Well. Last night's snow continued into the morning, and at about 11:00 am, Emil and I decided to go out and shoot a few pictures. Here he is, all ready to go:




(He decided to go with the 2 1/4 format - that's a Rolleiflex around his neck.)

And here he is out in the snow:



I realize a lot of you have a lot more snow than that . . . but it's the best accumulation we've seen in years.

Here's the Weber Dream House:



. . . and a view down the street:



And it's still snowing . . . We could possibly get another 4" by morning. This will pose interesting transportational challenges around here; one of us decided that a good Midlife Crisismobile would be a small car that goes "Vroom, vroom, vroom," while the other decided to go with the car that releases "the surfer inside the schoolteacher." Well, the "vroom-vroom-vroom" car goes "spin-spin-spin" in the snow . . . but the schoolteacher-surfer in the family wants to go skiing while the skiing's good. The skis don't even fit in the itty bitty spinmobile . . . which is also a lousy commute-to-work car in this weather. How will we resolve this situation?? Stay tuned. (All I know for sure about the solution is that it'll cost money . . . aargh.)

Anyhow, here are a few more pix o' the season.

First off, this year we decided to (gasp!) get a fake Christmas tree. Yeah, I know: The traditionalists among you are appalled . . . but part of the reasoning was: I usually feel very Christmasy around the end of November (when I think up all sorts of nifty presents for people and so on), but then the end of the semester hits and I'm flat out until December 21 or so. So I'm hoping that if we can put the tree up in early December, it will serve as a beacon of hope during the stressful sprint that the end of the term becomes. And you can't do that with a recently-deceased tree; it would lose all its needles by the time Christmas rolled around.

Here are Emil and Milo putting up the new tree. (Milo is being about as much help as he always is, no matter what the task.)





It turned out to look pretty good, actually. (We briefly considered getting a white tree with blue lights - if you're going to get a fake, it might as well be an obvious fake - but didn't because [a] we lost our nerve and [b] this one cost one fourth of what the white one would have cost.)





Emma didn't even realize it was fake when she first saw it.

One of my Christmas gifts was a spinning class. (That's spinning as in spinning wheel, not as in bicycle wheel . . . ) The class was extremely entertaining and I learned a lot; we started with a raw, unwashed fleece and learned how to wash it (I learned that I am very, very allergic to unwashed fleece), sort it, card it, and, finally, to spin it.

I had such a good time that I decided to buy a wheel. (There's a bit more to it than that; this is part of my ongoing plan to spin up some Wally Wool. There's really no way to learn to spin - or to spin once you've learned - without buying a wheel, as they're not available for rent or anything - but they should be! I'm thinking of this as similar to buying a musical instrument; the wheel will keep its value, and if it turns out I don't like spinning as much as I expect to, I think I'll be able to sell it for pretty much what I paid for it.)

Anyhow, the wheel is a Lendrum Traveler, fabrique au Canada:




(And yes, that IS M*A*S*H on the television in the background.)


Here's my first knitted object from my first handspun yarn (which I spun in class):




I'm told that once people learn to spin, they wish they could produce that beginner yarn again, but they can't. So I'm thinking of offering my early yarn on ebay at inflated prices . . . :)

My sister-in-law claims to have a rabbit hutch somewhere in her back yard. If I really like to spin, there may be an angora rabbit in our future . . . (Plus, rabbit poop for the garden! Oooh!!)

One last picture. In honor of the New Year, we finally put the weights on and wound the Grandfather clock we got from Emil's mother many months ago:



(Excuse the rakish angle. I had to prop the camera, as I took the picture at night. I'm hoping it looks arty.)

I was really afraid we'd get the thing wound, and then find the sound too loud to deal with on a regular basis (which is what happened when Emil's parents set it up - his father hated the chimes and so they let it wind down and never wound it again). But, happily, no: The chimes are beautiful, and somehow, in our house, they aren't loud at all.

Okay, that's about it for now. Time to toddle off to bed, after I spend a few minutes watching the yard fill up with snow . . .