Every December I'm inundated with catalogs and "Christmas" newsletters. I was a little dismayed last year to discover that though many are inundated with catalogs at this time of year, not everyone must bear up under the weight of the "let me catch you up on our entire last year of life" letter. As I was talking with a friend last year, she seemed dismayed when I complained to her about it.  We promptly discovered that it appears to be a predominantly Protestant affliction.  "Thank you, Luther!"  *shakes fist at the sky*  "Little did you know that posting your 95 theses on the Wittenberg Door in 1517, would lead to my overflowing mailbox almost 500 years later.  May your heavenly mailbox be forever filled with 'let me catch you up' letters!"
 
Don't get me wrong.  I love being updated on the lives of my friends.  But squashing an entire year of life into one letter that is sent at the same time as everyone else sends their letter, drowning me in tidbits of information, is not only unfair, but it pretty much guarantees that I'll promptly forget everything I read as I have to push it out to fit in the tidbits from the next letter. 

Every once in awhile, however, one letter shines out like a star among... among... um, light bulbs.  It's one of those letters that makes you laugh and cry and feel like you've actually just spent a few moments of time with the author.  Though I'm going to leave out the crying part of the letter, I thought the laughing part might be fun to share.  (All names have been changed (except for that of the dog) to protect the self-esteem of those mentioned.)

• It was the year of the dog.  Maria wanted a puppy and like all good parents we caved.  After all, she saved for most of it.  We went to the nearest pet store (the Amish) to pick out the perfect puppy.  The Amish raise various breeds from scary to scarier to Welsh Corgies.  So we decided on a Welsh Corgie, because they have cute little legs like me.  My wife researched them and supposedly they are really smart and good with kids.  If really smart means they like to eat poop, any kind, and suck on your feet, then we have a genius dog.  So Maria picked out the runt of the litter.  Cute, small, didn't move much like the rest of them.  It was a deal.  Our neighbor said to pick it up in two weeks.  So we waited in anxious anticipation.  Finally, the day came.  We drove to our neighbors ready for the little package.  Maria picked out a name, Sweet Pea, because the puppy was cute and tiny like a pea.  Our neighbor, not much for words of comfort, stated that Sweet Pea froze to death the night before. So much for Sweet Pea #1.  The good news was that his brother-in-law sells them too.  So we grabbed our crying daughter and drove to the next neighbor's house.  Maria quickly picked out another one, also, named Sweet Pea.  The catch was that Sweet Pea #2 was fifty dollars more.  I told the Amish man that his brother-in-law sells them for fifty dollars less.  He responded by saying, "And is is dead.  Correct?"  So i handed him an extra fifty.  Since then, we have decided that Sweet Pea is almost a fitting name.  She pees everywhere and she is sweet when she sleeps.

I need a wider sidebar.

I've been playing with my sidebar a bit lately. I know, I know. Mixaloo is too wide and Twitter is too scrunched. But still, the idea is cool... right?

So I tried making a mix on Mixaloo this eve. I make a mix for Rob every month so coming up with the tunes to add wasn't hard. (Except when they didn't have the song on Mixaloo that I needed. Grrrrr.)

The idea behind Mixaloo is that you group the songs together as you want. Then you title your mix, give it some cover art and some text and post it online. Your friends then run out and buy a copy and you get a cut of the profits.

*shrug* Sounds like a business idea that just might go somewhere, if you ask me. And it's all legal. (When it comes to dealing with the music big-wigs, that part's important.)

So check out my January Mix (I wasn't able to add Rob's favorite as they didn't have enough songs. You can't publish a mix until you've hit 10 songs.)

edit: ok, i've had enough of that thing in my sidebar. i think i'll just move it in here for now.

Jim's pictures of Colorado (and particularly of Fort Collins) inspired me last Saturday to snap a few photos of my own of our fair city.  We had gotten about an inch of snow on Friday and a light dusting over the night.  Usually the snow doesn't stay on the trees, but the first round of snow was so heavy and wet that it clung to the branches, making for spectacular winter scenes.

I was on my way to the Alley Cat Cafe, when I decided to spin by CSU for a few photos.  ("Spin" refers to the fact that I was on my bike.  I don't usually bike in the snow, but it wasn't very deep and it was quite crunchy, so I didn't slide at all.  It was crunchy because of the temperature.  I'm getting to that....)  I figured that The Oval would be beautiful with all the snow on the trees so I headed that way and wasn't disappointed.

I parked my bike and took a few photos, which I had to do with gloves off.  I'm surprised my camera even worked out in that weather.  When I pedaled past the Key Bank building (which has a time and temperature display), it was 16 degrees F.  (That's -9 C.)  My fingers could barely take it, so I didn't hang out long. 

The Oval, despite the similarity of having a geometric name and shape, is nothing like The Diag that I'm used to from my college days.  At the University of Michigan, the Diag (where two diagonal walkways cross in front of the Grad. Library) is in the center of campus and is a popular place to hang out, sunbathe, toss a frisbee, protest, preach and generally immerse oneself in the essence and aroma of university life. The Oval, on the other hand, is somewhat off to one side of campus.  I suspect it might have been central long ago, but now the CSU equivalent of U of M's Diag is located around the libary and Lory Student Center.  The Oval still has its events (I attended a dog show there once.), and it has its share of sunbathers and frisbee throwers (obviously not now, but as recently as a week ago we had some lovely 70 degree days), but it tends to be a quieter, more introspective sort of place to hang out.  (And the oval shaped road that circumscribes the grassy island makes a fun place to bike around with the kids, ...or for me when I just want to think without having to think about where I'm going.)


By the time I made it to the Alley Cat (which is only about 1/2 a block north of here) I was frozen to the bone.  But two steaming hot mugs of Alley Cat Chai brought me back to my senses. 

Since Saturday we've gotten several more inches of snow.  The trees are still snow covered and the, now fluffy, snow is about 6 inches deep (with a nice crunchy layer of icy snow underneath).

I wouldn't bike in it at this point.  (With this much powder, it's hard to tell where the icy patches are.)   So we walked to school this morning, enjoying the gently falling snow.

I've mentioned Me.dium before in a previous post, and recently I even added an addendum to that post saying that I had entered a contest they were having.

Well, I just took a gander at the results today (I've been too excited with all of the upgrades here in Multiply to be much of anywhere else on the web. But I noticed the announcement in my Me.dium sidebar just a bit ago.) and...

I won! Not only did I win, but I won first prize! (Yes, I screamed out loud when I found out!)

So I thought I'd post the winning vid. here. :-)

Rock and Roll, Baby!

(You can see the original on YouTube. It's the same thing, just in a different location.)

My brother-in-law was a Mormon for awhile.  (Mo, for short.)  Mormons are required to store up a years worth of food, just in case.  When my brother-in-law moved in with us in August, he opened our fridge door and said, "Oh. So I see that you keep your years supply of food in the fridge." 

Yeah.  Our fridge is packed. 

Part of the problem during the summer is that:
1) We joined a CSA this year, which meant that every week we were loaded up with bunches and bunches of veggies, whether we'd eaten the ones from the previous week or not.   I did pretty good at keeping up with them.  But I'm going to have to make a New Year's resolution to do even better next time.
2) We don't buy bread that's loaded full of preservatives.  So if we don't eat our bread in a few days (especially in the heat of summer) it goes bad.  The alternative is to fridge it.  Which means more stuff in the fridge.  (I froze most of the bread, but the "current loaf" stayed in the fridge.
3) In the winter, if we get a milk delivery and I don't have room for the milk just then, I can leave the milk in the cooler on the porch and it keeps just fine.  But in the summer I have to get it in quick.  So there's less milk storage flexibility in the summer.

But to be perfectly honest, we've always been a rather full fridge kind of family.  We have sauces and jams and salad dressings that just plain take up too much space.  Not to mention the fact that we have to have room for 3 gallons of milk at a time.  The milk people only deliver twice a week so we get 3 gal. on Mondays and 3 gal. on Thursdays.   That's a sizable piece of refrigerator real estate. 

Last week we received our last share from the CSA.  So we're doing better on the veggie front. And I turned a bunch of our milk into cheese to help clear some space.  (Still not sure what I'm going to do with the cheese.  I'd love a bit of Saag Paneer, but I've never gotten the spinach part to come out right.)  I even pulled out several items that were turning into science experiments further back in the fridge.  (I had some canned pumpkin in there that turned into a whole magical world.  It was intense.  I should have taken pics.  I did call all the kids over and have them take a look.  We're talking several colors and textures and small bubbles of water coming up out of the whole fluffy mass. It was beautiful.)

After removing all that stuff, Ryan (the brother-in-law) baked some potatoes with cheese and ham.  When he was done he wanted to put the leftovers away in the fridge.  I kid you not, despite the mounds of stuff I had removed, there still wasn't room. 

We've decided that unlike a black hole, into which things just seem to disappear, our fridge is the opposite.  No matter how many things you take out, everything inside magically multiplies until the fridge is full again.  It's a miracle of science.  I'm going to notify Scientific American.  They'll probably come and do tests and research and make great discoveries about the creation of matter out of nothing.  Before long there will be pilgrimages to our fridge.  It'll be called the fridge of plenty ex nihilo (out of nothing). We'll have to make room for monks and priests and scientists and all those inspired and intrigued by the glories of our miraculous fridge.  When Jesus turned 5 loaves and 2 fish into a feast for hundreds, he must have had my fridge mysteriously hidden up his sleeve.

I've given up on clearing the fridge.  It's a hopeless task.  I suppose I'll get back to doing the laundry.  I swear there's more of it now than when I first started carrying it to the laundry room this morning.

Roman just put me on to this. It doesn't look like it'll ever play here in little old Fort Collins, but maybe I can netflix it at some point.

(The pic is from an underground Christian music venue that I used to be involved with back in SF. Some friends took Billy Graham's head and put it on Bruce Lee's body.) ;-)

While up at Horn Creek I went horseback riding. (I had wanted to do the wall climbing, but when the girls found out I wasn't going to go horseback riding they about died.)

It was a beautiful ride. The aspens were in all their golden glory.

If you get motion sick, I'd recommend not watching the video. I took most of the footage while rolling along on the back of Revelie. It's a bit bumpy.

The pictures that accompany this trip can be found here.

This past August marked the 6 year anniversary of our move to Colorado to help my mom cope with my dad who has Picks disease.  When we first moved, we assumed that we would be here two years, three at most.  We were told upon diagnosis that my father would most likely only live another 6 years from that point. (He was diagnosed in the spring of 2000. The disaster of Y2K came for us in the form of a disease rather than a coding glitch.)  But the 6th anniversary of his diagnosis has not only come and gone, but physically, my dad's health has remained quite strong.  He continues to be active, walking as much as 5 hours a day.

For several years, friends would ask how my dad was doing.  I'd shrug my shoulders and say, "He's about the same."  It was a disappointing answer to be sure -- disappointing on my end because, though things never got better, they never got worse either, meaning the end was still a long ways off; disappointing on my friends' end because I could tell by the tone of their voice that the lack of "events," tragic moments that I could cling to tearfully as signs of my dad's descent towards death, meant they were beginning to doubt if there really was anything wrong at all.  In fact, when my friends saw my dad, he looked not only fine, but quite healthy.  It wasn't until they talked to him that they might think him odd.  But it was only if they'd known him before the disease that they'd have a true sense of the change that had befallen him.  (For a taste of what it as like to spend a minute with him during that time, see my post, One Minute with Picks Disease.)

But this past year there has been a noticeable difference in my dad.  He does less (no more picking up coins in parking lots, moving pictures around on the walls, or doing dot-to-dots) and paces more (activity without productivity -- not that his previous actions were all that productive).  He nervously rubs his thumbnail across his pointer finger to the point where he's worn a groove in his finger.  He's confusing our names more often.  (He knows I'm Meg, but he doesn't seem to know what our relationship is.  And my mom has become his mom, even when his mother is in the room with them.) 

He's also, oddly enough, started to lean.  He doesn't always lean.  In fact, it only seems to happen a few times a week, most often when he's walking around my block.  But he'll round the bend and there it is, he's leaning to the left.  He doesn't seem to notice.  And after awhile he straightens back out.

And he's becoming increasingly silent, entering into the aphasia stage of the disease.  Some people with Picks hit this stage straight out, losing their ability to speak before they even begin to lose memory or ability to reason. But for my dad it's been gradual, sneaking upon us so stealthily, that when it finally dawned on us that he was losing language, he had already been reduced to about 500 words.  I don't know that he even understands most of what we say.  When asked a question, he will most often either ignore it, or nod his head and say "yes" before walking away.

Oddly enough, despite the fact that he's lost reason, memory and language, he has retained mechanical ability.  When I picked him up from day care yesterday, he was in the yard behind the building and the fence had a clip that kept the gate from opening.  There was another gate that wasn't locked, so I directed my dad toward it, but while I was busily gesturing and explaining, he walked right over to the closest gate and figured out how to undo the clip that was locking the latch.  He walked out without a word and headed straight to my car.  Before slipping into the passenger's side seat he muttered vaguely, "Let's go shopping, Meg," one of his few remaining phrases.

While we were in Michigan, a bear had come into the city and had to be removed. Two days ago, another bear toddled in. He climbed up into a tree by the Avery House (a historical house downtown) and didn't come down again till last night.

I've heard this was a young guy, about 2 years old, who was previously untagged. They had to tranquilize him and pull him down out of the tree at 3:30 this morning, which means that he was tagged. (I think if he had come down of his own accord and entered the trap they wouldn't have tagged him. At least, that's what I've heard through the rumor mill.) Two tags can mean the end of the road for our little bear cub.

The bears are having an especially hard year, not only because of the drought (what's new, eh?) but because a late frost hurt the berry crop in the mountains.

The bear apparently started to come down several times during the night, but was repeatedly scared back up into the tree by passing onlookers. We stopped by the Avery house and checked him out Friday night after hanging out at Coopersmiths. The footage is rather shaky, but at least you can see the bear. :-)