Category: Home & Family

Posted on

Snow Days

Mandy’s out of town, leaving Bryan and I with quiet days home together on holiday break. On Christmas afternoon, it began to rain, and slowly the rain started freezing on the roof and on the bushes and on the trees. And on the street. And then it was ice. And little pine-tree branches fell on our house. And then it was snow. It snowed for hours, and when we woke up the next morning, we had more snow than I can remember seeing since I moved to central Arkansas.

2012 12 26 Snowy Doghouse

Like a little child, I put on my boots and my rain pants and I went outside. But like the grownup my father taught me to be, I shoveled our sidewalk and then our driveway, throwing the white stuff off into the yard, making strips of piles of snow alongside the pavement. I love snow. I love looking at snow, and playing in snow. I even love shoveling snow. I love every single thing there is to love about snow. Continue reading “Snow Days”

Posted on

Festivus (For the Rest of Us)

We’d settled into the afternoon when Monkey sent me a text. ‘Can we come over and meet Foster Dog?’ Of course. Come on down.

2012 12 21 Festivus Aly

And, since it was Festivus, it seemed appropriate to just go ahead and get the Festivus Pole down from the attic and pose for photographs with it. Bryan made chai again – it’s been his holiday-break project to perfect an easy and yummy recipe – and had a nice visit and a sort of aborted version of the Airing of Grievances. And Monkey and I tried to be appropriately serious and grumpy looking for our Festivus Portraits, but somehow that just didn’t work out very well.

2012 12 21 Festivus Monkey

Posted on

Merry Christmas (Observed)!

First there was Christmas (observed) at our house.  Since Mandy’s always in Tulsa for the first half of her holiday break, we always open presents either before or after that trip.  This year, Saturday the 22nd was the day chosen to observe the gift-giving part of our holiday.  We kept things pretty simple this year, and most of our gifts to each other involved needed outdoor gear.  A stack of books grew as we opened our presents, too, as it always does.

2012 12 22 Gifts

We’ve tried to move away from using lots of wrapping paper and toward reusing gift bags and lidded boxes.  But I think some of our presents may have gone a little too far away from ‘festive’ toward ‘cheerlessly utilitarian.’ Continue reading “Merry Christmas (Observed)!”

Posted on

Goodbye, Diane

Our friend Diane was hit by a car in November, while riding her bike.  She spent over a month in the hospital, in a coma, before her death last week.  I think it was hard for everyone who’d known her to wrap our heads around the loss of such a beautiful person, in such a difficult way.

2012 12 15 Diane

I feel a little self-conscious for taking it so badly, since I hadn’t known her as well as many of our other friends had.  Is it because I feel sort of responsible for bad things that happen to cyclists in LR because I was involved with trying to make things better?  Is it harder for me because my granny died in such a similar way?  I don’t know.  When it comes right down to it, loving people means knowing we’ll hurt when we lose them. Continue reading “Goodbye, Diane”

Posted on

It’s Starting to Look a Lot Like Christmas

Bryan and Mandy insist that we have a real Christmas tree, and while I grouse and complain about it, I really don’t mind. I like supporting our tree farming people, and I like the way a real tree looks and smells in the house.   Someone meets us at the truck with a saw when we first pull in, and we spend some time wandering around with it, looking for the perfect tree.

My role, once at the farm, is to prevent Bryan and Mandy from choosing a stupid Christmas tree.  They tend to be distracted by such trivial things as “it’s the right height” and “it’s pretty.”  My job is to keep them from picking a tree that has giant holes in the cone, or a tree with a badly curved trunk.  This year I had to discourage them from choosing a tree that was obviously deceased, though I really think they were kidding when they started cutting this one.  They choose the tree; I have veto power.  This means that the whole process of tree – shopping usually takes a couple of hours. Continue reading “It’s Starting to Look a Lot Like Christmas”

Posted on

Another Thanksgiving in New Orleans

wpid3322-20121124-Michael-and-Juliana-Engagement-_DSC0944.jpg

We left Wednesday evening just after work to drive to New Orleans – to Metairie, actually, which is a sort of suburb.  We arrived, as usual, at about two in the morning. After the misery of LAST Thanksgiving with Bryan’s family – click here to go back to that story, because I don’t want to think about it any more – we expected to great time no matter what happened.  And we did enjoy our visit, as we always do. Thanksgiving dinner with our family is a treat every year.

We brought Hayduke, which is extra trouble but works out all right.  He’s a good traveler, and we never have any problems with him in the car on long trips.  We stay at Aunt Dot’s house, and he spends several hours each day visiting with cousin-dog Bourbon at Kevin and Julie’s down the street.  I had arranged for us to have a temporary ‘visitor’ pass for City Bark, the nice dog area at New Orleans’ historic City Park, and we took Hayduke (and sometimes Bourbon) to the park to run and play every day we were there.  Then, he stayed in our bedroom in the evenings and all night. Continue reading “Another Thanksgiving in New Orleans”

Posted on

Oxygen, My Friend

For years and years, I’ve had weird ‘groups’ of what I thought were migraine headaches.  I thought that all horrible headaches were migraines.

But these were strange.  For one thing, they happened in groups – I’d be fine for a year or two, and then I’d be hit with an awful headache every other day for a month and a half.  And then they’d be gone, just like that.  They didn’t really act like regular migraines – I never had auras and didn’t feel nauseated and didn’t throw up.  I wasn’t particularly sensitive to light or sound.  I didn’t respond very well to migraine medicine.  And while I understood that migraines hurt a lot, these headaches seemed worse.  People would say “oh, I have a terrible migraine” but they’d often still be able to drive, or talk – when I had one, I couldn’t do anything but pace and bang my head on the wall.  And when the headache was finally over, hours later, I’d need to sleep for a couple of hours before being able to function again.  Even then, I’d be exhausted and sore for at least another day, just from my body’s reaction to the pain. Continue reading “Oxygen, My Friend”

Posted on

Crystal Bridges

On our last weekend of Mandy’s visit to Tulsa, Bryan and I decided to take an extra day off work and use the long weekend for a trip to northwest Arkansas. We took Hayduke with us. He behaved really well in the hotel (except for the one very serious bark he directed at a housekeeper in the hallway) and we enjoyed walking with him around the U of A campus, Dickson Street, and the square in Fayetteville. Continue reading “Crystal Bridges”

Posted on

They Do!

Aaron and Brittany got married! We don’t know them well at all, but Aaron’s parents are good friends, and they invited us to their lovely backyard wedding and asked Bryan to take a few photographs.

Bryan did a good job, as always.  I brought my little camera and snuck around in the bushes taking macros and sort of candid stuff.  Just as Bryan had everyone lined up for a nice family portrait, somebody saw me behind a fern.  “Look, it’s the paparazzi!”  That got everybody laughing and looking in the same direction, and I think it turned out to be the best photograph of the whole family. Continue reading “They Do!”