Happy Chris, er, New Yea.... Um, hi.

The nap odometer just rolled past two hours, so let’s see how far I get. Hello! How is everyone (and while we’re at it, who is everyone?) now that we’ve all moved through the last of the holidays and are back at our respective grinds, whiling away the winter? Our holidays were quite good - I got almost all of the crafting done for everyone’s gifts - the last item is still in progress, a sure sign that I need to be a bit more realistic about my skills, particularly as they pertain to carving chunks of cardboard into a kitchen. In spite of his request that we stick to a hard budget for all of our gifts this year, Patrick upgraded my phone and bought me a Kindle 2, which he claims he got for a steal. Most of the dead tree reading I’ve done in the last two years has been parenting-related or a reference book for some homemaking project or another, so I’ve got a nice collection of pleasure reading downloaded that will hopefully get me through my odd evenings of downtime.

We spent New Year’s Eve (or as it’s known over here, my birthday) visiting Yosemite and introducing Seamus to snow. It wasn’t his first time, as we took him to Shasta when he was five months old, but he’ll be able to create memories of it now. He’ll understand the ache in his fingers from packing snow bare-handed, and how a snow ball that lands near his collar explodes into chilly shrapnel that gets down his shirt. Maybe, just maybe, he’ll consent to wearing his hat and mittens and zipping his coat fully.

Things are mostly good over here if laden with things to do. Sometime during the spring or summer we would like to move, which means forays into neighborhoods and school district websites, disposal of more things we do not need (the bulk of this is Patrick’s to do, as it is mostly his stuff, though by California law, I could throw out half of it), followed by packing and cleaning and employing some level of the Good Camper Rule to this wee house that has seen us work and love and grow our family since we moved in three weeks before our first anniversary.

Seamus is up, so I’ll leave off for now.