Cabin fever

No pictures of snow tonight: we're indoors. For entertainment Dale constructed a very fine cave out of the couch, blankets, and the beloved orange futon.

Inside, Dale and Jordan played spaceship while Aaron methodically chewed on a flashlight. It was a good time.

Later we played Freeze Dance. No pictures of that, which is a pity, but we were having way to much fun to bother with the camera.

Bracing ourselves

Cold out there.  We're hunkering down for the storm that is predicted to arrive later this afternoon or evening, supposedly with 3-8 inches of snow in the city.  For Seattle, that's really disabling.  The packed snow and ice from a couple days ago is still on the roads; it's not too bad (we did drive to the grocery store today) but there are scary places.  Don't even look at the picture of the charter bus that slid down a steep icy part of Capitol Hill, busted a guardrail, and almost went onto I-5.  Amazingly, no one was hurt.  They all climbed out the back windows.

The University Farmer's Market was up and running as usual this morning.  The meat vendors didn't need coolers... it was 25 degrees outside.  Jordan thought that was pretty funny.  "It's like we're already inside a refrigerator," he said.  Freezer, actually, but I got his point.  

The good news for the day is that the furlough from Maryland for my salary bracket is only two days.  We can live with that.

Offer on Haddon

There's an offer on the Haddon house!  It's low, of course, but what else would it be in this market, and it's a reasonable starting point for negotiation.  The buyer is sincere and things are moving forward.  The buyer proposes a Jan. 20 closing, which is fine for us.  Inauguration day... so we won't rent it out for $2000 a night after all, I suppose.  That's okay - given the choice, I'd rather sell it.

We've started househunting.  This is the absolute bottom of the real-estate year (between Thanksgiving and New Year's), but we may as well look, and the bright side is that if we did find something we liked we'd be in a heck of a bargaining position.  We screened about six properties (first online, then onsite from the outside) and of these there are two that remain interesting:  8028 Burke Ave N (north of Greenlake) and 2822 NE 68th St (three blocks from our old house).  Nothing yet in Wallingford.  There might be new properties in January.  The search is on!

Jordan doesn't like househunting.  He's bewildered at the idea of moving again.  When we took him out with us to look at some places, he wanted to just stay in the car.  Next time we'll maybe just spare him until things are more clear.

Snow

Surprise! It snowed last night, and the resulting inch of powdery stuff stuck all day. I saw it starting and experienced a wave of dread, which evaporated when I remembered where we are! In Maryland, this would be the beginning of who knows how much snow (it was different every year), with rather scary storms, school closures, difficult travel, and frequent power outages. Our record was four and a half consecutive days of no electricity. That was truly rough. In Seattle, as in the rest of the developed world that I have experienced, a long power outage is maybe four hours. No worries.

Today the kids were eager to get out and throw snowballs, so we went over to Greenlake and took a bunch of cute winter photos. Jordan actually agreed to wear his coat. Aaron, once he had mastered his club-foot boots, was dying to jump in the lake and see the ducks up close.




We had fun until we got cold, and then we zipped back home for some holiday cooking. It's a food-gift year and I'm making orangettes, peppermint candy, salted caramels, peppermint bark (with the kids), and if I still have any energy left after that, peppermint patties and candied ginger. I've never made any of these things before, which is half the fun. The orangettes are done - came out great.

Shoe-dini

We went over to Sue's house yesterday evening for the traditional wintertime visit to the Bellevue Botanical Garden, which has an elaborate display of lights. It is garden-themed rather than Christmasy (which is fine with me): flowerbeds, wisteria arbors, oversized bugs, birds in the trees, that kind of thing. It's very well done. It's also very dark, very crowded, very hard to keep track of your children (not to mention your fellow grownups - but they have cell phones), and very, very cold. Painfully cold. We had properly bundled the kids, but not ourselves, and by the end of it my toes were stinging. Aaron's toes would have been cold too had someone in the crowd not said "Did anyone lose a shoe?" Dale immediately knew it was Aaron's. He's become quite the little shoe-dini.

Aaron was a huge fan of the whole experience. He ran all over the place touching everything and talking up a storm and pulling off his mittens and hat every time we put them on. Jordan enjoyed himself too, but was eager to get warm again. His favorite part of the evening was dinner at Grandma's, featuring ham and crock-pot mac and cheese. She was so happy to be hosting her grandchildren, and to be able to just have us over for dinner... her smile was the warmest part of the evening.

Dooraway

Today we had no door. In fact, we had no doorway, really -- just a big hole in the front of the house. Phil had to spend the day locked in the laundry room.

I was a little worried we'd be living with a tarp over the hole for the weekend, but fortunately, by the end of the day, we had a door again, complete with a non-rotten doorway. There's still the same drywall missing in the interior, and part of the floor is gone too. Now, though, I'm in the mood to appreciate the solidity of what's there.

In case you're wondering, we plan to seek rent abatement. Comments welcome on what all this should be worth.

Sweets

Last weekend, I was lucky enough to attend a cookie-making and -decorating party at our friends Matt and Sharon's house. I got to take home my favorite creations. Then we ate 'em.


I also wanted to share this picture from a couple weeks ago, in which Aaron and I share cake at a birthday party.


The birthday was Danny's sister Jill's, her 50th. There were a lot of people there I didn't know, so I wore a nametag identifying me as Jill's brother's wife's brother's wife. Wasn't that helpful? She had a picture of herself at age five on her invitation (and also on the cake), leading some of us to declare that "50 is the new 5."