You must be lost

So, yesterday sucked even worse than Saturday and I've tried and tried to come up with something that made me happy that wasn't just completely trivial, but I can't. So, here it is: Chris made gnocchi and scallops for dinner with a yummy sun-dried alfredo sauce. Mmmm, butter and cream.

Oh wait, also, the neighbor kids brought over a little bag of Christmas cookies. That was really sweet and the shining star on an otherwise shit day.

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Today was definitely an improvement over the past three days.

I'm happy that I'm mobile again, though somewhat stiff and still sore. I have to take it easy and not do too much at once (that goes for anything, sitting, standing, typical house stuff, laying down) I have to stick to a regular cycle of work and rest. Rest has to be alternated between sitting and laying down. I can't sit for too long at all. But, I'm not in crippling pain, so YAY! Haven't even taken an ibuprofen today. I feel like I can work the rest of the kinks out with some diligent yoga (which I've been really needing to do anyway).

I'm happy that I got some of Chris' gifts wrapped so he'll stop snooping in the closets trying to find them.

I'm happy that I finally finished putting together amaz0n_princess's CD! It was so hard not to cheat and send two CDs or to bend the rules and burn it as a data disc so I could fit more mp3s on there. But I was good and stuck to the rules and managed to squeeze 21 songs on there. See my halo? ;) Hope you like it! It was really hard to get the songs to flow from one to another since I wanted to cover such diverse musical territory. The cover song was easy to choose and I think she'll get why. The foreign song narrowed itself down fairly easily as well, though I wish I could have included the other two runners up (some other year, perhaps). But I got it down to 24 songs, 15 minutes over the max runtime, and then froze because I didn't want to cut any more. I really deliberated over this thing! Hope there's lots of stuff you don't already have. It'll be on its way to you tomorrow. :)

I also started working on the one commission I have this year for my brother-in-law's girlfriend. I'm finally doing the pieces of butterfly wings under glass cabochon pendants. I had found a second completely intact Monarch butterfly on my run on the beach in Florida last month (the first one was somewhat less intact). I held it in a loosely cupped hand for probably a mile or more. It's been fun to work on jewelry again and I started pulling out all sorts of other materials I could possibly put in these bezels. I've got silver, copper and bronze to work with. Lots of possibilities! I'm thinking brocade swatches. It's like everything I look at I think, "hmm, wonder what a piece of that would look like under glass".

I got my Christmas dinner menu planned. Not a single dish I've made before! Also, we are free from the shackles of obligatory turkey this year! FREEEEEEEEDOOOOOOMMM!! Chris always got a free one at Vandy for Christmas and since all our extra freezer space is full of beer and kept at refrigerator temps, we had to cook it soon after receiving it. I suppose we could have donated it to someone if we really wanted to, but honestly that thought hadn't occurred to me until just now. Anyhoo, we're doing Alton Brown's grilled leg of lamb with pomegranate molasses as well as his green bean casserole, a root gratin, zucchini mushroom crumble, roasted butternut squash with Moroccan spices, and roasted asparagus with balsamic browned butter. Oh, and I lied, I am making something I've made before: cranberry pumpkin yeast rolls.

Tomorrow is the last day for this meme, but life has been beating me down and I know it's only going to get worse after the holidays. So, I might keep it up. We'll see. Even if I could make it a weekly thing, I think I really need to focus on the positive in order to deal with the stuff that makes me want to simultaneously scream and cry.

Welcome February! Your arrival brings us one month closer to 70 degrees and sometimes, by the end of you, the first flowers have sprouted up. Better watch out winter, 'cause February could cut a bitch! Sometimes. With usually a bit of a relapse at least once in March and sometimes April.

Anyway, despite having kind of a crappy weekend, health wise, I forced myself back out for several hours of snow fun with Jonah yesterday. I mean, really, how often do we get an honest to god snow around here? You've got to exhaust all the possibilities for snow fun while you've got it. The neighbors just so happened to be getting out with their kids and their little sledding saucers while we were getting out to check the consistency as things began to melt to see if we had snowball/snowman material yet. Not yet, but it was happening in the sunny areas. So we went to join them for about an hour of sledding. Jonah got freaked out when I pushed him down the hill with an all clear, but about halfway down, a car came running up the road pretty quickly, actually. The poor boy had a look of shear terror in his face as he scrambled off the sled and tried to gain footing on the icy road to get to me. He didn't want to do anymore runs down the street after that. So I let him go down the sidewalk once, then we borrowed the sled as they left to go in for lunch and we went down the hill behind the playground/pool area a couple of times. I even went down with him. Was pretty fun, despite the snow up the back.

By the time we got back to the yard, we had a large area of what was fast becoming prime snowman material. So, I got to work as Chris showed Jonah how to peg me with snowballs from stuff he scraped off the car. I took a break to have a little snowball fight with the boys. Chris was brewing and since he really pegged me hard at one point with what felt like an ice ball, I sneaked around and pegged him inside the garage with one. Then it was back to work. After a while, I had recreated to the best of my ability a snowman with a tennis racket through it's head and one about to hit his own head like a golf ball.

( Let me show you 'em. )

( And, the weekend of waning health. )

ETA: This is fitting, given the subject matter of this post. Bill Watterson looks back with no regrets.