Snowflakes

In celebration and recognition of our first snow of the season, I present a link to a site on snowflakes, run by the gentleman whose snowflake pictures appeared on the 39 cent snowflake stamps back in 2006. The site offers gorgeous close-up photos, snowflake facts and physics, and some ideas of snow-related activities for kids and adults.

If you become inspired here, you can seek out Paula Nadelstern's "Snowflakes & Quilts," to learn how to make amazing snowflake quilts. (The book is out of print, but I was able to find it last year at a quilt store for its original price. I include the link to Amazon so you can read a little about it; I'm not recommending that you purchase it at that inflated price!) Or just take the easier and more economical route and go goggle at the quilt gallery on her website!

Doctor Who

Lately I've been revisiting the newest Doctor Who series. These episodes, starting in 2005, are a far cry from the old time Doctor Who, with the low budget monsters and wobbly sets. Today the special effects are decent enough not to call attention to themselves.

I love that the characters travel in time, but we don't have to get all hung up on the details of the technology that allows them to do this. No super-hyper-mega-warp-schmarp-burp drive like they'd have on Star Trek. It's funnier than Trek, and more history-friendly too. (Stories include characters like Shakespeare and Dickens and Queen Victoria.)

Most of all, I love that the main character is a big old geek who takes a childlike sense of wonder and joy in life and adventure and all of the little things that make people (and other weird creatures) work. It's that joy that makes the character (and the series) so much more attractive to me than someone like Spock.

But don't tell my stepmother I said that. She's a huge Spock fan, and this would be tantamount to blasphemy.

Liam's recital

My brother-in-law is in town to interview for a potential job. (Who knows, they could actually be back here next year. I am keeping my fingers crossed!)

My sister took the opportunity to send along with him a CD of my 5 year old nephew's recital. Liam's performed with other kids before, but I believe this was his first solo recital. It covered all of the material found in the Suzuki violin book 1.

My sister started Suzuki group lessons when she was 3 years old. I don't know how old she was when she was playing the book 1 tunes, but I remember every one. (Not by name, but by melody. The human brain really seems to be wired to respond to and remember music and rhythm very well, which makes me wonder if maybe we shouldn't be integrating more music in the teaching of other subjects. Imagine the possibilities.)

I enjoyed revisiting all of the pieces, but my favorite moment was listening to my sister duet with Liam on three of the minuets. It gave me such a sense of continuity, the passing along of something important from one generation to the next.

Maybe in 25 or 30 years, it'll be Liam playing the harmony for his child in her/his first recital. And the rest of us, very old and gray by then, will be sitting in the audience, remembering...

Birds

I keep seeing a bird (sparrow?) motif in fabric and decor, like this Joel Dewberry print



When we were out and about the other day and wandered into various design shops, I thought for sure I'd see whole aviaries full of bird prints and other material... but I saw just one, in the very first shop.

Now I am wondering whether this is a trend whose time has come and gone, whether it's only just begun, or whether the whole thing was always only a flight of fancy to begin with.

Idle question, really, as I don't especially care for birds. It's just interesting and mysterious to me to see what floats in and out of style, and try to guess why.

Brownies

Two weekends ago, DH had to go into work all day Saturday to help conduct interviews for potential college hires. I decided I should bake him something nice to make up for it, so I took some of the peanut butter cups left over from Halloween, chopped them into wedges, and folded them into some homemade brownie batter.

When they came out, I tasted them - delicious! I let them cool, put a bunch into a plastic container, and left a half dozen or so on a plastic-wrapped plate on the table.

Some time after dinner, I wandered back through the dining room and was shocked to find one of my cats on the table hunched over the plate stuffing her face!

I burst into laughter at the guilty look on her fuzzy little face - even while I began to worry, knowing that chocolate in quantity is toxic to cats. The question was, how much was too much?

DH googled for information. And, after I gave him the amount of chocolate in the recipe, and the weight of the greedy kitty, he concluded that she was right on the border. So I got on the phone to animal poison control, and, ultimately, they suggested we'd better take her in to the emergency vet.

We knew we'd be about 3 hours in the waiting room, if they were as busy as they'd been in the past, but there was nothing to be done about that. We loaded the guilty party into her box, and headed off to the vet.

Not 3 minutes before we arrived, my husband the engineer almost stopped the car: "Wait... did I get the math wrong? I think... I think I multiplied instead of dividing at the end!"

Sure enough, he re-ran the numbers and confirmed it.

We called poison control back while sitting in the emergency vet parking lot. As he suspected, they told us we could just go home. Sigh. (At least we figured it out before they put kitty through some unpleasant procedure. The car ride she didn't actually mind.)

Tomorrow DH goes in to do another round of interviews. I'm thinking maybe this time I'll stay away from the baking...