumosity last night for the first time in a couple of years (I fell prey to an ad on Facebook). I let my paid subscription go after I retired, so I was only able to do a few games, but that was enough to make me wonder about […]
A little while back, Mr. Karen and I got an odd piece of mail: the USDA 2017 Census of Agriculture. Our response was required by law, the envelope said. So we opened it, to find instructions about how to go to a website and enter our unique survey code to answer questions about our agricultural […]
One of the surprising turns in cleaning out my mom’s house was finding her wedding dress in the basement. I had no idea that she still had that; I thought it had slipped away at some point as so many things did (including the quilt I made for mom, which I hadn’t seen in years […]
Every topic I’ve considered writing about today will take longer to do justice to than I have this morning, as I’m heading first into town then down into the city with a whole list of errands and tasks and places I want to go as I haven’t been in the city for a couple months, […]
I mentioned in my first Holidailies entry that I’d been on the road for six of the previous weeks. At that point, I hadn’t yet gotten around to doing any entries about those travels, but that changes today, with the first installment of Trip Report Tuesday, a new December feature here at Hat on Top, […]
Today I took the day off I originally intended to take yesterday. So far it hasn’t been all I hoped for due to a middle of the night spell of insomnia last night that got me off to a groggy, late start this morning combined with internet issues. I guess it’s refreshing that the internet […]
When I went to sleep last night, I had thought about taking today off from skiing, give my muscles a rest from the effort of skiing myself back into downhill form. Maybe I’d get on that last bit of unpacking I tasked myself with yesterday. Maybe I’d catch up on the laundry. Maybe I’d do […]
At the beginning of 2017, I set some goals for myself. I revised them mid-year, then did a check-in for July, saying then that I was going to do what I could in August due to travel then reassess in early September. Ha. And also ha. But there’s one more month left of 2017 in […]
It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year
Ah, December, when I turn to my poor neglected online journal and become a posting fool for a month, thanks to Holidailies. This time, it’s been more than two months since I last wrote an entry here. I was away from home for over six weeks of that time, and I’ve never been good at […]
One of the tasks I routinely fall behind on is going through my mail. This is true with both the electronic and physical varieties, but the latter is continually adding to the visual clutter surrounding me, so I need to work on that. Starting now, with the stuff on this card table I use as […]
Welcome to September! I am not reassessing my goals right now as I said I’d do early this month but rather recapping my latest road trip to Illinois and back, because that’s more fun. I need fun right now because as you have probably heard, the country is variously on fire, damaged by or about […]
When I did my goal progress report as of June, I revised some of my targets and set milestones for July. It’s time to see how I did. 1. I will participate in the photo a day and photo a week projects I signed up for on Flickr. The milestone for July was to catch […]
Since coming home after my long road trip, I’ve been enjoying being in one place for a while. Mr. K and I don’t have a set routine, but we do try to get out in nature most days, which is easy enough when nature is pretty much all around us. There are trails and undeveloped […]
In my latest goal check-in entry, I mentioned travel as reason for dropping balls. I’ve written about the trips Mr. K and I did in April and May—a whirlwind weekend in Portland and Seattle and a week in Orlando—but only now am I getting around to writing about the four-week solo road trip I took […]
Progress Report as of June and Revised Plan
I haven’t checked in on my goals since mid-April. I blame a lot of that on being away from home, though when I examine that, I have to admit I wasn’t making checking in a priority when I wasn’t gone, as I knew I didn’t have much progress to report. I do let travel mess […]
The day after we got back from Florida, I did a project I’d been procrastinating about for literally months: I tore down my laptop to replace the power jack. I noticed this small but vital piece was broken upon my return from my winter trip to the Great Lakes states, when a jagged piece of […]
A couple days after returning from our Kansas in the Pacific Northwest weekend, Mr. Karen and I left the cold and snow for Orlando, where it was so so much warmer. We flew out in early afternoon, had a long-ish connection in Salt Lake City, and arrived in Orlando well past our usual bedtime. Then […]
So yes, obviously my goal balls fell on the ground again, as one could tell from the fact that I posted zero times in May versus my target of three. Ah well. I have been doing stuff, just not necessarily goal stuff. One of the things I did was take a quick weekend trip to […]
And just like that, another ski season has ended. Ended over a week ago, actually, but somehow I’m just now managing to sit down and write about it. We got a bonus week of skiing this year; since there was so much snow (ended up something like 30 inches over the historical average for the […]
I made some goals for this year, did a check-in on them at the end of January, and then dropped the ball. I’m going to pick it back up now and try to keep it in the air. 1. I will participate in the photo a day and photo a week projects I signed up […]
So yes, as I mentioned in my last entry at the end of February, I was traveling for a few weeks. That doesn’t entirely explain why I am only going to manage to get one entry done for March; after all, I wrote that single one for February when I was away from home. What […]
I’m on the road for a few weeks, which eventually I’ll write about, but today I’ve got a handful of photos from the last night I spent on my mountain, which happened to be during the annual winter carnival. That, and the holiday weekend, brought a lot more folks than usual up to the hill. […]
I made some goals for the year, and now it’s time to see how I’ve been doing. 1. I will participate in the photo a day and photo a week projects I signed up for on Flickr. Yes. Done. The photos have been taken and uploaded and tagged and put the the proper places. I’m […]
I finally finished a knitting project. Two, actually. These are my first completed knit objects in almost two years. I’ve done some knitting in between, such as the not quite finished scarf in a basket on a shelf downstairs and part of a blanket I lost track of in the move (I don’t even remember […]
As I was last year, I’m waffling on making formal resolutions. There’s so much I want to do; that’s not the issue. It’s the setting myself up for failure that’s holding me back. I pretty much didn’t do anything I set out to do last year. I’ve already written about falling far, far short of […]
I just posted my final photo in the photo a day Flickr group I participated in this year, my fourth with this group. After two years of not missing a day, I missed one this year. I’m rather surprised I didn’t miss more, what with everything that went on to distract me from getting into […]
Originally, Mr. Karen and I were planning to stay at his sister’s through the weekend, but after studying the weather forecast, we decided to come home today in order to get ahead of a snowstorm that looked like it would cause some difficulty for us traversing the mountain pass between her house and ours. It […]
I’m recently back from dinner out with family at a restaurant on the third floor of a historical building converted to space for small businesses; it was still festively decorated for the holidays. Before dinner, we played Hearts (I won, more luck than skill). Before Hearts, we lazed around the house and had […]
It’s one of the three most crowded weeks on the mountain; the lodging is all full, the activities are booked solid, and today they were doing overflow parking at the lot halfway down the mountain because all the upper lots were full. So what did we do? Leave town. I grabbed Stanley the octopus and […]
I’m having another one of those days when I despair over the future of our nation, no doubt helped along by not feeling well, my Christmas cold having reasserted itself today, so in an attempt to cheer myself up, let’s look at a recent small success I had: I made yogurt. My wonderful Instant Pot […]
We didn’t ski today; it’s one of the more crowded days of the year, and I’ve been fighting a cold. I did walk down to the village to check our mail, but not until after dark (which is about 4 p.m., so I wasn’t slacking that much), which meant I grabbed my Frozen wand as […]
I can’t remember the last time Mr. Karen and I put up a big Christmas tree; in recent years the fascinating fiber optic table top version has served us well. But this year we did put up a big tree, a skinny artificial one my mom gave us because she thought it would look […]
Mary and Melanie have both done Holidailies posts about their Santa on a firetruck experiences, and now it’s my turn. Here, Santa comes on Christmas Eve. This year, we had no children in the condo building, so he did not stop to throw candy, just rolled on by and waved and wished us Merry Christmas. […]
Today the weather on the mountain was challenging. The day started with snowglobe snow, with fluffy flakes falling gently, but by the time we got out on the hill, the dreaded ice fog had set in. This looks like regular fog, but has the added element of coating objects moving through it with a thin […]
The latest addition to my collection of photos of things I am not going to buy is this ski sweater: Why am I not going to buy it even though I really, really like it? Several reasons, starting with it’s $158, and my clothing budget is not what it used to be. Then there […]
My most-viewed photo on Flickr yesterday was the one I took of the chairlift, which I posted in my journal entry entry yesterday. That’s not surprising. What is surprising is the second most-viewed yesterday, only one view behind first place: this snap of one of my breakfasts at Disney, which I uploaded on December 1st […]
I had something happen today that’s never happened to me on a ski day before: I, along with a bunch of other folks, got stuck on a lift long enough that the resort opened a room for us to gather in after we got unstuck and stocked it with hand warmers, blankets, and lunch. I’m […]
My goals for Holidailies were simple: write one post for each day of the project and post them before midnight server time. Seems simple, but I already messed up a few days ago and didn’t finish up my entry for the 16th until twelve minutes after midnight server time. Server time is Eastern US time, […]
These constructions of rubber and metal have made my winter better. They’re Yak Trax that Mr. Karen got me for my birthday in March but which I didn’t use right away, what with the warm spring we had here. I’ve sure been using them the last month or so, stretching them onto my hiking […]
In preparing the list of prior years’ links for this day in Holidailies history, I saw that on this day last year I wrote about how very, very far behind I was on my reading goal I’d set. I’d planned to read 104 books in 2015, and was 45 books behind at this time last […]
Mr. Karen and I did a pretty good job downsizing our Christmas decoration collection before we moved (wish we’d done as well with other things, but too late now, better luck next time). One of the survivors was this purple light ball, currently lurking behind the television, where it will stay for the duration […]
I have never been much of a cook. I’ve been more of a reheater, an open the box and follow the directions maker of food. Over the last several months, that’s been changing. This past summer, after months of seeing many Facebook friends extol the virtues of something called the Instant Pot, I succumbed to […]
What with all the bad, sad, maddening news in the world, I’ve been feeling down today and not much like writing. Thus, I offer instead of a bunch of words, a photo of a doll I saw at a museum in Kansas. The card in her case called her “pouty face felt girl”. I’m not […]
Today started the “12 Deals of Christmas” at the ski resort; this first one was $1 off slices of pizza upstairs at the day lodge. I would have been more excited by this if the pizza were more like one of my four favorites from the Great Lakes States. Growing up in Chicagoland, I was […]
When I left the mountain back in September before all my travels, it was early autumn, warm enough to hike with only a light jacket. There were spots of fall color, but the majority of trees still had the majority of their leaves, and the aspen outside our front window hadn’t even given up its […]
Part of moving is, of course, finding new health care professionals. Our new dentist’s office is quite a change from the one we had in Michigan. These folks seem more technologically up-to-date—they have a fancy image-taking machine that swoops around one’s head like something from a sci-fi movie, and they text me reminders of my […]
Happy as I am to live on our mountain, it does have its challenges. I think I’ve mentioned the lack of proximity to certain things I’d gotten used to having nearby during our life in Michigan, like chain drugstores to hunt down nail polish displays, and an eye doctor that takes our insurance (the nearest […]
Previously on Mr. K and I Roam the Country, we finished out our stay in Orlando in a funk due to the election results. We spent our last night in our rental condo driving to and then back from a concert in Clearwater. The next morning, due to parking lot work, we had to drag […]
Now I’ve finally reached the main event of our trip: spending a month in Orlando. On previous trips there, we’ve never quite felt we had enough time, so we booked a condo for four weeks in Kissimmee. We also booked a couple nights at a Disney hotel at the beginning of our stay so that […]
In our last episode, Mr. Karen and I had arrived on Cudjoe Key to spend a weekend with our friends Bo and Gretchen. As many times as we’ve been to Florida, I’d never been to the Keys before, so was curious to see some new things and hang our with our friends. (Whose place in […]
After we left Minneapolis that Sunday afternoon, Mr. Karen and I turned our attention to our next travel goal: making it to the Florida Keys by Thursday afternoon/evening. That’s only a little over 1900 miles; considering we’ve routinely done the 2100 from our Idahome to metro Detroit in two and a half days, having four […]
Mr. Karen flew into Chicagoland for the last few days of the Illinois portion of my trip. Saturday of that week, we drove up to Minneapolis for a Viking fan event associated with a forum that Mr. K doesn’t post on but our friend Eli is quite active on. Our hotel was in easy walking […]
After spending a few days in Michigan near the end of September, seeing some of the people and places I miss, I backtracked to Illinois, where I stayed with my mother-in-law Joan and spent many of my waking hours working on settling my mom’s affairs. My brother was once again there to work with me, […]
As of the end of the previous installment of this trip report, Mr. Karen and I set out on our own journeys from Spokane, Washington, he heading home and me heading east toward Michigan. I stopped the first night in Montana because that’s pretty much unavoidable when going from the Inland Northwest to the Great […]
As I mentioned in yesterday’s entry, I recently took my longest trip ever. It was 58 days on the road, starting with a quick overnight in Seattle, about six hours west of home. Two bands Mr. Karen likes (I like one of them, too, and didn’t know the other but trust his taste) were playing […]
Welcome, welcome to my 15th year of participation in Holidailies. I expect many of those of you who found your way here today already know me, as there’s a core group of bloggers and journalers who show up for Holidailies every year, but there may a be a few new folks stopping by and that’s […]
Has it really been three months since I wrote here? Yes, yes it has. It’s been way longer than that since I wrote in my paper journal; what that says about me and the state of my life, I’m not sure. Anywhoo, Holidailies starts tomorrow, and yes, I’m doing it, so I thought it wise […]
Stupid Shallow Girl Pockets Strike Again
Maybe you remember back in May when I drowned my phone after it fell out the back pocket of my jeans in a bar, it being in my back pocket because I didn’t want to carry a purse and the front pockets were too short to fit my phone, because heaven forbid women’s clothing should […]
If we’re friends on Facebook or if you read my nail blog, you know that my most recent long absence from this journal is not a byproduct of just another trip or being too distracted by the mountain: my mom died at the end of July. I’m taking it a lot harder than I did […]
In contrast to May, when I spent about three weeks away from home and destroyed some pretty pricey possessions, June has been pretty calm. Mr. Karen and I continue to unpack and organize, a process that’s going slower than it might as we aren’t devoting full time to it, what with there being no hard […]
I ended my last entry (in mid-April, yes, I know it’s been too long) with the hope that my positive outlook would stay with me. It did, for a couple weeks. Then I got sad for a while, despite being surrounded by the beauty of mountains and trees (which are extra pretty with the tamaracks […]
I’m sitting here typing at my dining room table, looking out from my mountain to other mountains in the distance, ignoring the stacks of boxes in the room that still need to be unpacked, and feeling pretty content despite a sore back from overdoing things this past weekend, the last of the ski season. Unlike […]
As per usual, I had the best intentions of writing here during March, but obviously that didn’t happen. What was I doing instead? Well, let me tell you. If you read my previous entry, you know I started the month in Michigan, where our house was in “sale pending” status. I spent the first couple […]
This will be the last installment documenting my Thingadailies participation, during which I made very few actual things. Oddly for someone who used to get stressed about stuff like that, I’m perfectly okay with this outcome. February 21st I made many noises of surprise and delight during my favorite event of Winter Carnival, the […]
I’m still doing Thingadailies in super relaxed mode. I may manage three posts this month, which is two more than I did in January, so that will be good if it happens. Which it won’t if I don’t get to the meat of this catch up post. February 11th I made three balls […]
So yeah, that Holidailies burst of activity didn’t exactly reset my journalling switch to “On”. Instead of writing here since Holidaililes ended, I did a lot of skiing, some nail blogging, and drove all the way to Michigan and back by myself to see friends and family and pick up some things Mr. Karen and […]
I thought about jotting down some resolutions for the new year but the brain fog accompanying this sore throat / sinus thing that I’ve been dealing with for the past couple days means I just want to sit around and drink herbal tea and play Candy Crush. I haven’t even put on real shoes since […]
Wrapping up my year in what’s become a tradition, posting here after posting my final picture in the photo a day project I participated in on Flickr. This was my third year with the group, and while I didn’t miss a day for the second year in a row, I didn’t exactly keep up with […]
When I’m not skiing or staring out the window at my Christmas lights or trying to settle into life in a much smaller space than I’ve gotten used to, I marvel at the icicles hanging off some of the buildings in the neighborhood. In the village, of course, they knock them down before they get […]
I was poking around Flickr earlier and happened to notice in one of the little boxes cluttering up some screen that my most viewed photo yesterday was from April 2014, showing the conference room in Minsk that served as my office when I was there. I don’t get it. It’s not a particularly well composed […]
Today’s minor problem that my brain has latched onto and won’t let go of: my favorite hiking socks are missing. I’d noticed this a week or so ago, but figured they were in the mounds of laundry that built up while the dryer was not working right. Now I’m far enough through the pile that […]
One nice thing about the long hours of darkness this time of year is it gives me ample opportunity to stare out the window at our Christmas lights on the balcony. You may recall them from my Christmas Eve entry, when they looked like this, with a wave of snow curling down from the railing. […]
Mr. Karen and I decided to skip skiing today. There wasn’t any new snow to speak of so no reason to mix it up with the post-Christmas weekend crowd. I made whole wheat pancakes for breakfast, which were tastier than I thought they’d be, though the pure maple syrup and huckleberry compote I topped them […]
I hope those of you celebrating Christmas today are having a wonderful time. It’s pretty quiet here on the mountain tonight, which suits Mr. Karen and me just fine. Wishing that your holidays suit you just fine, too. ***** On this date in 2014: Merry Christmas 2013: Christmas Trees of WDW 2012: Merry Christmas […]
Had a great day today, starting with skiing in yet more fresh powder. I shoveled the decks yesterday after I came in from the slopes, and this morning the snow was piled up again; the snow report for today said sixteen inches in the last 24 hours. The trees are so covered that some are […]
One of the things that got left behind in Michigan that should have come out here to Idaho was my favorite pair of ski pants. I am still not 100% sure how that happened; I guess I thought since I didn’t see them when I was packing they must have already been out here, like […]
There are many adjustments I’ll have to make living out west in a small town after having spent five decades in large metro areas in the Great Lakes region. Case in point: butter. Specifically the aspect ratio of sticks of butter. The butter of my childhood came in long skinny sticks, and I knew nothing […]
It’s Beginning to Look a Little Like Christmas
Mother Nature is putting on quite a show decorating for Christmas here, with over two feet of snow in the last week and more in the forecast for the next three days. Mr. Karen and I have been more restrained in our approach, mostly because we’re still unpacking and settling in and adding more chaos […]
Back when Mr. Karen and I were younger and more energetic, we’d take ski vacations in Colorado where we’d fly out of Michigan after work, get into Denver late, then get up the next day and head to Keystone, where they had night skiing so we could stay on the slopes ’til 8 or 8:30 […]
There is ample evidence that Mr. Karen and I are grown ups, what with being retired and all, but there are also signs that we are not entirely mature. Such as Mr. Pumpkin taking a seat in the wreath that hangs above our fireplace, above the mouse ear hats from various Disney theme parks […]
It’s Handy to Be Married to Someone Handy
The dryer at the condo here has always been wonky, making an odd noise and shutting itself off to take an hour-long rest during any but the lightest loads, but it always did eventually dry the clothes. A couple days ago it stopped making the odd noise, and just heated the clothes instead of drying […]
A couple days ago, I noticed an entry called “Three Books Behind” in my prior years’ links, which inspired me to update my book log and Goodreads account to see how far behind I am this year. Answer: 45 books. So yeah, I’m not going to make it. I didn’t realize how very distracting the […]
In the department of whimsy, I spotted these reindeer grazing among some pine boughs in a planter that sits in front of our mailbox here in Idaho. There are six of them (the sixth, not pictured, is some inches from his mates, far enough away that I wonder if there used to be eight […]
Mr. Karen and I did some skiing today, on our second full day here at our previous home away from home that’s now our primary home I guess even though most of our stuff is still in Michigan. There hasn’t been enough snow yet this season for the whole mountain to be open, but that’s […]
I was greeted with a beautiful winter scene outside my bedroom window this morning. The only downside was knowing I’d have to shovel that deck at some point. The deck in front had also started to make its own garland. Sock Monkey and Sparty Monkey tried making snow angels, but they were not […]
This morning, we checked out of the hotel in Bozeman and headed west. We intended to meet up at a great little burger restaurant about two hours away, only to arrive and find it closed for a private party. Fortunately, there was another cafe in the tiny town that was open, so the six of […]
We woke up this morning in Bozeman; when I peeked out the window, I was greeted with this beautiful view, which was a nice surprise since it was too dark last night when we arrived to see the mountains. I knew they were there, of course, since we had to drive through some of them […]
Today began in Chamberlain, South Dakota. We slipped into the breakfast room at the hotel just before it closed at 9. The woman who came to shut it down saw we were still eating and instead of breaking down the buffet, talked to us about her five kids, the youngest of which is two and […]
Several hours after I posted yesterday’s entry, Mr. Karen and I finished loading up our vehicles and headed west. Our house is not yet sold, but it’s being taken care of by people we trust, so we’re going to Idaho for the winter to ski. Consistent with our theme of downsizing, I only have two […]
I am way too stressed out getting prepared to relocate to Idaho for the winter, so instead of more angsty words from me about that, I present a series taken at my mom’s house over Thankgsiving weekend, called “Simon is a cat and thus does not care if you are trying to get a good […]
Work, Dress, Boots, Sport, Sandals, Other
As much sorting and clearing and weeding out as we’ve done, there’s still plenty of stuff to go through, and still stuff is surfacing that I’d forgotten all about, like this Shoe Inventory dated March 1, 1990, which I came across yesterday. My job didn’t allow for business casual, so the “work” section shows […]
Instead of my anxious brain getting stuck in overdrive and making it hard for me to go to sleep at night, as is its wont, today it decided to wake me up early and keep me that way. Topic of the day: stuff. Specifically what stuff to take out to Idaho for the winter when […]
We came home from California to a for sale sign in our front yard that wasn’t there when we left, but no offers from anyone to buy it. A few days later, we got our first snow, and it was serious, not just a dusting. I was still coughing from the vacation sickness, so that […]
Yesterday, I drove up to my old office to have lunch with a friend who still works there. Despite my best intentions of keeping in touch, it had been a while since we talked at any length, so there was lots to catch up on over a meal at one of my favorite lunch spots […]
The day after we put our house on the market, we flew off to California for trip to the Disneyland Resort, our reward for getting that big task done. We’d intended to go in September, but that was part of our road trip that we cut in order to work on the house. Still, we […]
On November 9th, our house went on the market, an important milestone in the move to Idaho plan. We’ve never sold a house before, having stayed in this, our starter house, for 25 years. We haven’t sold this one yet, either; we’ve had some showings but no second showings and no offers. This is not […]
I didn’t write anything here in October, but I did take photos throughout the month, so I am able to see what I might have written about then if I’d managed it. The house decluttering and sprucing up that’s been an ongoing theme since retirement continued; we had contractors in to strip wallpaper and paint […]
This has been my least active year of online journaling since I started in the spring of 2002. I had zero months in October and November, which hasn’t happened ever, much less two months in a row. Yet I still signed up for Holidailies, because it’s what I do around here. Will I post every […]
A week after I got back from my solo road trip, Mr. Karen and I went to Chicagoland for a quick two-night stay to see Cirque du Soleil Kurios and our moms, then came back home to pack for a month-long journey out to Idaho. Originally, we’d planned the Chicago jaunt would be the start […]
So much for the idea that once I was retired, I’d have more time to write journal entries. That so has not been the case. In the month plus since I last appeared here, Mr. Karen and I hosted the long planned family reunion, with 28 people including us here at our not at all […]
As I sit down to write this, I’m just starting my third week of retirement. So far, my favorite part is people telling me I look too young to be retired. My least favorite is how the vast stretches of time I thought would be freed up by not having to spend ten to twelve […]
When I last checked in here nearly a month ago, I was looking forward to seeing what Mr. K and I could get rid of, following up on our successful decluttering of the laundry room. The answer turned out to be some of our Christmas stuff and many decorative objects I’d forgotten we had. One […]
Where Did Half of April and Almost All of May Go?
I have many questions in my head about how being retired will change my life, including whether I will update here more often. I tell myself my extreme slackitude in this area is due to just not having enough time to fit everything in, what with the many hours each week consumed by being employed. […]
While I was on vacation earlier this month, I finished a knitting project. Preparing to do an entry about it today, I thought to myself “seems like it’s been a very long time since I wrote about knitting here” so checked the archives, finding it had been way longer than I expected: a post about […]
I spent last week out west with Mr. Karen, celebrating his retirement by doing mostly what we would have done on vacation anyway (though he did start on some projects that should get done around the condo before we move out there full time). Our original plan was to stay at our condo and ski […]
Even though I’m not even halfway through the Julie Morgenstern book I mentioned in my last post, I felt inspired to tackly my first small SHED project, one of the drawers under my bed. I pulled it out, and then pulled out the things that had fallen behind the drawer and piled them on top, […]
It’s official: I’m retiring later this year. I’ll be 53. Mr. Karen is wrapping up his working life at the end of this month; I’m sticking around Purple Systems until the end of June with the intent of contributing to completing the bulk of my team’s part of the big project that took me to […]
Last week as this time, I was heading to Green Bay with the quilt from my last post, a basket I’d assembled of Detroit and Michigan treats (also for the raffle) and a ridiculous amount of clothes and nail polish. Destination: Weetacon 11. As per usual, I arrived after the early bird reception; this time […]
I call myself a quilter, but in recent years, I’ve been one more in spirit than in action, sewing only when I got together with my quilting buddies (and sometimes not even then‐at one gathering I knit and another worked on a photo album). After I finished the baby quilts for my grandnieces in summer […]
I spent last week up on Schweitzer Mountain on my second ski trip of the season. I wrapped up the report about my previous trip bemoaning that it started snowing after we left, but concluding “… that just means the base is gonna be better when we get back there.” I was so wrong about […]
Work has been especially stressful lately, so I was especially happy this past weekend to have a quilting retreat scheduled with some of my friends from the office. We tried a new location this time, much closer than the place we’d been going in recent years. It still felt secluded, with the house set way […]
I’m having an extra-strength Monday. Mr. Karen hired a snow removal service this year for the first time, and so far it’s not working out as well as I’d hoped. Instead of shoveling resignedly before I leave for work, I shovel angrily because I think the service should have cleared the walks already, and this […]
I am back to work today after being off for the last week and a half and am finding it hard to slip back into my regular routine after spending my holidays at Schweitzer Mountain, where I never had to set an alarm clock. Unlike last year, there were no significant air travel delays, either […]
Since there are plenty of things I want to accomplish in 2015, it would seem there’s no time like the present to make some resolutions, but I’m not going to do that right now. Instead, I’m going to continue to enjoy hanging out with Mr. Karen since we’re both off work until Monday. Earlier today, […]
I’ve just posted the last picture for the only photo project I did this year, a daily diary as part of a group on Flickr. I did this same thing with some of the same people in 2013, and my goal for this year was to not miss a day while interacting more with the […]
Mr. K and I stopped in a charity shop today to see what we could see. He found a belt to buy; I found some men’s sweaters I was sorely tempted by. Since I have many sweaters in my wardrobe already, some of which I haven’t worn in several winters, I could not justify buying […]
I am not looking to buy any more real estate, at least not anytime soon, yet I continue to pick up real estate listing guides from brochure stands. I guess it’s like a wish book for grownups. What if I had a lakefront cabin with 65 feet of frontage? Or for only 35 thousand more, […]
Cooking is not one of the things that engages me, generally. I don’t dislike it; I’d just rather spend my limited free time doing other things. Yet the past two nights, I’ve made hot chocolate from scratch, working on perfecting a recipe that tastes good, has a nice mouth feel, and doesn’t contain any white […]
It was one of those days when Mr. K and I left the house with two lists: places to go and things to buy. Our first stop was Home Depot, where I immediately got distracted by the Christmas clearance stuff, even though about 90% of my current Christmas decor never made it out of boxes […]
Today Stanley and Sparty Monkey got to play in the snow. Well, sit in the snow. More snow is in the forecast, so there was no point in shoveling yet. I don’t think they’ll be good at shoveling anyway. ***** On this date in 2013: WDW Day 9: Animal Kingdom, Epcot, Magic Kingdom 2012: Most […]
Merry Christmas to those of you celebrating today, from me and also Sparty Monkey and Stanley the octopus, who invaded a giant poinsettia tree together (I helped). Mr. Karen and I celebrated Christmas by exchanging text messages with family then playing in the snow all day before celebrating Jesus’s birthday (observed) with pie. It was […]
I met some new friends today; they’re so new I don’t know their real names yet, but I just know we’ll have fun adventures together. I kicked off my Christmas Eve celebration this morning by going to get the oil changed in my car. I might have to make that a new tradition, as business […]
Soon I will leave the office for the holiday break. Most of my colleagues have already gone, but I don’t have anywhere I have to be until after lunch tomorrow and am rather enjoying the quiet here right now. Or was enjoying it, rather—the cleaning crew has just arrived on my floor with their vacuum. […]
I wrote earlier this month about my seasonal office decorating with window clings. I’d just taken down the last of the autumn stuff and had not yet put up anything for winter, saying that was a post for another day. That day has come. After the gingerbread house party, I adorned one window panel with […]
I’m sitting down to write this post before dinner, lest it become a repeat of yesterday’s “woe is me, I frittered away all my time”. I have actually gotten some tasks done that needed doing, including changing the sheets and doing the laundry—well, most of it; load four is in the washer now, and there’s […]
I can’t quite figure out how it got to be nearly bedtime. I slept in a little this morning, but not a lot, so that’s not where the time went. I did dawdle some getting showered and dressed and breakfasted, but I don’t think I was exceptionally leisurely. Yet somehow here it is going on […]
The Purple Systems holiday party isn’t until January, but earlier this week my boss’s boss hosted a dinner for the team leads in our department to thank us for our hard work in what’s been a more challenging year than usual. It was a chance to have some fun and relax. As part of the […]
The city of Detroit made a big impression on me when we passed through on the way to visit my uncle in Canada in the early 70s. I’d been to Chicago, of course, because we lived close, and to Milwaukee, because that’s where my grandmas were, but Detroit was exotic and strange. I knew no […]
One of the few downsides of working for Purple Systems is the lack of sick days. The policy manual says that there is no official number of sick days and to stay home if we’re sick. That’s all well and good, but it also says if you haven’t been working enough extra hours to flex […]
Yes, I’m recycling content today, bringing three of my favorite looks from my nail blog this month over here to the journal. I won’t go all nail polish geek on you and list brand names, shade names, number of coats, whether topcoat was or was not used, etc., because if you wanted that sort of […]
I took a few minutes this morning to update my book log and Goodreads for the first time in a month. Goodreads now informs me that I’m three behind schedule on my goal to read 100 books this year. I’m not too worried about it; if it looks like I won’t make it, I can […]
After a couple/few days of feeling like I was getting over the sinus crud, it seems to be staging a comeback, leaving me once again with an extra fuzzy head and low energy. Instead of dwelling on that, let’s instead look at some pretty pictures from the Ann Arbor quilt guild show I went to […]
This morning Mr. K and I went to the bank and got my signature notarized on his retirement paperwork, which was the last piece of documentation needed for the package to be finalized and his retirement date to become officially official. (I had to irrevocably consent to his opting out of the normal form of […]
Yesterday was another late night entertaining our work guests from across the sea. If I were really dedicated to Holidailies, I would have gone up to my office when the bus pulled into the parking lot around 11:20 last night, gotten the photos off my camera and written an entry then to get it posted […]
One of the meetings on my calendar for today was cancelled at nearly the last minute, so I decided I could afford to take a little break and do some Lumosity training for the first time in nearly a week. As the graph of my overall performance shows, I don’t do so well when I’m […]
Barely squeaking this one in today; I am up very late because I spent the evening with guests who are visiting us at work this week. We went downtown and rode the People Mover, which showed nicely with this mosaic mural in the station we started off at. We rode to Greektown and had dinner […]
My father-in-law, the man I call Dale here in this journal, died yesterday. His health had been declining for quite some time, and after his most reent hospitalization in late September he went into in-home hospice care. I last saw him at Thanksgiving and wasn’t able to interact with him in what felt like any […]
It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Something
I’m facing a more stressful week at work than usual, so this morning before my first meeting I decided to put up the little purple Christmas tree that I bought for my office a couple years ago (back when Purple Systems still had purple as our corporate color). Now some might say when overwhelmed by […]
It’s been an extra social weekend for me, with the Instagram gathering yesterday and then today’s adventure, a gingerbread house decorating party hosted by one of my coworkers. She baked and assembled all the houses, while we guests just had to bring candy. My house looked like this at the start of the event: And […]
So I’ve already failed at the daily part of Holidailies even though, unlike last year, I wasn’t traveling. Ah well, it was bound to happen. I’d intended to write an entry yesterday. On Friday, I’d spent a bit of time getting a document all ready with all the links to prior years’ entries for the […]
When I need a little break at work, sometimes I go make a cup of tea, and sometimes I play a game at lumosity.com. I started doing that summer before last, when I was going through a particularly bad period of brain fog and worried about the state of my grey matter. I know the […]
Just a couple days after saying I wasn’t going to make 2014 Holidailies a post-for-post homage to 2013, I am returning to that idea because unfortunately the crud I thought I’d successfully fought off got the better of me starting late yesterday, so I need a quick win here as I sit in my bathrobe […]
One of the things I intended to do Monday was switch the window decor on the glass front wall of my office from autumn to winter, what with Thanksgiving being over. As of right now, Wednesday noon, I’ve only gotten as far as taking down the fall-themed clings and am pondering whether I should try […]
Given that yesterday I wrote a Holidailies intro post, just like I’d done a year earlier, and today I am planning to write a Thanksgiving trip report, just like I did on this date in 2013, I briefly considered continuing the pattern and making this year’s entries for Holidailies an homage to last year’s by […]
It’s December, so it’s time for Holidailies. Of course I signed up. How could I not? This will be my 13th year participating, which makes it a longer-lived tradition than most things I’ll do to celebrate this winter holiday season. This year, I first heard that registration was open on Facebook, which wasn’t even a […]
Last November, I managed only one entry here. I hope to do better this year, but we shall see. My employer held a charity garage sale a few weeks back, the idea being we would donate our unwanted stuff and then turn around and buy our coworkers’ unwanted stuff and all the proceeds would go […]
Mr. Karen and I celebrated our 28th wedding anniversary this past Saturday by spending the day at Cedar Point with our friend Kurt. Going as a couple would have been more expected, I suppose, but Kurt was going anyway so it made sense to hang out together. Given that we took a friend along when […]
Yes, it’s yet another “where does the time go?” entry from me today. Since getting back from Minsk and getting and then getting over a sinus infection thingy, I’ve been doing the usual things: working, nail blogging, reading, a bit of knitting. It’s a testament to how routine my life has been these last few […]
As seems to be the new pattern here, I return with a trip report— I spent last week in Minsk. After I went there this past spring, I said I’d love to go back, and as it happened, my job wanted to send me again. Last time I stretched my report into five parts (starting […]
Like last year, Mr. Karen’s family reunion was held in Houston. Unlike last year, I managed to actually book our flights in to and out of Houston rather than Dallas. This meant we had enough time to meet up with my friend Mel, and fortunately her work schedule cooperated so we were able to make […]
Mr. Karen and I spent last week at our home away from home on Schweitzer Mountain in Northern Idaho. As per usual for a summer trip, we flew out there, arriving in Spokane mid-afternoon on a Saturday. Instead of driving directly to Idaho, we stopped and had dinner with Mary, a friend of one of […]
Social media makes it easy for me to feel like I’m staying in touch with people when in reality I haven’t talked to them or spent any time with them in weeks or months or even years. For long distance friends, that makes some sense, since I can’t jet around the country, much less the […]
On the theory that some posting, even mostly photos, is better than no posting, here I am with a round up of the last three-plus mundane weeks of my life. I celebrated the 4th of July by putting themed window clings in my office at the start of that short holiday week (they’re still there […]
This is the face of a woman who wants to post more here and is perplexed about why that never seems to happen. Okay, not that perplexed; I am busy at work and use my lunch hours to write nail blog posts and other things take priority when I do get home at night. Regardless, […]
After getting home from Minsk and spending the rest of that week in the office being even more behind on things than usual, I needed to recharge my mental batteries, so without really thinking about it, I gave myself an Artist’s Date, a la Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. Out running errands that weekend, I […]
Minsk in April, Part Five: Wrapping Up and Heading Home
After my weekend of sightseeing around Minsk, I had one more work day. It was the day before a national holiday, so it was rather quieter in the office than it had been the previous week, but there were still enough people around that we got some things done. At the end of the day, […]
Sunday after another leisurely breakfast in the hotel, my BBF (Belarusian Best Friend) came to pick me up for the day’s tour. We started at the Belarusian National History and Culture Museum (or maybe it was the National Museum of History & Culture, translations seem to vary), where we saw artifacts dating from very much […]
Saturday I had breakfast in the hotel as I had every other day. The buffet was included in the room rate, and there was a wide variety of things to eat on it, so I saw no reason to venture farther afield. I usually stuck to the fresh fruit and yogurt section, supplemented with the […]
Same as they’d arranged for my transportation from the airport to the hotel, the company Purple Systems is working with in Minsk set up a driver to pick me up at the hotel Wednesday morning (and every other weekday, for that matter) and take me to the office where I’d be working. The first day, […]
I meant to post more than one entry last month. I think about writing here, have topics in mind and everything, but then get distracted and busy with other things. Most recently what pulled me away was a business trip to Minsk, Belarus. As of the beginning of April, I had no plans to go […]
Mr. Karen and I finished out our ski season with another trip to Idaho, sliding down the slopes of Schweitzer Mountain last week in between doing projects at the condo. We started our trip by flying into Spokane on what happened to be the same day that our alma mater, Michigan State, was playing in […]
This past weekend, I once again headed up north for a quilting retreat with some of my friends from work. Like last year, I didn’t get out of the office as early as I’d hoped on Friday, but unlike last year, I hadn’t signed up to make dinner that night, so I wasn’t stressed about […]
In my high level recap entry about Weetacon 2014, I mentioned I’d be back with details on the Igigi dresses I wore, which were provided to me free in exchange for my honest review. And yes, it was dresses, plural. When I posted my Igigi wishlist back before the event, I was hoping to get […]
I went to Weetacon in Wisconsin this past weekend, driving over on Thursday and home on Monday after visiting with my mom in Illinois. As usual, it was a lot of fun and lot of socializing, and I came home tired and a little sad. I stopped at Mars Cheese Castle on the way there […]
Last week, I did something I haven’t done in a very long time: skied in Michigan. I want to say it was sometime in the 90s when I last put boards to snow in the Great Lakes region, and almost didn’t do it this year either. I left almost all my ski stuff out in […]
Mr. Karen and I spent last week at our condo on Schweitzer Mountain. The weather was not the most cooperative for skiing, but of course we had fun anyway (and the weather was fine for traveling; unlike my last ski trip I got both there and back on the actual days I’d planned to. We […]
Whenever I have a special event I need to get dressed up for, my first thought is Igigi. I’ve been fortunate to get several of their garments for review over the years and continue to wear them regularly. For instance, for the christening I mentioned in my last post, I wore the Paloma dress, which […]
I look away from this journal for a minute and suddenly three weeks have passed. Fortunately, I have being doing pretty well keeping up with my photo a day project, so I need only look at those images to remind me where some of that time went. The weekend after I posted my previous entry […]
I just today finished updating my book log with the things I read during the last six weeks of last year. I’d set a goal at the beginning of the year to read 100 books, which seemed reasonable given the 70-something I read the year before. Unlike in 2012, when I did A to Z […]
I spent last week at Schweitzer Mountain in Idaho kicking off my 2013/2014 ski season. If we consider just the part of the trip between when Mr. Karen picked me up in Spokane and when we left there together eight days later, it was quite a pleasant vacation, even though I was still sick (whether […]
I was planning to write today about how much of a Holidailies underachiever I was this year, finishing with my lowest post total ever, including my first year in 2002 when I didn’t quite grasp the “daily” part of Holidailies. I am finishing on a whimper, for sure. But just at the moment, I’m in […]
As I have the last several years, I tasked myself with some photo challenges for 2013. I joined a photo a day group that worked a bit differently than ones I’d done before and also decided I’d continue my weekly self-portraits even though the group I’d done them with before didn’t carry over. I failed […]
One of the many photos my mom and I have uncovered working on cleaning her house over these past few months is this shot of me in the fall of 1965 at the Mitchell Park Conservatory in Milwaukee. I’m three going on four years old. I have so many questions for this little girl. How […]
Holiday stuff showing up too soon bothers me, like Christmas nail polish in stores before Halloween, but I rather enjoy holiday decor hanging around after its big day. (To a point; overlapping the next holiday is just as bad as arriving before a previous one.) Which is a long way of saying I’ll be spending […]
If you asked me yesterday where I’d be today, I would have given the wrong answer. I wouldn’t have lied to you, I just didn’t know at the time that the universe had plans for me other than the ones I made. I expected to be reunited with Mr. Karen after a week apart, but […]
WDW Day 10: Magic Kingdom, Departure, and Reflections
Yes, this is the last installment of my trip report, departure day. Our flight wasn’t ’til late afternoon, so we fit in one last visit to the Magic Kingdom, hitting four of the classic attractions: Pirates, Haunted Mansion, Country Bears, and Small World. We also had lunch, eaten at a table in a fairly quiet […]
WDW Day 9: Animal Kingdom, Epcot, Magic Kingdom
I was still feeling sick (congested, mostly) on this, our last full day of touring, but like the previous day, loaded up on cold meds and went forth. It was our last full day of touring, after all. We started our day at Animal Kingdom, which sort of got short shrifted this trip in our […]
Merry Christmas to those of you who are celebrating today! I decided to take a break from my extended trip report to share some of the many fantabulous Christmas trees Walt Disney World displays during the holiday season. Each theme park has a huge tree, and many of the resorts do as well, with I’ve […]
As is our wont, we started this day in a leisurely fashion, having a late breakfast in the Contempo Cafe, watching monorails glide by as we ate. This counter service has the benefit of space and thus has much better traffic flow than Captain Cook’s at the Poly; what it does not have is Dole […]
WDW Day 7: Downtown Disney and Christmas Party
Instead of heading to a theme park on this fabulous Thursday, Mr. Karen and I went to Downtown Disney. Our primary mission was to hit the huge World of Disney store and see how many things we could find to buy from the list of desirable souvenirs we’d been compiling all week, but before we […]
WDW Day 6: Magic Kingdom and a New Hotel
On this sunny Wednesday morning, we packed up and said goodbye to our beloved Polynesian, as we were moving over to the Contemporary. It was the first time we tried doing a split stay; we’d always wanted to try the Contemporary, but weren’t sure enough that we’d like it to commit a whole long trip […]
WDW Day 5: Magic Kingdom and the Studios
Less than 12 hours after leaving it, we returned to the Magic Kingdom to start this day of touring. Some rides were ridden and shops explored, of course, but the main attraction was lunch at Be Our Guest, the headliner restaurant in new Fantasyland. Lunch is quick service, which usually means first come, first served, […]
With Reunion over, you might think our vacation calendar was free of events, but no, it was not. Since we were participating in the test of FastPass+, Disney’s new system for making appointments to experience attractions, we had weeks before setup times for three rides/shows per day, so we had to keep track of those, […]
On this particular morning, the last day of Reunion, we had to get up earlier than we like to on vacation in order to get to the breakfast and podcast taping event that kicked off the day’s festivities. I kicked off my day making another donut bandage out of Moleskin for my blister, which had […]
One of the rules of a Walt Disney World vacation is TAKE CARE OF YOUR FEET. It’s a big place and there’s a lot of walking. On this trip, I failed to follow this rule on our very first day. I wore my hiking shoes on the plane and then in the Studios our first […]
As I mentioned in yesterday’s entry, Mr. Karen and I spent last week at Walt Disney World. Last week plus a few days, actually, as we left on Friday the 6th around noon in order to participate in some of the WDW Today and Mouse Fan Travel Reunion events. Before we could leave, though, we […]
Last week, I was at Walt Disney World in Florida, not camped out in front of my computer as per usual. I will have much more to say about the trip in future posts, but right now I am focusing on getting back into the normal rhythms of my life. The adjustment is proving harder […]
Part of the Holidailies tradition as I manifest it here on my online journal is me writing at least one entry about being stressed and/or bummed and/or unmotivated, from 2002’s Humbug to 2012’s Cranky. I’ve written similar entries in non-Holidailies months, too, but not nearly so regularly, since without the spur of this collaborative project, […]
Over the last few years, I’ve built a small collection of sock monkeys, starting with Christmas Sock Monkey, who has appeared in this journal many times, sometimes with his monkey friends. It’s been months since my sock monkey family grew, though; the last addition was Pocket Monkey, who was a gift from Mr. Karen this […]
I am glad the Elf on a Shelf was not a thing when I was a kid. A spy in my house watching me and reporting back to Santa every night and then getting into some sort of mischief in the house while I slept (who’s reporting to Santa on all the Shelf Elf shenanigans, […]
The part of my brain that likes to do things in a certain order thinks yesterday would have been the ideal time for me to do a Thanksgiving weekend report, but the part of my brain that deals with getting photos off the camera so they can be used for journal entries (even if just […]
I signed up for Holidailies again this year, making my twelfth attempt at this daily writing project. Looking back at my history with this collaborative writing effort and ahead to my schedule for December, I already know I will not manage to post here every day between now and January 1st, but I still have […]
Time continues to race along. The most significant thing I did since I last wrote here an embarrassingly long time ago was take a week off work and spend it in Illinois helping my mom sort through and clean her house so it can be listed for sale. She had that house built in the […]
This past weekend, I took trip to see my mom in Illinois. I packed pretty much just what I thought I would need for the time I was planning to be gone; I’ve made so many similar trips I didn’t feel like I needed to add a bunch of extra stuff just in case. You […]
Most evenings, I leave work and just go straight home, but last night I went to a concert instead. Mr. Karen and our friend Ben and I converged on the venue separately because that’s just how it worked best logistically. I found Ben in the line waiting for the doors to open; Mr. Karen joined […]
Mr. Karen and I spent last week at our condo in Idaho, enjoying an end of summer break (and working on various repair and improvement projects, but somehow those seem easier to manage when there’s a mountain right outside to play on once we’re done). Before that, though, for work I went to Maryland and […]
23 Hours in Pittsburgh and Other Diversions
Once again, time has gotten away from me when it comes to posting here, so let’s catch up. This past weekend, I hung out at home catching up on things like laundry (but not sleep, unfortunately) while Mr. K traveled to Illinois to visit his parents. I probably should have gone with him and visited […]
It doesn’t feel like I’ve done a whole lot since I last posted here on July 3rd, yet I also feel like I’ve been busy. Let’s see what my photostream has to tell us… I gave myself a patriotic manicure for the 4th of July. I got up early on the 5th and drove through […]
Rather than taking a long weekend for this upcoming 4th of July holiday, I took one last week to fly to Las Vegas and hang out with some ladies I met online who like nail polish as much as I do. The trip got off to a good start last Thursday afternoon, when I actually […]
Where does the time go? Well, for me, since the last time I managed to post here, a fair chunk of it has gone to travel. Over Memorial Day weekend, I went to Illinois. My brother was there, too, and we spent some time with Mom at her house, continuing the cleanup effort needed before […]
I took this photo outside my gym yesterday morning—apparently the kids in childcare had been having a lot of fun with sidewalk chalk recently. I hadn’t been to the gym in quite some time, and I learned that if you don’t show up for some unspecified period longer than a few weeks, they deactivate your […]
I haven’t typically used this space a dream journal because usually I don’t remember enough to write down anything significant, but I woke this morning with a full scene still accessible, probably because my attitude in the dream was so at odds with what I would have expected. In the dream, I’d been invited to […]
Somehow it’s been over a month since I last posted here. I shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose, yet I am. Here’s some of what have I been doing instead of writing entries: I edited my last post with the information about how to win a $50 Igigi gift certificate; scroll down here for the details. […]
At Weetacon, I and some of the other ladies once again had the opportunity to model clothes generously provided free for review purposes by IGIGI. I got the Aubriella dress, which caught my eye on the site because it’s in my favorite color family of purple. The bodice and sleeves are a solid plum color […]
Two entries ago, I mentioned that my mom had gone into a nursing home. As things worked out, that move coincided with the days I’d previously arranged to take off to attend Weetacon, so I didn’t have to cancel anything at the office to head back to Illinois after spending three days at home taking […]
Between the beginning of January and mid-February, I knit two scarves. The one above is for me, the one below went into the Weetacon raffle. I used a free pattern from Maia Spins, which is really two patterns, one for a squared-end scarf with single rows of eyelets to break up the body, and one […]
Since I wrote my last entry, I’ve done a lot of stuff, including helping my mom get settled in a nursing home. She’s in a rehab unit for now; depending on how things go with her therapy and medication and such, we’ll figure out what happens after this. One of the things I’ve done is […]
Mr. Karen and I spent the first part of last week in Idaho, skiing. As usual, I couldn’t resist taking multiple photos of the mountain, but so far I haven’t managed to edit them down to a reasonable photoset for Flickr, because I’m trying to cram too much in now that I’m back, as I’ll […]
I spent last weekend at quilting retreat with some of my friends from work (one of whom no longer works for Purple Systems, but we still all keep in touch). Due to one thing or another, I hadn’t been able to go up to the retreat house since fall of 2010, so I was especially […]
It’s been almost two weeks since my last entry here. I didn’t mean for that to happen, but that’s the result of putting so many other things ahead of this website on my priority list. Work, of course, is the big one. It’s taken even more time than usual lately, as the development department, my […]
Mr. Karen and I were out in Idaho again last week. Unlike last trip, we flew out. We lucked out and got one side of a row to ourselves on both flights. On our long layover in Minneapolis, we hung out in the observation deck and had lunch at a place we hadn’t tried before […]
Last night I finished a black and blue cap that I started knitting over Christmas break; I had it mostly done on New Year’s Day and just had to bind off and weave in the ends. It’s yet another go round with my favorite fast hat pattern, Quanah’s Head Hugger, with my standard modification of […]
How little time I took me to fall out of the habit of writing here again, with just those two post-Holidailies entries and then nothing the week after until now. It hasn’t been a great week for writing overall, though; I skipped one day on my nail blog entirely and just did a mini-post one […]
I did finish that last book I needed to finish my A-Z reading challenges for last year, so yay for me. I rolled over the book log today, as I had three books to enter for this year already (a day off plus insomnia makes for more reading time). I didn’t quite finish my photo […]
As I mentioned in yesterday’s entry, Mr. Karen and I were out in Idaho for the holidays. We left the Friday before Christmas after work (my work; Mr. Karen had taken the day off to do last minute prep and packing) and made it to Chicagoland that night without incident. Saturday morning we visited with […]
This last day of Holidailies and first day of 2013 found me waking in my bed at home for the first time since December 21st. Mr. Karen and I road tripped out to Idaho to our ski condo, making stops in Illinois on the way to see family. We flew back late last night. Today […]
The Sock Monkeys aren’t sure they can stay awake until midnight. I might manage it, but just in case, let me wish all of you a Happy New Year now. May 2013 bring us all much joy! ***** On this date in 2011: How Long Until 2012 2010: Sock Monkey Waits for the New Year […]
Sock Monkey and Mr. Karen and I recently got the chance to try Five Guys for the first time. I’m not sure what took us so long—they’ve been in Michigan a while. Having now tried it, I can say it’s a good burger, but Culver’s is still my favorite. I did quite like the colorful […]
Today I spent my morning covering a patio window with tape. Strip after strip of clear weather seal tape, like packing tape but with an adhesive that allows it to be applied in cold temperatures. Why was I doing this? Because I feared without the tape, I’d soon have a pile of glass shards, because […]
My mom in a variety show at the school she taught at, circa 1952. The caption in the photo album I scanned tells me the second woman (with her back to the camera in the shot below) is Ellen Jankowski, whom I believe was another teacher, but I’m not sure and really should ask my […]
Assuming I finish reading The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje by midnight on New Year’s Eve, which seems likely, I’ll have achieved my goal of completing A to Z challenges for both titles and authors in 2012. Not all of the books were long or serious, but I’m good with that. I read mostly to […]
The monkeys are allowed to play on the stairs because hey, they’re monkeys—surely they won’t fall. ***** On this date in 2011: No entry. 2010: Christmas Sock Monkey 2009: Post Holiday Slump 2008: Shhhh 2007: There and Back Again 2006: Not Quite Matchy Matchy & Red Scarf Three 2005: Wait ‘Til Next Year 2004: Alaska […]
It wouldn’t be Christmas without Sock Monkey climbing into other people’s trees. This year, he’s showed his new girlfriend, Scarf Monkey, how much fun it is. ***** On this date in 2011: No entry. 2010: No entry. 2009: The Man with the Bag 2008: Christmas Break 2007: Happy Holiday 2006: No entry. 2005: Christmas Past […]
Because I’ve been spending time on other things today, such as standing outside talking to the neighbors while waiting for Santa to come by on his decorated firetruck, I’m reusing photos from my nail blog for this post. It’s a holiday, so I have one of the most festive of polish finishes—glitter. Here’s Feliz Navidad, […]
Sock Monkeys Wish They Knew How to Drive
Some of the monkeys favor a road trip for the holiday week. Too bad for them that they can’t drive and thus are dependent on me for transportation. New Monkey is ready to go. He want to go off roading. I don’t think so, little monkey. Baby Monkey is content to recline on the dash […]
All the sock monkeys gathered to discuss their Christmas week plans. Left to right: Spooky Monkey, New Monkey, Metro Monkey, Baby Monkey, Love Monkey, Scarf Monkey, Bunny Monkey, Sock Monkey, and Girl Monkey. Girl Monkey was late to the meeting because she was hanging out with Pikachu, a squirrel, and a French guinea pig in […]
Though it varies with my sodium intake and such, most days there’s a 13 inch (33 cm) difference between my waist and hip circumferences. This is more than most clothing manufacturers care to design for, which makes buying pants an exercise in frustration. Some clothing lines there’s no hope for me getting along with—they’re made […]
It’s the Lazy Woman Who Works the Hardest
When Mr. Karen got me a new iPod (well, new to us—it was a refurbished unit because the color I wanted wasn’t available in the generation that was current at the time), I passed along my old one to him. He doesn’t use it very often, just on long driving trips, so I put new […]
I’ve been waiting to declare this scarf finished until after I’d blocked it, but today decided I’d just go ahead and take pictures and if I get around to blocking it later, great. As it is, I can’t quite remember when I started knitting this or when I finished. I’m 98% sure I was working […]
Yesterday I shared the outside of an envelope; today I’ve got what was inside. Above is the front of the folder that contained the commemorative postage stamps shown below. The text inside the folder is in Japanese and English, so I can tell you the 5 yen stamp is the Olympic Cauldron and Athletes (well, […]
I’ve been pondering making a Tumblr for my dad’s stuff that’s sitting in boxes in my basement. If nothing else, it would force me to figure out Tumblr, which still confuses me somewhat even though I have an account and follow some things and click around over there most days. But I don’t really have […]
I wasn’t feeling well last night and ended up sleeping until 10:15 this morning; I might have slept more but the phone rang and woke me up. By the time I had breakfast and showered and had otherwise gotten ready for the day, it was afternoon. I should have gotten started on one of the […]
I had an entry planned for today, but that topic got pushed right out of my head when I heard about the school shooting in Connecticut. Right now, my mind reels that something like this happened and my heart goes out to all the families affected by this latest tragedy, the people who lost children […]
I’m pretty sure if I checked my archives, I’d find I write at least one entry every December about how stressed I’m feeling. Which is sort of dumb, since compared to so many people, I don’t have that much to stress about. I’ve given up a lot of the holiday stuff, like sending cards and […]
The only quilting-related activity I’ve been doing recently is looking at pictures of other people’s quilts, like this Tree of Life from somewhere around the 1870s or 1880s, which I snapped at a local quilt show back in 2008 and came across again today when poking around Flickr. There’s so much to like here. The […]
Because I have the tasks of a fortunate first worlder to take care of tonight (stopping at the bank to get money for the cleaning lady, then straightening the house before she comes tomorrow so she can actually clean), I don’t have time to write a proper entry. I do just have time to share […]
I came across a product the other day that, despite being nail polish-related, did not tempt me in the slightest. It’s called The Nail Pak. The top part is nail polish, the bottom part is a file and nail polish remover pads. The display shows a “before” photo with a remover bottle, a polish bottle, […]
A while back, one of my friends from work invited me to a gingerbread house decorating party. She’d make and assemble the houses; all we guests had to do was show up with some candy to contribute to the supply pool. That sounded good to me. Well, yesterday was the day. When I arrived there […]
This is the best photo I took this past week. Walking back to my car after dropping off a package at the post office, I took a very slight detour into their loading dock area and snapped this shot of the dripping pine needles against the foggy background. I’m sure someone with a better eye […]
Today is the 71st anniversary of the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor, and the date is on my mind more so than other years since just last month I visited the USS Arizona Memorial. I knew about the oil that still bubbles up out of the wreckage, which is also a grave site, both for […]
Does Inspiration have an Expiration Date?
I worked from home today, which means when it came time to stop working and write an entry for Holidailies, I had the hard drive of my personal laptop to troll through for ideas. I came across a folder with some scans I’d made in 2009 of a plastic souvenir cup from the Lowry Park […]
I ate lunch at my desk today, as I do most days. When I go out, I tend to be entirely too tempted to eat and/or buy things I don’t need. Not that I don’t face similar challenges while staying in the building—there are five candy jars between my desk and the printer, for instance, […]
I was playing with the new set of plugins I got for paint.net (the ones here from pyrochild and used up the time I had allotted today to create original content for this site. I did just create that sentence right there, but that’s with time I should be spending driving home or doing more […]
While I continue to struggle with stuff management, as discussed yesterday, I’ve made progress in some areas of my life over the years. Today’s case in point is taking photos in public. There was a time where I would have been embarrassed to take out my camera in the grocery store, thinking that other people […]
The glove in this photo has been in my life for nearly 13 years. I bought it in a grocery store in France, on my first and so far only ski trip to Europe. It’s been lots of places with me since then—pretty much anywhere I’ve gone that is or might be cold—and has kept […]
Every December since I started this journal in 2002, I’ve been a part of Holidailies. This year, it runs from December 1, 2012 to January 1, 2013, and I’m doing it again. Will I post every day? That seems unlikely, given my lackadaisical approach to this journal in recent times, but I’m going to try. […]
Mr. Karen and I went to Illinois for Thanksgiving weekend. On the day itself, the two of us celebrated with much food and many relatives—the extended family gathering this year was around 30 people. The rest of the weekend, we split up, Mr. Karen staying with his folks while I went to spend time with […]
Given that it was a longer trip than I usually take, I suppose it’s not surprising that I still have a few things to say about Hawaii. Of course, I’m very glad we went— I’ve wanted to pretty much since I saw the Brady Bunch there on tv when I was a kid, and over […]
When we left off, Mr. Karen and I had arrived on Oahu after spending not quite a week on the Big Island. It’s taken me so long to pick up our story because holy crap I took a lot of photos, and they did not sort themselves. Day 7, continued— Aulani We landed in Honolulu […]
Last entry, Mr. Karen and I had left Hilo on the Big Island of Hawaii after three nights and one tsunami warning and checked into a hotel on the Kona side. Day 5— Kealakekua Bay We started the day with the breakfast buffet in our new hotel. It didn’t have as many options as the […]
Yesterday, when my lunch hour was over and I hadn’t even gotten through sorting out the first four days of photos I took in Hawaii, I realized it would be best if I broke my trip report up into a few parts. Today, I’ll cover the days on either side of the nights we spent […]
This time, I have a great reason for why I haven’t posted here in so long: Mr. Karen and I were in Hawaii, where the two of us, both age 50, picked up our 50th state visited. (We didn’t do them all with each other, of course.) We spent most of our vacation on the […]
So yes, here I am again, popping up to after 10 days to write what will be only my second entry this month—and looking at my calendar for the rest of October, it will likely be my last until next month, meaning yet again I’ll fail to manage even three entries for the fourth month […]
Can I make it to three entries this month? The fact that I’m getting this first one up when October is half over does not bode well. While I haven’t been writing here, I have been taking photos every day, so I’m hoping a handful of those will serve to catch you up on what […]
Well, I guess two entries this month will make it a 100% increase over last month. I was hoping to do better, but hope alone does not get the photos sorted or the words written. I’m just back from another quick weekend trip to Chicago to see my mom. She continues to recover from her […]
I am determined that this is going to be the month where I break out of my journaling slump and post more than one entry, starting with this one, about my trip last week to my home away from home on Schweitzer Mountain in northern Idaho. My mom is doing well enough recovering from her […]
Since I last wrote here, I have three times packed my bags and left home for short trips, which in the past would have led to journal entries upon my return, but here I am only getting around to setting fingers to keyboard now, when the memories of the first two journeys are no longer […]
This month marks a new low for new content here at this online journal. My apologies for the neglect, though I’m not entirely sure who all might have noticed other than the spammers who like to put their links in my comments section. I am fairly confident that future me is going to notice, as […]
As you can see from the photos, I did finish the baby quilts for my baby grandnieces which I wrote about earlier this month. I sewed the labels on with a few days to spare before I was heading to Chicagoland, where one of the babies lives. The other baby lives in California, and […]
Earlier this year, I came home from work to find Mr. Karen watching a video of a lecture about the physiological effects of consuming sugar. (I believe it was Sugar: The Bitter Truth; warning; video starts on clicking that link.) Nothing too crazy there; he’s watched lectures on YouTube before. But somehow this one has […]
Over the weekend, I got out my sewing machine for the first time in quite a while, because I really, really need to get the baby quilts done for the grand-nieces while they are still babies. I had a bit of a setback when I discovered that the batting I’d bought especially for these quilts […]
I’ve been driven back into the arms of this journal to vent about my own shortcomings, specifically my failure to take a picture yesterday for my photo a day group on Flickr. This morning at 6 o’clock, when I realized I’d missed a day, my first thought was “well, I might as well quit since […]
Friday night I got the news that my sister-in-law Lynne had lost her battle with ovarian cancer. Since then, I’ve not quite known what to do. I’ve had times when I’ve felt that I’d very much like to smash a great many things, times I’ve acted like everything is fine (if you’ve gotten an especially […]
On this date ten years ago, I went public with this online journal. I chose Diary-X as my journaling home at the start, for reasons that seemed terribly important at the time but which I now barely recall. Once I decided I liked writing online about my life enough to keep at it, I bought […]
Yesterday I got a belated 50th birthday present from my health insurer: a screening colonoscopy. I know it’s a good idea to get one at my age. I know colon cancer is nothing to mess around with. Still, I was not delighted by the idea of having a camera up my butt. After I got […]
I mentioned in my Weetacon entry that there was an Igigi fashion show, and that I’d have more to say about that when I got the right photos. Yesterday, when I put the dress I’d worn in the show on once again for Easter, I finally took those photos. The garment in question is the […]
I mentioned in an earlier post that one of my birthday presents from Mr. Karen was a Kindle Touch (his research about which Kindle version to get was as much of a gift as the thing itself). I felt like maybe I should hand in my geek card for being so very late to get […]
Last weekend I traveled to Wisconsin for Weetacon, a traditional winter event for me, except this year winter was not really much in evidence. That was fine by me, since I got plenty of winter in Idaho this year, and also I’d decided to drive rather than fly, what with baggage fees and security theater […]
My neglected Ravelry projects page tells me I started knitting this cap last August. I just finished it this morning, sewing in the last of the ends I’d left dangling when I set it aside to work on other things. If I didn’t have to get this done for a raffle this coming weekend, it […]
I turned 50 last week, and I’m perfectly okay with that. It would probably make a better journal entry if I were not okay and had something to rant or whine about. Sure, I wasn’t delighted to see the invitation to join AARP show up in my mailbox earlier this month, but that was mostly […]
So yes, I was in Idaho most of last week. Mr. Karen and I were originally scheduled to go a couple weeks before that but ended up postponing the trip because a few things came up that made it seem like that was the right thing to do despite the costs involved (in airline change […]
Hmm, I seem to have managed only two entries here in February. Sure, it’s a short month, but not that short. Ah well, perhaps March will bring me more energy and inspiration. I rang in the month at Schweitzer Mountain, which welcomed me and Mr. Karen back with crazy deep fluffy snow for our […]
Long time readers will know that Mr. Karen and I have been going to Kansas concerts together longer than we’ve been married—and we’ve been married a long time. It seemed like a mean twist of fate when we found out that they’d be doing two shows within a hundred miles of our house during the […]
This past Monday, instead of awakening at a somewhat reasonable hour and heading to work as usual, I got up at crazy o’clock so I could get to downtown Detroit and find parking and report to the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice at the time indicated on my summons for jury duty. Clearing security to […]
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 […]
Ah, it’s nice to be back from my traditional post-Holidailies break. I was intending to be back yesterday, but it was so nice and quiet at work due to so many of my customers being off for MLK Day that I took the opportunity to focus on some projects I’d been neglecting there. Yesterday was […]
Today is officially Day 32 of Holidailies, but since I started (along with some other folks) on reddit before the official start date, this is the 35th consecutive day I’ve posted an entry. I’m pretty sure I’ve never managed that before. Considering I also posted 27 entries to my nail blog in that same period, […]
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 […]
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 […]
It felt downright spring-like when I went out at lunchtime today: 53 degrees F and sunny. I went ahead and opened the sunroof in the car, even though that’s still a bit chilly for that sort of thing, since I didn’t know when I’d next get to have the sun on my face. This […]
So far, the hardest part about doing a photo a day project again has been remembering I’m doing it. Yesterday, I was sitting at my desk and realized I hadn’t taken my photo for the day, so I grabbed a quick snap of the bulletin board in my office, thinking I’d at least have […]
I am still procrastinating on making my resolutions for 2012. One of the things I’ve been doing instead is reading other people’s posts about how their 2011 went and what they’re hoping to accomplish in 2012. Thus I’ve run across the 40-ish question New Year’s Meme several times. I don’t have the attention span to […]
While I was out in Idaho, I finished the last book for the A-Z challenge I set for myself for 2011. This is the third year I’ve done one—I did titles in 2009, authors in 2010, and went back to titles for 2011. Here’s what I read to meet the challenge: A–April Rising (Corine Lemaître) […]
Now that I’m back, I feel comfortable sharing that I spent most of last week away. Regular readers have no doubt already guessed that I was at my home-away-from-home on Schweitzer Mountain in Idaho. Since this makes two years in a row, I guess it’s my new Christmas tradition. Mr. Karen took the few days […]
I posted my last pictures from 2011 to Flickr today and thus completed both of my photo projects there for last year. When I wrote about my photo a week group earlier this month, I was thinking I’d skip doing a similar project for 2012, since I was lacking motivation. But today, going through the […]
Two monkeys waiting for the New Year calls for a bigger clock than Sock Monkey waiting alone last year. Though if Girl Monkey decides to join them next year, I’m not getting an even bigger timepiece, so we’ll just have to figure something out. ***** On this date in 2010: Sock Monkey Waits for […]
Sock Monkey and New Monkey decided that what this big wreath was missing was monkeys. They might be right. ***** On this date in 2010: Sock Monkey Goes Grocery Shopping 2009: Gadgetry 2008: Twilight, The Movie 2007: Fitter 2006: Chilly Afternoon Out 2005: Triplets 2004: Vacation Paddling 2003: Pikachu Loves Me, At Least for […]
On a drive into town last evening, New Monkey decided to show off his (or her? Mr. Karen and I have different ideas about New Monkey’s gender) flexible arms by playing with the buttons in the car door. With no strength to go with that flexibility, no buttons were actually pressed. ***** On this […]
Wheeling the cart around the grocery store with Sock Monkey, as I do from time to time, I came upon a display near the floral section which held a stripey friend for him. $4.99 plus tax later, New Monkey came home with us. Mr. Karen thinks Sock Monkey might be intimidated by New Monkey, […]
Sock Monkey seemed to enjoy the view from the top of the snow pile, but he disappeared inside when it was time to shovel all this off the deck. ***** On this date in 2010: Sock Monkey Drowns His Sorrows 2009: Slacking 2008: Still Sweet 2007: Super and Out with the Old 2006: Quilt […]
In what’s becoming a tradition, Sock Monkey celebrated Christmas by sneaking into someone else’s tree and posing for photos. He thought this one coordinated especially nicely with his own color scheme. ***** On this date in 2010: Christmas Sock Monkey 2009: Post-Holiday Slump 2008: Shhhh 2007: There and Back Again 2006: Not Quite Matchy […]
Now it is time for me to shut down the computer and take my Christmas break. Mr. Karen and I didn’t put up a tree in our house this year, so this shot of the purple one at the office which I took on my way out of the door last night will have […]
So far today, at least the part of it I’ve been awake, I’ve been feeling anxious and ever so slightly panicky about all the stuff I have to do today (and now that I’m sitting here typing, I’m starting to worry about whether the fan noise the laptop is making is normal or a sign […]
We had a minor flood in our basement recently (thanks, automatic icemaker). While sorting through stuff to see what got wet, I found a group of postcards I collected on a family vacation in the early 1970s. My mom, my grandmother, my brother, and I went to visit family near Toronto and on the way […]
What you see here is my latest knitting project, which I started over Thanksgiving weekend even though I hadn’t quite finished the project I had been working on most recently. It’s a pair of socks, and everything was going along quite nicely until I got to the heels. Can you see the problem? (With […]
I updated my book log today. Doing that reminded me of a comment I got here last year from someone who was upset about my book log and not too impressed with the rest of my journal, either. It’s the only non-spam comment I’ve ever chosen not to approve. I deleted it only after I […]
A couple days ago I let you all look into my linen closet; today you get a peek at what’s in my purse. I was planning to take this photo before I cleaned anything out, but I just couldn’t quite do it: I took three folded sheets of 8 1/2 x 11 paper and […]
No, not that law of attraction stuff, but the secret to how I do something in the office bathrooms that not everyone seems to be able to manage. First, the problem and a sub-optimal solution: I choose to believe people do this not because they are lazy or inconsiderate, but because they don’t know how […]
One of the items on my weekend to do list was sorting through the shelves in the linen closet that we use as a warehouse for toiletries and first aid supplies and cosmetics, things we aren’t using right now but will when we run out of the stuff in the bathroom. (Some things we […]
One of my friends works in retail, and she’s close friends with the woman who manages layaway at their store. This past week, a man came into the store and went to layaway and said that God had been good to him and he wanted to show his appreciation by paying off as many Christmas […]
I try to keep cross posting from my nail blog to a minimum, and I already did it once this month, but I just couldn’t resist sharing what is probably my favorite new polish of 2011. It’s from Jessica Cosmetics and is called Disco Diva. Just look at those rainbows! This was so much […]
Last night after work I met up with some colleagues for food and drink and discussion; the restaurant was in a city I don’t get to very often, so I did not realize that it had decked itself out in thousands and thousands of Christmas lights and thus was quite surprised when I came […]
Speaking of hobbies I’ve been neglecting (as I was, yesterday, about my quilting), I’ve been slacking big time in my photo a week group on Flickr. There’s a theme every week, and often I don’t even look up what it is until the day before I have to take the photo or miss the […]
When I started this journal, quilting was just about the only creative hobby I was really pursuing. Looking back at the archives, I finished seven quilting projects in the first twelve months I wrote here. My, how times change. In the last twelve months, I’ve finished two quilts, up from zero the year before. […]
I took this photo a couple years ago of all the vitamins and supplements I was packing to go on a week long trip. It would look pretty similar if I took one this year; the colors and sizes and shapes of some of the pills have changed as I’ve swapped new brands in, […]
Because my roots were showing, I’m sitting here with a head covered in Clairol Natural Instincts in Fresh Maple (boosted with Ardell Gray Magic from the beauty supply store because it seems my grays are getting more and more stubborn). I’m not especially fussy when it comes to my hair—I bought this brand of color […]
As part of my ongoing quest to manage my files of magazine clippings, I recently weeded out the contents of the job hunting folder, which had pretty much been sitting untouched since I was last looking for work in 1999. A lot of the articles were from much earlier than that, including these gems: —An […]
So evidently Holidailies is not going to be on reddit this year after all, but back at the dedicated portal—starting today and running through January 9th—so I don’t have to put a photo in every post to avoid the generic image. Today I do have a photo, though, because I thought I’d share a bit […]
It appears that Holidailies is going to be on reddit again this year, which means I’m going to have at least one photo in every entry even if it’s one I’ve used before and/or it has nothing to do with the subject matter of the text. If I do not do this, my entries will […]
I have once again turned my thoughts to weight loss, which I think makes it about eleventy billion times I’ve decided I need to do something about my excess pounds. This go-round I’ve been taking pictures of all the things I’m eating, which is a tactic I’ve not tried before. Mr. Karen asked last night, […]
Every year since I’ve had this online journal, I’ve participated in Holidailies. It seemed there might not be an official Holidailies this year. I was planning to write anyway, and it seems other people had the same idea. Some started December 1st, which is when the project used to kick off way back in the […]
I let this check-in slide until today rather than trying to jam it into yesterday because I was having a worse than usual Monday due to some trouble sleeping the night before (for no good reason that I could figure out). Last week’s progress: a. Lose two pounds. Done. I lost three. b. Increase weight […]
When I last checked in, I said I was going to take a couple weeks off but would still be doing stuff. Hah. Make that a month off and not doing much. I did a tiny bit of stuff at Distributed Proofreaders, and made some updates to Find a Grave, but that’s about it. Obviously […]
I had a quiet weekend at home the past two days, but before that, I packed in more entertainment than usual. Thursday night Mr. Karen and I went to Ann Arbor to see Michael Ian Black perform. On our way to the comedy club, we happened upon the Occupy Ann Arbor encampment; it’s no Wall […]
The jet lag still hasn’t entirely left me (or maybe this is just my new level of tired), but at least it’s Friday and I’m not feeling spinny anymore. So yes, Mr. Karen and I went to California to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary. In October of 1986, we got married on a Saturday night […]
No goal check-in today, nor will there be many words, as I just got back last night from a little over a week’s vacation and have much catching up to do at work and elsewhere before I can focus on pulling together a coherent entry for this journal. On this trip, Mr. Karen and I […]
Last week’s progress: a. 4 x 400 two days. Nope. I start strong most days and then blow it at second lunch or dinner. I need a new plan, I think. Or a new brain. b. Run a little more than last week. Done. By some measures, I ran a lot more than last week, […]
Last week’s progress: a. 4 x 400 one day. That can’t be so hard, just one day of seven. Done. b. Run a little more than last week. Done. Walked more than last week, too. c. Complete backup discs for photos. Nope. Didn’t make any progress on this at all. d. Empty one box in […]
Last week’s progress: a. 4 x 400 plan at least five days or just lose a pound somehow. Nope. My head is just not in weight loss mode, and I don’t know what to do to get it there. At least I seem to have been able to stop getting fatter, so that’s something. b. […]
Report Card Monday will be postponed this week because I’d rather write about the impromptu mini-vacation Mr. Karen and I had this past weekend. The main purpose of the trip was to continue our pretty much annual tradition of the past 30 years or so of seeing Kansas in concert. (I’m not sure if I’ve […]
Last week’s progress: a. 4 x 400 plan at least five days or just lose a pound somehow. Not done. Lost a pound as of Friday morning, but it came back over the weekend. b. Add one walking session to routine and no slacking on gym sessions. Done. c. Organize photo folders to be backed […]
This is the knitting project I started when I was coming out of my malaise some months back. It’s a wee blankie for the then-newborn daughter of a friend. Even though this blanket is quite small as blankets go (about two feet by a foot and a half), it took me four months to finish […]
It’s been years since I used a travel agent, but for a trip Mr. Karen and I are planning for next month, I decided to work with one for some of the arrangements because I’ve heard on podcasts about how they check for discounts that come out after you’ve booked and get those applied to […]
Last week’s progress: a. 4 x 400 plan at least five days or just lose a pound somehow. Done. I’d lost three pounds as of yesterday morning and then re-gained two of them by this morning. I’m hoping that’s just a temporary side effect of my late and sodium-laden dinner last night, because I’m sure […]
It’s tempting to let mini-goal setting go another week, what with the holiday yesterday, but I’m not going to give in. I’m also not going to report point by point against the last set of mini-goals I set, since I haven’t been keeping track of things that well. My weight has been pretty much holding […]
No goal report card again this Monday, since I’ve once again been traveling. This time it was a trip to Maryland on Friday to meet with a coworker who’s based in her home office there. Originally, I was planning to stay over until Sunday so I could spend some time with my New Jersey-by-way-of-Australia friend […]
No report card today (or last Monday, you may have noticed) because I was on vacation last week. Mr. Karen and I headed to our mountain home away from home in Idaho for some recreation, relaxation, and remodeling (well, not really remodeling, but I liked the alliteration—we did work on some condo improvement projects, though). […]
Last week’s progress: a. 4 x 400 plan at least 5 days. Done. As of Friday, I’d lost another two pounds, but all of that showed back up over the weekend. I know I didn’t eat an extra 7000 calories in those two days, so I’m hoping that this morning’s scale reading was just a […]
Today I have another installment in my ongoing series, Privileged People’s Problems. I pay Sirius for two services: satellite radio and something called Travel Links, which gives me stuff like real time traffic information displayed on the GPS map, weather/ski info, and fuel prices. Last night on the way home, I noticed the Travel Links […]
Here’s how I did on last week’s mini-goals: a. 4 x 400 plan at least 5 days. Not quite done. Thursday got a little wonky; it was more like 800 + (2 x 400). The weekend, as usual, was a challenge, especially Saturday, when I ended up having only two meals, but I’m not going […]
I got back on the goal wagon last week—easy to do since it was pretty much stopped dead at the side of the road so I didn’t have to run to catch up to it or anything—and here’s how I did on the mini-goals I set for myself: a. Grapefruit and protein diet Monday through […]
On January 3rd, I announced my goals for 2011: 1. Weigh less and move more. 2. Keep less and organize more. 3. Surf less and contribute more. In the seven months since then, I’ve pretty much ignored these goals. Sure, I’ve made some sporadic attempts to take baby steps in the direction I want to […]
I am having one of those days where my head feels like it’s packed with something it should not be packed with—rice pudding, perhaps—and I would very much like to unroll a sleeping mat in my office and take a nap, but I’m hoping the decongestant (the good kind, like you can make meth with) […]
I took this shot for the “Pop of Color” theme in the photo a week group I’m in over at Flickr. As often happens, I put off doing it until the last day of the week and didn’t expend a whole lot of energy when choosing a subject. I looked around the room, grabbed the […]
A postcard came in the mail that a charity would be in our neighborhood picking up donations this week so I went through some drawers and boxes to fill a couple of bags to donate. One of the things that went into the bag was a t-shirt I’d gotten from the Greg Biffle Foundation. I […]
Going through my photo files to get the images for yesterday’s entry, I realized I never shared the group quilt I worked on with the ladies in my office this past spring. We made it to be raffled off at our company’s user conference (well, silent auctioned, as it turned out, but I still think […]
I finished a quilt! It’s not a big quilt, not even as big as a baby quilt. It is just about the right size for the space it was made for: our television. The quilt attaches to a mounting bracket Mr. Karen made and covers the big blank screen when we’re not watching it. I’m […]
I keep intending to write entries here yet I never quite manage to get around to actually doing so. I’ve been feeling much less malaise-y lately, so there’s stuff to write about: I’ve started a new knitting project, gotten my long-delayed tv quilt moved along so it’s now ready for quilting, and been reading more. […]
I got dressed up and went out not once but twice this weekend, first on Saturday night to go to a charity benefit and then again on Sunday for a wedding. Given that my social life on weekends is often limited to going out to dinner with Mr. Karen before doing our grocery shopping, this […]
I’ve been especially busy at work lately so that’s been eating up hours that I could be doing things at home, such as sitting down with Mr. Karen and planning our vacations. I know we’re blessed to have problems like the jobs that make it possible for us to travel interfering with discussing when and […]
I mentioned in my most recent “resurfacing from the pit of malaise” entry that I didn’t have anything on my needles. That’s still true, but I have unearthed two knitting projects I finished at the tail end of winter. I thought I still needed to weave in the ends, which I why I didn’t share […]
I didn’t plan for April to match the low entry record I set in February, but it just turned out that way. I haven’t been doing much lately except working, creating content for my nail blog (which just turned one year old this week), and going to the dentist. (I’ve had two more visits since […]
Sometime soon after I got home from Idaho, one of my teeth started hurting when I chewed or drank cold beverages, so I stopped chewing on that side and hoped it would get better on its own. It did not, so I called my dentist last Wednesday to make an appointment. After getting hung up […]
I finished out my ski season with another trip to Schweitzer Mountain last week. That’s two years in a row now that I haven’t skied anywhere else—it’s just so nice to have a home mountain (even if it is 2000+ miles away) that I’ve not been able to convince myself to spend my ski […]
As I mentioned in my last entry, one of the Weetacon events this year was an Igigi fashion show. Last year, many of the Weetacon ladies got a garment for review from Igigi; this year, Yulia Raquel (the founder and designer at Igigi) amazed us by sending so many things we had to have a […]
So, Weetacon. This year’s theme was the Seven Deadly Sins, of which I managed to commit at least four during the course of the weekend. The ride over on Thursday was delightful—it was a big plane, and I had three seats all to myself. Ah, luxury. Jennette had connected in Detroit and was on the […]
I’m still not ready to do my Weetcon trip report, but here’s a scarf I made for the raffle. Like the scarflet I also donated, this one is from an Iris Schreier pattern I’d made before. It’s called Zig Zag Scarf, for obvious reasons. I used my entry about my first go ’round with […]
This time there’s a good reason for the gap between entries here: I spent the last four days in Green Bay at Weetacon. I’ll write about that later; it seems too soon to do so today (my ears are still ringing—from what I’m not quite sure–and a couple of my toes are still numb). In […]
Well, here is an entry I didn’t plan: driving home last night I got in a car accident. I am fine, just a little stiff and sore, but my poor car is most definitely not fine. I was stopped behind a line of vehicles, the first of which waiting to turn left, and the person […]
February is traditionally a low entry count month around here, but wow, it’s never been as low as the mere two I managed this year. Usually when there’s a long gap between posts from me in the winter, it’s because I’ve been off skiing, but that wasn’t the case this time. This time, I was […]
I started this sunset colored scarflet on my way to Idaho last month and finished on my way home (well, finished except for weaving in of the ends, which I took my sweet time doing). The pattern is the Flying V Scarf by Iris Schreier. I made this pattern once before, about four years […]
Yesterday my part of Michigan was scheduled for Snowmageddon, with 12 to 18 inches of snow forecast overnight. We got about six inches. Yeah, it took a while to shovel, but it wasn’t the huge mess I was expecting to have to deal with when I woke up. I worked from home anyway, which […]
Not too long before I left for my recent trip, I finished knitting these socks, which I started in September of 2009. I didn’t work on them steadily all that time, of course; indeed I didn’t even have them in my possession for all that time, as I left my whole project bag (a gallon-sized […]
I went on another ski trip last week. Just like the last one, I took Sock Monkey and went to Idaho. This time, Mr. Karen flew out with us, too. An early Saturday morning departure had me more worried than usual that we’d miss our flight; we did not, though the parking lot shuttle guy […]
I am on some sort of creative roll lately. Here’s the latest project I’ve finished, a baby quilt commissioned by a woman at one of my employer’s customers for her great niece. In what I think may be some kind of record for me, it went from vague idea to finished quilt in a little […]
Here I am, back from my traditional post-Holidailies break. I meant to post about this hat during Holidailies, as I finished it last Thanksgiving, but I only got around to taking pictures of it today. They could be better pictures, I realize; I decided not to use that as a reason to procrastinate any longer […]
Today is the last day for Holidailies 2010. Before I get sidetracked, I want to thank Jette and Chip for hosting once again. Over the 31 days of the project, I posted (or will have posted provided I remember to add this last one, which I did not for Holidailies 2009, much to my annoyance) […]
I took these three pictures last March when I went to Green Bay to meet up with my tribe. I found them today in folder on my PC, still waiting to have something done with them. I found the cemetery they belong in on Find a Grave and will post the relevant […]
My goals for 2009 carried over to 2010 and because I still want to do those things, here they are again for 2011: 1. Weigh less and move more. 2. Keep less and organize more. 3. Surf less and contribute more. I can’t say I did a bang up job on any of these in […]
Today I am back at home after spending last week at Schweitzer Mountain in Idaho; between wanting to spend time skiing and having to spend time working, writing entries got pushed aside, thus the recent run of picture posts. I have more pictures today but many words as well. This was the first time I’ve […]
I did two photo-a-week projects in 2010, one for self-portraits and one which had a theme each week. This morning I picked one photo from each month to make these mosaics for the projects. I’ve already signed up for a theme a week project for 2011; I’m undecided about continuing the self-portraits but […]
I haven’t asked if he’s making any resolutions. I probably will but not tomorrow; I believe in grace periods. ***** On this date in 2009: Finished, in which I wrapped up some projects. 2008: The Year in Pictures, in which I looked back on my first photo-a-day effort. 2007: I Am the Champion, in […]
Sock monkey doesn’t care if it’s a stereotype; he wanted to check out the bananas. ***** On this date in 2009: Gadgetry, in which I see how tech-riffic I am. 2008: Twilight, The Movie, in which I saw it. 2007: Fitter, in which I worked out. 2006: Chilly Afternoon Out, in which I went […]
The sock monkey found it chilly and soon came back inside. ***** On this date in 2009: Mani-Pedi Madness, in which I rediscovered my love of nail polish. 2008: Morning Mystery , in which I saw some spotted cars. 2007: Chilly Boy, in which the Big Boy was out in winter weather in shirtsleeves. […]
The sock monkey found his arms were too short for this modern hand drying device. ***** On this date in 2009: Monday, Monday, in which I didn’t like that day. 2008: New Toy, in which Mr. Karen made me a swift. 2007: Possibilities, in which I opened my fabric sketchbook. 2006: A Body in […]
The sock monkey and I had to have a margarita (we chose pomegranate) to dull the pain from finding out that this Chilis location does not have fried cheese sticks. ***** On this date in 2009: Slacking, in which I barely managed to write an entry. 2008: Still Sweet, in which Mr. Karen and […]
Holiday greetings from me and my Christmas sock monkey! He was an impulse buy at Rite Aid; I saw him on my way to grab the cotton rounds I’d come to buy with my $2 gift certificate that was expiring on Christmas Day and once I picked him up, it was all over—he was […]
I took this shot of the office Christmas tree as I was leaving the building yesterday; I don’t have to go back until 2011. (I do have to work some between now and then, but I can do it remotely since that whole issue seems to be sorted out.) ***** On this date in […]
I’ve had a headache for going on two days now, but the closer it gets to the holiday break, the better I’m feeling. Yesterday I picked up the new glasses I’d ordered earlier this month and was planning to work from home the rest of the day, except I could not because my remote connection […]
Another week, another hat. This one is a Christmas present for Mr. Karen’s dad Dale, who’d said at Thanksgiving that he was thinking about getting a stocking cap. I couldn’t quite see him in what I picture when I hear the words “stocking cap”, namely a hat with a long, somewhat silly, tail on it […]
I was poking around my Flickr stats and found a referrer I didn’t recognize, which led me to an article on an interior design site that’s using this picture of my nail polish storage along with several other people’s photos of the same IKEA unit. There was a tag line that said all images were […]
Holidailies, as you may have noticed, is happening on reddit this year. This is preferable to Holidailies not happening at all, which I understand was the other option. I’d never heard of, much less looked at, reddit before Holidailies moved there, and having poked at it for almost two weeks now, I doubt I’ll be […]
Mr. Karen is going on a long driving trip without me and asked if I could lend him my iPod so he could add podcasts to the entertainment options available to fill the long hours on the road. My first thought, much as it pains me to admit, was “but I need my iPod!” I […]
Here’s the hat I made for Mary, the one I mentioned I was starting the last time I posted a finished knitting project. More precisely, here’s the top of the hat, which is my favorite part; the swirl of decreases pleases me. It’s a simple knitted beanie very similar to one I made for the […]
Today (and possibly more days in the future) I am stealing an idea from Jette to post an entry about a random picture from my Flickr stream. Since she’d already tried and failed to find an easy way to select a random shot, I decided to look at my stats for today’s view and […]
Silly me, being all complacent yesterday about Snowmaggedon. Because more snow was predicted overnight and it was windy enough that we thought drifting would be an issue, Mr. Karen and I put off shoveling until this morning. While this would have been an excellent day to work from home, I had to be in the […]
We’re having Snowmaggedon here (though nothing like Minneapolis and parts west had it earlier this weekend), and I am enjoying that it’s happening on a day when I can just stay inside. I haven’t even put on proper shoes yet, and it’s almost dinnertime. At some point, I will need to bundle up and go […]
February, 1965: Standing next to the smoke tree my dad planted in front of the house; it grew up with me but eventually died and had to be cut down. Pulling my sled back up the hill that our house was on. There was a road at the bottom of the hill and another […]
In 2009, I did an A to Z title challenge and liked it. This year, I did A to Z authors, and just finished my 26th letter (Y, as it turned out) last night. Here’s the list of books I read to meet the challenge: A-Wanderlust, Ann Aguirre B-Agatha Raisin and the Murderous Marriage, M. […]
I haven’t formally updated my quilting to do list since August of 2008, mostly because I’ve only finished four of the ten projects on that list, so it’s not like I ran out of things to work on. I’ve done other sewing and quilting besides the things on the list in the intervening time, mostly […]
When I went to the eye doctor last year, we talked for the second or third time about whether I was ready for bifocals. I was not. In the last few months, though, I have gotten so ready. I have to take my glasses off to read my Droid (or else hold it so far […]
I see I’ve gone twelve days without an entry here. I’d like to use the excuse that I was saving up my energy for Holidailies, which started today and which I’ve done every year I’ve had this journal so I had to do it again this year, but I was just being lazy. I have […]
Last week, I went to the gym, did some stuff at both Distributed Proofreaders and Find a Grave, and did not eat anything bigger than my head, so considering how very busy work has been I think that’s pretty good. Goals for this week: 1. Eat sensibly enough over the Thanksgiving holiday that pants can […]
I think the cooler weather has helped me get my knitting mojo back; after I’d ignored them for months, I excavated the emergency sock yarn socks I’d started on my trip in June from the dark recess of my knitting bag and finished them. They’re very simple socks, just a plain foot and a ribbed […]
So yeah, I skipped a check-in last week, since going on retreat meant I really lost momentum. (It didn’t have to be that way; in past years, I’ve gone for runs/walks while on retreat, but this time I did not.) I haven’t completely abandoned my goals though—I’ve been to the gym, and did some pages […]
I took Friday off work and spent a long weekend on the sunrise side of Michigan. Six of us from the office gathered at the retreat house we’ve been to several times before and while I never seem to get quite enough sleep at these things, it was a fun weekend. Four of the ladies […]
So much for getting back into the swing of things by lowering the bar on my goals for last week. I did meet my exercise target, but fell short on everything else. Work has been crazy busy, but that doesn’t look like it’s going to change much any time soon, so I’m going to need […]
Following up on my teaser post about my recent journey to Florida, here’s the detailed trip report. This won’t be nearly as detailed as some I’ve seen on various message boards, but it will help me remember what we did and what we want to do differently next time (provided I re-read this when we’re […]
So yeah, because of vacation I didn’t get much done on my goals in the last couple weeks. I did do plenty of walking while touring the parks, so that’s something, and I returned to the gym this morning (even remembered both the combination to my locker lock and my PIN to get into FitLinxx). […]
Mr. Karen and I took last week off to celebrate our 24th wedding anniversary with a vacation in Orlando. Given that we spent time at Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm, and Universal Studios Hollywood on our honeymoon way back when, running around the theme parks in Florida seemed a fitting way mark this milestone. We planned […]
I ended up having a much busier day yesterday than I’d expected thanks to getting pulled into a customer demo of a module I don’t work with very often, so Goal Wednesday is a day late. Not that I have a ton to report, really. I did not keep a food diary. I did do […]
In weeding out some files and piles this past weekend, I came across an article from the July/August 2009 issue of MORE magazine entitled “How Not to Act Old”, an excerpt from a book of the same name by Pamela Redmond Satran. Admitting I read a magazine aimed at women over 40 is probably not […]
I skipped doing a check-in last week because I was sick and didn’t want to make myself feel worse by going over how little I’d gotten done. I’m still not back to 100% but didn’t want to let it go another week, so here I am. My diet has pretty much been awful; left to […]
Well lookee here, I finished a knitting project. That hasn’t happened in a while. This particular item, a baby blanket, was supposed to be a welcome to the world gift for my friend Harmony’s son. I got a bit of a late start on it, not casting on until the month he was due to […]
How the heck is it Wednesday again already? This past week was not stellar one as far as goal achievement. I did keep track of my food intake for the most part, but that intake included quite a few things that in no way fit into the 4 x 400 plan. Exercise, surprisingly, continues to […]
Taking last week off from goal check-in was not my best idea ever, since it meant that I was not keeping myself accountable for two weeks (the week before I skipped check-in and the week after). Predictably, I got less done in those two weeks—well, when it came to eating, I got way more done, […]
Like so many of our fellow Americans, Mr. Karen and I spent the long Labor Day weekend traveling. We packed a lot into the three days: our high school class reunion, a visit to my side of the family, and a visit to his side of the family. The reunion was first on the schedule. […]
1. Stick to the 400 x 4 plan. Travel messed with my routine to the point where I gained weight this week. 2. Weight work twice; aerobics twice. Did the weights, but only one formal aerobics session. I think that’s okay since I did do a lot more walking that usual when I was out […]
Last Friday, I got up earlier than usual and headed to the airport for a quick trip to visit the member of my team who works from her home in Maryland. The business part of the trip went well (and much better than last year, when she thought I was coming out to fire her) […]
1. Stick to the 400 x 4 plan as much as possible. I wasn’t as diligent about this as I’d hoped to be (and my efforts were not helped in any way by the installation of a freezer full of free ice cream treats at work), yet today I am a pound lighter than I […]
A couple weeks after I got my new work PC, I got a new phone, trading my much loved purple flip phone for a Droid—the Motorola version with the slide-out keyboard, because I just didn’t think I ready to go all touchscreen all the time (despite the fact I do just that in my car, […]
1. Stick to the 400 x 4 plan as much as possible. Still plateaued. 2. Weight work twice; aerobics twice. Done. 3. Weed through some container, any container—box, bag, cupboard, drawer. Not technically a container, but I did clean out my work e-mail inbox, my Yahoo mail inbox, and my gmail inbox, each of which […]
Why Can’t the World Have a Pause Button?
There’s a meme going around the nail polish blogs I read which has as one of its questions “what are four things you’ve always wanted to do?” The first four that came to my mind: visit Australia and New Zealand, visit Hawaii, knit a Kaffe Fassett-style sweater, and have a chauffeur. I’ve been reading other […]
1. Stick to the 400 x 4 plan as much as possible. Still stuck on a weight plateau and trying to be patient. 2. Weight work twice; aerobics twice. Done. 3. Clean out backpack. Done. 4. Weed through some container, any container—box, bag, cupboard, drawer. Done; I chose the coat cubbie in my office, which […]
1. Stick to the 400 x 4 plan as much as possible. Still not doing quite as well with this as I need to be, but at least I didn’t gain any weight this week. 2. Weight work twice; aerobics twice. Done. 3. Handle mail on the day it comes in. Done. 4. Clean out […]
In early June, my department at work changed over to a new version of one of our development tools. When I tried to install the software, I found I didn’t have enough space on the hard drive partition where it needed to go, even after I deleted everything I thought I could safely do without […]
1. Stick to the 400 x 4 plan as much as possible. Doing just barely okay here; still a little heavier than my recent low of two weeks ago. 2. Weight work twice; aerobics twice. Yes. Neither aerobics session was quite as long as the week before, which was a conscious choice because the weather […]
Mr. Karen and I always try to catch Kansas when they come to town, because, like I said in 2002, “How many more years they’ll be coming, I don’t know.â€ (At least eight, I know now.) This year we skipped their appearance at the venue formerly known as Pine Knob, though. They weren’t headlining but […]
1. Stick to the 400 x 4 plan as much as possible. I slipped a bit here and gained a little weight back; I am hoping that most of that is just water retention, because I did have more sodium than usual. My big indulgence was a friend’s 50th birthday celebration, and I don’t regret […]
One of the ladies in the self-portrait Flickr group I’m in had a birthday last week and also (not coincidentally) had volunteered to pick the theme for the week, so she asked that those of us who were up for it make a happy birthday sign for her and take it where we would take […]
1. Stick to the 400 x 4 plan as much as possible. I’m continuing to do pretty well here; I’m down a pound from last week. At some point, I’ll need to work on improving the quality of what I’m eating, but right now I’m sticking with what’s working for me. 2. Weight work twice; […]
This is the latest quilt I worked on, a group quilt done with the ladies at work. I don’t have a picture of the finished product, because I wasn’t the one who did the binding, nor was I at the event when it was presented. Those of you who follow my Flickr stream got a […]
1. Stick to the 400 x 4 plan as much as possible. Considering there was a three-day holiday weekend in here, a holiday that calls for fried chicken and potato salad and other picnic food, I did okay, ending up the week where I’d started weight-wise. 2. Weight work twice; aerobics twice. Weights, yes. Aerobics, […]
When I was around 11 years old, my mom took me into Chicago to see the Art Institute. My best friend at the time and I spent hours and hours playing Masterpiece, a board game in which players bid on paintings and aimed to win by amassing the most valuable art collection, and the paintings […]
There were no goals for last week, or the week before, but I of course did things. I gained weight on vacation and have since lost most of it again, ending up just about where I was the last time I did a goal check-in. I returned to the gym after being gone and got […]
Our first full day in Idaho was, as predicted, cloudy and damp, but that sort of weather doesn’t interfere with kayaking, so I served as shuttle bunny for Mr. Karen and Wendy’s trip down a creek near Clark Fork. Even though much of the beautiful scenery was obscured by rain clouds, it was still a […]
Wow, this trip report is taking just about as long as the trip itself did. By midday Monday, people who’d come in for the graduation had left or were getting ready to go, including me and Mr. Karen and Dale and Joan. We’d rented what Enterprise considers a full-size car, which will hold four adults […]
(Note: Goal Wednesday obviously did l not return yesterday as scheduled. Look for it next week; I hope to be done with my trip report by then.) Let’s see, where were we? At a hotel near the airport in Seattle on a Friday night, I believe. Saturday morning we drove up to my sister-in-law Kathy’s […]
You may have noticed I was gone from here for over a week. Yep, that means vacation. In this particular instance, Mr. Karen and I traveled to Washington to see our youngest nephew graduate from high school and meet our first grand-niece (she’s the daughter of our oldest niece, who is the only sister of […]
Goals for last week: 1. Stick to the 400 x 4 plan as much as possible. This continues to go well. I lost half a pound this week, so still trending in the right direction. 2. Weight work twice; aerobics twice. Finally did this! 3. Get rid of one box of stuff. No, but I […]
The theme for one of my photo a week Flickr groups last week was “Toy, Game, or Childhood Pastime”. A lot of people in the group who have children took pictures of them to illustrate the theme, but many of us took the opportunity to revisit our own childhoods. I only had to look in […]
Last week was a better week than the one that preceded it. My goals: 1. Stick to the 400 x 4 plan as much as possible. Good news here—I lost two pounds this past week, which is great for a normal week but super fantastic for a week that included a holiday. I love that […]
Today has been a challenge already and it’s only just time for first lunch (the 4 x 400 plan has me eating two lunches). I woke up with a sore throat that denial was working just fine to deal with yesterday afternoon and evening. It hurt so much that if I hadn’t been covering for […]
This wasn’t one of my better weeks achievement-wise, but not writing about it won’t make it any better, so here we go. My goals for last week: 1. Stick to the 400 x 4 plan as much as possible. I thought I did okay here, despite another day of conference buffets, but the scale says […]
I spent two days last week at the Purple Systems user conference, the biggest one ever in the history of the company. I remember early on when it fit into one room in a hotel convention center and everyone listened to the same presentations; now the general session fills a ballroom and there are three […]
A prominent feature in many of the weekly self-portraits I’ve been taking for the project I’m doing on Flickr is my forehead, which I perceive to be gigantic. More and more, I’ve contemplated whether I should add bangs to my hair in order to provide some camouflage, but then I remember how not into maintaining […]
My goals for last week: 1. Stick to the 400 x 4 plan as much as possible. I did pretty well here, especially considering I had to navigate a day at my company’s user conference during which there were four buffets—breakfast, morning break, lunch, afternoon break. I even ended up losing a pound and a […]
I haven’t bought any new fabric in months and months, but that changed on Saturday when I went to quilt guild (another thing I haven’t done for months and months). Instead of there being a shop as a vendor as is usual, fabric donated by guild members was being sold by the pound to raise […]
My goals for last week: 1. Stick to the 400 x 4 plan as much as possible. I got rather off track on Saturday, though I did refrain from trying everything on the buffet at the party, which was a small victory of sorts. My scale this morning was bouncing between last week’s weight and […]
I spent most of my Saturday at the office, but for fun rather than work. Our company quilting group hosted a surprise 50th birthday party for one of our members. She was really surprised, in part because her actual birthday isn’t until July (we figured if we did it now, she wouldn’t suspect anything). She’s […]