the deep moans round with many voices

Today was very slow at work (even the packages were manageable, despite getting a full UPS delivery on Saturday), so Miss California decided to do some holiday decorating. She made a Christmas tree, and then I suggested making some snow-people. She then suggested a row of snow-people in the front windows, which sounded excellent to me.

So I found some line art and printed 21 snow-people (just three lumps of snow, no internal details or extras), which I cut out and Miss California decorated with buttons and individual faces.

Then we gave them all funny hats. :D

Five top hats, four knitted wool hats with a pompom on top, four straw garden hats with a flower on the brim, four cowboy-style hats, and four baseball caps. The top hats are all black because the best hat design I found came pre-colored, and the baseball caps are all red with various Cornell references, but the others are in an assortment of bright colors because dammit, snow-people deserve interesting hats and winter is dreary enough.

We didn't get our gaggle of snow-people taped into the window today (actual work ate some of our time, shockingly enough), but I will figure out a good way to give them little twig arms on Monday, and Miss California will arrange them in the window on Tuesday.

I'll try to take some photos, because they are ABSURDLY cute.

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ETA 12/9: Photos on Tumblr!

I never know what to write in holiday cards, so I resort to tiny doodles instead. (This goes for birthday cards as well, but birthday cakes, flowers, and butterflies do not really say winter, let alone solstice or Christmas. Alas!)

Anyway, this year I wrote and drew my cards at work instead of at home, which meant I had a bunch of ultra-fine-point Sharpies to work with in addition to my usual black ink pen. So I figured I would share the joy of color with the internet. :)


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The sleigh and the string of lights are new to my repertoire this year. Next year I think I might try learning how to doodle a cardinal...

(Before anyone asks, yes, I have tried drawing snowflakes. They never work out right. I can cut paper snowflakes like nobody's business, but adding a pen into the equation somehow always results in disaster. *sigh*)


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One thing Miss Cactus likes to do is decorate the rental office's package counter (and sometimes our cupboard doors) with seasonally appropriate displays. This autumn, we put up a swirl of colored leaves. Currently we have a gentle fall of snowflakes. (We also had strings of paper Christmas lights on the cupboards in December.) Next week we're going to put up a Valentine's display, but her plans for the arrangement are kind of elaborate so we actually made the hearts today.

(Saturdays are very slow, which is how we get away with this much extraneous labor.)

About two thirds of the hearts are either plain red or pink, but for the remaining third, we got a little fancy. Miss Cactus adopted a strategy of drawing patterns over an entire sheet of paper and then cutting hearts out afterwards. I got a little more artisanal and decorated a full sheet individually. (We also added some individual touches to some of the hearts cut from full-sheet designs, since one pattern came out a little plain and needed some jazzing up, but I didn't photograph those.)

I find this sort of artsy-craftsy work very soothing. It's nice because you don't have to decide on any grand artistic vision -- you know exactly what you are doing, and what you are doing is decorating paper hearts -- but you can still have a lot of fun within those constraints. :)

The photos below are my initial designs, and then the final versions after I decided some of them were a little plain and added more colors.


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Our tentative plan for March, incidentally, is raindrops and rainbows over crocus and snowdrops. We will add more flowers as the weeks go by, which should keep us going strong through May. We may need a new theme in June, assuming we're both still working there by then.


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1. Paid my November rent.

2. Bought groceries, including another batch of Halloween candy. I still don't think I have enough.

3. Boiled fourteen eggs. (I have added a hard boiled egg to my standard breakfast of toaster waffles, applesauce, and black tea -- the meal now contains fruit, carbs, protein, and caffeine, which I think is a pretty solid start to a day.)

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12. Prepped for Halloween. I don't know if I'll be able to leave the office early tomorrow, so I have arranged with Downstairs Neighbor S that I will leave some stuff in the foyer of the house, which she will place out on the porch around 5pm and/or when the first trick-or-treaters arrive. I mixed all my candy into a big wicker basket (which I usually use for collecting empty bottles to return for the bottle deposit) and made a little 'TAKE 1' sign with a picture of a jack-o-lantern on it, which I have taped to the back of a folding chair; the candy basket will sit on the chair seat.


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16. Repaired a mug whose handle broke when I dropped it about two weeks ago, and the lid to my casserole dish (which also broke when I dropped it two weeks ago; I was having a very clumsy couple days). The mug is perfectly functional again. The lid is... less so. The ceramic was very crumbly where it didn't have glaze to hold it together, so there's a noticeable missing wedge, and the pieces have very sharp edges.

If anybody knows a material I could use as filler, that would be awesome. It doesn't need to be oven-safe -- I only use the lid as a cover after I've baked stuff, either to keep it warm for serving or to protect the contents in the fridge -- but it does need to be waterproof and preferably mold-proof as well.


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As part of my ongoing decluttering project, I have been sorting through the massive file folders of childhood documents Mom dumped on me several years back, and which have been living, untouched, underneath my coffee table ever since.

It turns out that about 85% of the contents are art projects. I am sure you can imagine what kind of art projects a toddler makes.

If you can't imagine, please refer to the above example, made when I was two and a half years old, back in July of 1984. :)

(Happy 4th of July!)

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