The Zen Habits blog (in connection with the guy’s book that just came out) is sponsoring a New Year’s Challenge, in which people sign up to work on forming a new habit by spending just 10 minutes a day on something, for 30 days.
I like the 10 minute time limit (everyone has 10 minutes, right?) […]

Life is too short to ___________________.
Today’s list:
sort socks into pairs
scrapbook
send Christmas cards (sorry, it’s just not happening this year… maybe Groundhog Day cards)
What’s your list?

A Fairly Unadorned Chronology of Events for the Sake of Family History
The night before Christmas Eve we did a little cooking prep. R chopped potatoes for soup, while I mixed dry ingredients and chopped pecans for the traditional Christmas Eve morning spicy buttermilk coffee cake.
Christmas Eve morning we stayed in our pajamas for much of […]

(Actually tried to post this yesterday. We recently made some behind-the-scenes administrative changes, which are causing some problems. We are ironing it out… thanks for your patience.)
Sometime I’ll blog about the lovely events of Christmas, but in the meantime…
Smiles from Mason Neck State Park.

(Mamala will find the M&M cake funny… I’ll leave it to her to share why)
reverendmother: the blog is five years old today.
December 23, 2003 was a rather quiet day. While senior pastors prepare Christmas eve messages, choir directors prepare cantatas, DCEs do pageants, and so forth, associate pastors can sometimes find themselves with a strange […]

I wrote her a fill-in-the-blank riddle:
Election Night was quite a joy, with so much jubilation,
For Senator Obama now will lead a grateful nation.
There’s just one more event to wait for with anticipation:
Your daughter got us tickets to the big…

When R and I went to Scotland two summers ago, one consideration was to decide how we felt about spending so much time, effort and grandmotherly goodwill to leave the kids and visit a foreign country, only to spend the entire time on a tiny island. Wouldn’t it be better to take a tour and […]

Tonight at dinner:
Me: Hey kids, we received a box from Gramps and Gran… there are some more presents under the tree now!
little she-who-is, excitedly: Oh I can’t wait for [me thinking: oh, here we go with the gift-lust] you to open the gift that I made you in art class!
May it always be thus.
Image: Christmas […]

Another good full weekend in Santa’s Workshop.
We have received all of one Christmas card/letter this year. Are others noticing a dropoff? I enjoy sending and receiving them, but I’m about ready to bag it this year. Are cards a dying art in the digital age? Most of the people I send letters to are on […]

Colors

Did you know that this blog is almost five years old? My very first post was a fairly silly categorization of Christmas songs. In that post I admitted my love for “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” which I think is the best [secular] Christmas song ever. It would seem that many recording artists agree […]

Pilfered from my brother’s blog
ABCs
A - Available: for what?
A - Age: 37 in about four weeks
A - Annoyance: pump bottles that have a little concave portion on the bottom which means that the pump straw doesn’t go all the way to the bottom, leaving a half inch of stuff. Grrrr….
B - Braces: I had braces […]

Huge weekend of family/holiday fun. May have overdone it a bit—feeling tired and bleh today. Have cleared the schedule and hope to rest and recover. It says something that M told us she was too tired to go anywhere today. Toddlers aren’t exactly known for reflective self-awareness.
Saturday C and M went to Parents’ Day Out […]

I was curled up by the Christmas tree with Oprah’s magazine
When there among her Favorite Stuff was a thing I’d never seen.
A pair of gloves for iPhone users—featuring a dot
Of rubber on the index finger… I cried, “They must be bought!”
But in my haste I threw that ‘zine on the recycle pile
And when I went […]

Glistening with frost,
My lawn is God’s big bowl of
Frosted mini wheats
photo is “Frost on Grass–Jackson Hole Wyoming” from this site

Heat water/milk.
Spoon Swiss Miss/Hoity-Toity Cocoa into separate mug.
Add liquid and stir with Care Bears spoon, as it is the only clean one available.
Add marshmallows.
Moisten them by tamping them down into the cocoa with the spoon.
Microwave an additional 20 seconds.
Enjoy the fluff-like texture.