According to Punxsutawney Phil, that future predicting rodent, we still have six weeks of winter to go. Which should be interesting, since we have not even had six consecutive days of winter yet. I have decided to be hopeful that this wintery forecast indicates that we should expect winter to start any day now, and last about six weeks.

Seriously, I would just about kill for a good blizzard at this point. It was in the 60s here yesterday, and it is supposed to be in the 50s today through the end of the weekend. This is ridiculous.

Last year I put 11 items on my yearly “to do” list (I hate calling them resolutions) because it was 2011 and 11 seemed like a good number.  (And the year before I had 10 items for 2010.)  So, to continue that numbering theme, my 2012 list will have 12 items on it.

12 still seems like a reasonable number to me.  Eventually, probably soon, probably next year in fact, I will hit a point where I just cannot keep correlating the number of items on my list to the year number, and when that time comes I will have to come up with a different system.

1. Keep on with the exercising, but mix it up a little more
   I have got a pretty solid thing going with the elliptical and stationary bike for cardio and the yoga for stretching and flexibility and the fencing for fun.  I just need to focus on working in some weight training.
2. Garden 4.0
   We hit the limit on how much we can reasonably expand the size of the garden, so it will be the same size as last year.  We have also pretty much figured out what plants grow well and get eaten, so we won’t change that up too much, though I would like to try growing either snow peas or sugar snap peas this year.  If so we might have to start flats of seeds for those in the early spring since we probably won’t be able to buy seedlings at any of the local garden stores.  I also want to give the zucchini another shot, to try and fine tune what we need to do to keep those plants safe from the root-borers.  Meanwhile, the zucchini are going to be planted in large pots on the deck this year.  That way if they do die, that way we won’t be “wasting” a large corner of the garden that could have otherwise been taken up with something more reliable, like tomatoes or jalapeno peppers.
3. Weed the library
   We have a dedicated library as well as bookshelves and stacks of books in every room of the house, except for the bathrooms.  A lot of those books are trade paperbacks, or books that we will probably never re-read.  We would like to cut down the library size by at least half.
4. Crock pot cooking
   John and I both really like to cook, regard it as relaxing, and make most of our meals from scratch.  But it can be kind of a drag to get home after a long, busy day at work and then have to jump right into dinner prep work with no time for de-stressing.  Hence the crock pot concept.  Can we work out and work in a couple of delicious and low time commitment meals a week?
5. Improve my communication
   I can be very bad at staying in touch with people, and I know it.  I am no longer going to let emails linger unanswered, and I am going to call my folks every week.  (I know that this one will make you happy, Mom!)
6. I am not very crafty, and I often admire John his ability to just make things.  So I am going to work on just making things also… maybe I will give knitting a try again, maybe I will get back to making Ukranian eggs.  At the very least I will finish that embroidery project that I started at the beginning of last summer!
7. Update this site
   Always on the list.  I have a few things in mind…
8. Photograph, identify, and catalog all of the china and glassware in my collection
   I am not planning on selling anything… this is just for my own personal interest and use.  Really, I should have been more attentive when I was building the collection, but better late than never.  At least I have all of those books on china and glass patterns that Grandma gave me that I can use.
9. Kick up my photography a notch in general
   I would like to do more with my photography… can I figure out any way to transform it into an income-producing hobby?  Also, I would like to take better advantage of all of the photography and Photoshop classes and tutorials that are available out there.
10. Get authorized for (heavy weapons) combat archery
    Between that and the fencing, I figure that I will be able to ironman (i.e. participate in all point battles that I am eligible for) at Pennsic this summer.
11. Work on German longsword techniques outside of official fencing practices
    Once it gets warmer outside, of course.  I would like to work up to the level where I feel comfortable working up and teaching a class.
12. Mobile design and development
    Learn more about mobile design and coding and the responsive web.  Then I need to apply what I learn.  Starting with this site right here.

I have already gotten started with a couple them… last night John and I had our first crock pot meal.  It was a very traditional beef roast with root vegetables, and it was veeeery tasty.  And it was just as quick and easy as hoped for.  John did all of the prep work the evening before, put the assembled dish in the fridge over night, and then plugged in and turned on the crock pot in the morning.  Now I must find a lot of other crock pot and slow cooker recipes to try.

My friend Sarah has also (at my request) started to (re) teach me how to knit.  I started trying to teach myself years ago when I still lived in Ann Arbor, but gave up pretty quickly in frustration.  She was going to start me out on a fairly simple shawl pattern (because starting out on a scarf is boring… just endless rows of knits and purls) and then discovered that I needed more than a bit of remedial help.  So she taught me how to cast on, knit front and back, purl front and back, pointed me toward some online tutorials, and told me to practice the very basics for a little while before tackling the shawl.

I put a whole bunch of things on my 2011 to-do list didn’t I?  Lets take a look at that list and see how I did!

1. Keep going with the regular workouts.  Weights/elliptical/stationary bike during the week, and yoga on the weekend.
   Yup. Been keeping up with this one just fine. Well, been keeping up with most of it anyway… I get plenty of cardio with the elliptical/stationary bike, and plenty of stretching with the yoga, but I wasn’t able to work weights into my workouts very consistently.
2. Garden 3.0!  We should be able to get raspberries and blackberries this summer, since the bushes will have had a year to establish themselves.  Also, I would like some squash.
   All of the blackberries and raspberries (the ones that the birds left us) got eaten straight off of the vine rather then saved for a pie or some jam. We didn’t plant any squash either… after careful consideration, we decided that we didn’t want to devote that much space (squash spreads) to squash. We did enlarge the garden again, and we planted pretty much the same things that we planted last year, only in greater quantities. The jalapeno peppers were the surprise standouts of the growing season, and we had many many meals of poppers out of them. The zucchini once again succumbed to the scourge of the root borers. The tomatoes did not do as well as last year either. We had a very hot summer, with a record number of days above 90 degrees, and it turns out that tomato pollen dies when the temperature goes over 90, so there went our tomato crop.
3. I want to be able to actually catch stuff when I go fishing.
   I did catch fish! And l cleaned those fish and ate them as well. (They were very tasty.) One time we went out I caught three good-sized fish!  Catching fish is, however, mostly luck, so I wasn’t able to catch fish every single time that we went out, though I was luckier at fishing last summer then I was the year before.
4. Finish the boat and learn how to sail.
   Yes. Oh yes. We finished the boat. It sails like a dream. Once we finally finished it, we spent most weekends out on the lake.
5. Strip and re-seal the bamboo flooring in the living room. ( Maybe this year will be the year we actually knock this one off. Maybe?  Here’s hoping.)
   Yes! Done! Finally! It took the better part of a week from start to finish, but we got it done. And it looks great. I wish that we had done it long ago.
6. Train to go back-country backpacking with my folks.  (Trip tentatively planned for September)
   We went to Yellowstone with them in early September, and then we went to Grand Teton National Park and hiked around (literally, we hiked around a mountain) it. We covered over 50 miles in five days, most of it uphill. I don’t think that I will ever do something quite so extreme again, but as my Mom put it, I “did something that most people won’t ever do” and now I have “bragging rights”.
7. Start to weed down my part of the library.  Do I really need all of those textbooks from college and grad school still?  I think not.
   Kind of, but not really. I weeded out the books in my office… but the books that are taking over the rest of the house remained untouched. It is really, really, really hard for me to get rid of books.
8. Clean and organize my home office.  And keep it that way.  (Keeping it that way will be the hardest.)
   Yes, I did clean and reorganize my office. And I have (mostly) been able to keep it that way… I do occasionally start to backslide into clutter again, but I try to keep that under control as much as possible.
9. Mix up my wardrobe a little bit more.  I don’t think that I will magically turn into a fashion plate, and I don’t really want to, but I do need to broaden my go-to clothing beyond jeans and a t-shirt all of the time.  Also, maybe I should add color to my wardrobe beyond black, grey, and blue.
   I definitely did this with my summer wardrobe. I think that I wore dresses and skirts most of the summer. I am still trying to beef up my winter wardrobe a bit. I am also getting more comfortable with the concept of layering, and how leggings and sweaters can take a lot of stuff from summer wear through the cooler fall and early winter days. However, I learned that I am essentially lazy when it comes to my wardrobe, and I tend to do what is easiest. So if dresses and skirts are easiest, then I will wear dresses and skirts. If jeans and t-shirts are easiest, then I will wear jeans and t-shirts. I also learned that I do not have a lot of patience with clothes that require special care. If an item of clothing is not hardy enough to at least go through the wash on the “delicate” cycle and then go on a rack to dry, the I probably shouldn’t bother with it.
10. Learn how to do my hair.  I have great, short, easy-to-take-care-of hair, and all I really do with it is wash and comb it.
    Kind of. I figured out what product is best to use when I want to blow-dry my hair straight, and I figured out what product is best to scrunch through my hair when I want it to be really curly, and I figured out some things to do with hairclips and headbands, and I figured out how to flat-iron my hair, but mostly I figured out that I am essentially lazy. I can do a lot of things with my hair, and now I am better at doing them, but I just don’t really want to take the time. So mostly I use the product to make my hair curlier (and a lot of time I also use the product that I figured out is best to keep down the static) and leave it at that. I am pretty much just a wash-and-go kinda girl.
11. Do regular training on longsword techniques outside of the group fencing practice.
    Eh… this one kind of fell by the wayside. John and I were pretty busy last year.  So some of the extracurricular activities, like this one, just went undone.

Well.  That’s it for 2011.  I think that I did pretty well, overall.

Now I need to come up with a plan for 2012.

I just finished taking our Christmas lights and decorations down.  They are back in the basement, in storage boxes, waiting until next mid-December, when they will once again be brought out and put up.

Last year John and I did nothing for the end-of-year holidays.

Which is to say that we just stayed home and had our own little cozy celebration.  I was in the middle of a year long bout with oral surgery, and wasn’t feeling up to even faking like acting social.  So we stayed home.  We put up a tree, and had a holiday dinner, and watched “The Thin Man” and “A Christmas Story” (two of the best Christmas movies out there, in my opinion), and exchanged presents, and lounged around, and relaxed.

This year, to make up for last year, we went everywhere.  We went to Michigan to spend Christmas with his folks, and we went to Cleveland to spend New Years with my folks.  And in between we did holiday-oriented baking and replaced the garage door.  (The torsion spring on our old, original to the house, garage door snapped, so we replaced it with new springs.  Which turned out to be insufficient to life the heavy, solid wood door.  And since it turned out that the old, solid wood, door was falling apart anyway, we ended up just ordering a new garage door.)

We ate entirely too many cookies and cake and chocolate nibbles and holiday breads and rich delicious food.

While we were in Michigan with John’s family we lit the menorah and went to see “Tin Tin” on Christmas Day.  We also ate a lot of very delicious food and played a lot of card games.

While we were in Cleveland we went to see my Grandmothers.  I seem to have the good luck of always catching both of them on relatively “good” days.  We played pool (I lost badly) and Scrabble (I won!).  We dressed up (how often do I really get a chance to wear my 1940s blue mink jacket? Not often enough) and went to see the Cleveland Pops for New Years.  (It was an amazing show.  I had a great time.) And we ate a lot of very delicious food.

A lot of very delicious food was pretty much the theme for the holidays.  We are both paying for that now.

Anyway, now the the decorations are put away for another year, the holidays are officially over.

Time to get back to normal.

Just before the Christmas holidays I had an appointment with my eye doctor.  I had realized that it had been a while (almost 3 years) since my last appointment, and I had also noticed that I was starting to squint a little when watching subtitled movies (and it is not very far from the couch to the TV in my house).  So off I went.

Turned out that it was not all in my head… my prescription needed to be just a touch stronger.

I also picked out a new pair of frames.

I like glasses much better now then I did when I was younger.  Maybe the frames themselves are better, maybe I just have a better idea of what is stylish and what actually looks good on my face.  Either way, I liked my old frames quite a bit, and I am very happy with the new ones as well.

The new frames have a very vintage, almost Art Deco look to them.

it seems kind of silly how happy picking them up and wearing them for the first time made me, but there you go.  New glasses.  Such a simple pleasure.

Grandma always made the best Christmas cookies.  Almond cookies and brazil nut cookies, cut out into different shapes and sprinkled with colored sugar.

She hasn’t made those cookies in years, and I missed them.

Then it occurred to me – that I had the recipes (actually, it is great-grandma’s recipe) for those cookies, and if I wanted to have them again so badly, then I could just go ahead and make them myself.

I even had some of her old (very old) cookie cutters that I could use.

Honestly, the hardest part about making the cookies was the ingredients.  It was easy enough to find the blanched almonds, but it was tricky finding the brazil nuts.  Especially since the most common way of getting brazil nuts around here is in the shell, as part of a mixed nuts arrangement.  And I wanted just brazil nuts, and I wanted them shelled.  (Since I really didn’t want to spend a lot of time with a nutcracker in order to make these cookies.)  I ended up having to go to a health food store for them.

Then of course I had to grind the nuts up into a fine (well, as fine as I could make it) powder to mix in with the flour and the rest of the ingredients…  but once that was all done, the rest of it went pretty smoothly.

And the cookies turned out great.  They were just as delicious as I remembered.

While I was out running pre-holiday errands a few days ago, one of the things that I did was to pick up a couple of rolls of 35mm film and a couple of rolls of 120 film.  I thought that (in addition to my DSLR and Android cameraphone) it would be nice to take some old-fashioned film shots of the holiday glory.

Alas, it turned out that the Lomo Action Sampler had warped in such a way that froze the shutter closed and was un-fixable.  I was slightly depressed about this (less analog fun!) but as it was an all-plastic toy camera, at least it will be easy and inexpensive to replace.

Fortunately the Holga seems to be working just fine.  So there will still be something of an analog Christmas, but not quite as analog as I had planned.

And maybe it is for the best.  If I spent the entire holiday season swapping between 4 cameras, it might have been… irritating for everyone else around me.  A mere 2 cameras (3 if you count the Android) should be more manageable.

In other news of things breaking down…  my old photo printer died.

I had that Canon iPixma photo printer for… I can’t really remember exactly, but let’s say a good long time now.  And by “died” I mean that the print head is completely messed up.  Of course, I will try to take the print head apart, clean it out, and then put it back together, but I am not completely sure that will fix the problem.  I could also just get a new print head, but again, I am not entirely sure that will fix the problem, plus I am not sure if it is worth the expense.

Fortunately, I do have a second, large-format, photo printer, so I am not completely at a loss here.

While I was bemoaning the fate of the iPixma, and wondering how I would get my printing done, John suggested that I simply use the large format printer.   Oddly enough, until John mentioned it, it simply had not occurred to me that I had the option of using a smaller size paper in the large-format photo printer.  I had always had a rule in my mind that the large prints were printed out on the large printer, and the small prints were printer out on the small printer.

Ha.

We did a little holiday decorating.  Not too much – we don’t do outdoor lights at all and we can’t have too many tchotchkes and baubles out because of the cats – but I do like to put up some lights and decorations.

Percival playing with the holiday lights – this is why we can't put out a lot of decorations… everything is a cat toy. Fortunately about five minutes after I took this photo, he lost interest in the lights.

Lights in the front windows

Tiny glass ornaments on the Christmas Clementine

Jingle bells…

These are some of the photo ornaments of the family that Grandma always had on her Christmas tree. Mom brought me all of the ones that had photos of me on them. Maybe I will see if I can trade some of them with my brothers, so that I can have some photo ornaments of them as well.

The overall effect of the lights and stocking and ornaments hanging off the fireplace mantel, with the holiday cards that we got in the mail displayed on top. I like it. I think that it looks good like this.

As I have mentioned before, John and I live in a neighborhood where the population demographic skews toward the retired-with-too-much-time-on-their-hands end of the scale, and boy do they all love their festive decorations.  We have everything in our neighborhood, from the stately and tasteful all of the way to the gauche and gaudy.  There are too many people who like those giant blowup yard decorations.  There is one neighbor who has some kind of outdoor slide projector  that they use to project seasonally appropriate images onto their garage door.  (They have images for every single holiday, day of celebration, and season.)

Personally, I like Christmas lights on houses.  I prefer white lights to colored (though I do enjoy the white and blue Hanukkah combination that you sometimes see) and I hate hate hate those blinky or “moving” lights.  Words of advice for people lighting their houses… I can tell when you get lazy and just drape one of those nets of lights over a bush, and it really doesn’t look as good as you think it does.  Lighting trees in your yard looks really nice… but remember to light some branches as well as the trunk, otherwise when it gets dark out and the lights go on, all that people can see is the glowing column of the trunk, which looks weird.  But who am I to criticize?   It is not really like John and I do a heck of a lot of outdoor decorating.

The first year the we lived here we gave into peer-pressure (we didn’t want to be the only unlit house on the cul-de-sac and drag down everyone else’s festive spirits) and put up a couple of strings of icicle lights around the porch.  Every other year since then we have thought about it, said “to hell with that” and confined our decorations to the inside of the house.  The (real) tree goes in the library where it can be seen through the front windows, and the icicle lights get draped around the front windows and back door.  We also put little tiny ornaments on the potted clementine tree in the kitchen, because why not.  Every year we lose one or two ornaments to the cats and to our own clumsiness.

Speaking of decorating, I also like poinsettias.  And every year I mention how I would love to get one for the house, but that I won’t because it is inevitable that the cats (Merlin in particular) would chow down on it and then I would have to clean red and green cat puke off of the carpets.  And every year someone gasps in horror and says something like “But why would you want a poinsettia? Aren’t they poisonous?”  No, they aren’t. Or, rather, they are poisonous in the same way that apple seeds are, in that it is pretty much physically impossible to eat enough to poison yourself.

We haven’t done any sort of decorating at all yet this year.

I just managed to get my cards yesterday.  I meant to have had them all done much earlier.  Heck, I had all of my holiday shopping done, delivered, and wrapped before Thanksgiving.  But you know how it goes… you have everything all ready to go ahead of time, and you think to yourself, “man, it is way to early to send these out yet”.  So you put them aside and go do something else, and then you realize that it is midway through December, and you should have gotten everything off to the post office by now.  I also meant to get custom cards made with some of my photography this year, but that didn’t happen in time either, and I ended up having to buy cards at Target like everyone else in the country.

Ah well.  Next year maybe.

After all, isn’t this what the season is all about?  Critiquing other people’s decorations, and procrastinating holiday errands until the last minute?

I think that the massive amounts of leftovers are one of the best parts of any major holiday.  (People who hate leftovers with the fire of a thousand burning suns – and I know that you exist – are free to disagree with me, of course.)

You don’t have to take your leftovers and re-make and re-heat the holiday meal as it originally was on your plate until the leftovers are gone.  That’s boring.  Leftovers have so much potential.

Leftover turkey turns into turkey pot pie, curried turkey, turkey quesadillas, turkey noodle soup, turkey and mushroom lasagna….  In fact, we made the turkey pot pie for dinner on Sunday, and ended up with not only the dinner, but with two days worth of lunches as well.  (“leftovers of our leftovers”, according to John.)  It is a good thing that we like turkey.

There is seldom any leftover stuffing, but it goes well with any dish that incorporates eggs – like a fritatta.  It also goes well when eaten cold, straight out of the tupperware, while standing in front of the open fridge.

In the spirit of using up every last bit of the bird, the carcass was rendered down for stock and all of the last shreds of meat were ground up into turkey a la king, which will be delicious in sandwiches.