The Inconsequential Blogger: holidays

Showing posts with label holidays. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Going on a little trip

I'll be gone for a while. Hubby and I are getting away for a couple of weeks starting tomorrow. He'll be working part of the time, but I'll be sightseeing for the whole of it and he will join me when he can : )

Some of the places we'll visit are Paris, the Christkindlesmarkt in Nuremberg, and the medieval walled city of Rothenburg ob der Tauber. I'm so excited to see these places during the holiday season. And I'm so looking forward to lebkuchen in Nuremberg!

If we happen to have Internet access while we're away, I'll post some pictures when I'm able. So far, the weather over there looks about like what it is here - 40's and rainy.

Well, off to pack now and run last-minute errands!

Monday, January 4, 2010

Breaks

There have been a lot of breaks around here lately:

Winter Break, from school
Elbow Break, my son's (a slip & fall accident)
Thumb Break, my daughter's (a shut-in-the-car-door accident)
Sunshine Break (nothing but clouds and snow for us lately)

This has lead me to consider another break - a small one from blogging. Not a bleak, no blogging break. More of a blogging slow-down. With a newly re-built computer gracing the desk in the office room of our house, I'm trying to get back into my writing. In order to do that, I need to concentrate on the blank page and not my blog page.

So, I'll still be posting, but perhaps not quite as often. If there is a real dearth of posts, you'll know my writing is going well. If I'm posting fairly regularly, then tell me to get back to writing!!

I'm leaving you with a picture my husband took over the holidays. I know Christmas is over, but I really liked this picture of our quaint little downtown on a snowy night just after Christmas:

I'm sure I'll be in touch again soon!

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Lebkuchen

I'm attempting to bake the German holiday cookie, lebkuchen, today. I became hooked on them when I had a sister living in Germany and she sent them to me at Christmastime. My mother-in-law is German, too. In our earlier years, when we lived closer, my young family would visit the in-laws at Christmas. She always had a huge, beautiful tin full of lebkuchen and pfeffernusse cookies and treats sent to her from relatives in Germany. Yum!

I can find lebkuchen at a store here called World Market during the holiday season, so I always buy a few packages. I did so this year, too, but my children have come to like the taste now too so the packages didn't last long.

So I found a recipe. I made the dough yesterday, and today I will bake my first lebkuchen. I'm so excited! I hope they turn out.

You can find the recipe I'm using here. If it turns out that I don't like the results, there are lots of other recipes out there to try.

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Gaa!

I am so far behind on everything!! What am I doing sitting in front of the computer?!

Oh yeah, getting my daily dose of lolcats.

Hope the holiday season hasn't run you ragged yet!

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Birdwings, campfires, and Christmas

We decorated our Christmas tree last night. We cut it down ourselves at a nearby Christmas tree farm last Sunday, but had to wait until last night before we all had an evening free to gather round and decorate it.

I was clicking through some older photos on the disk drive from my old computer, which I haven't had access to for a while. I came across this photo from a family backpacking trip a few years ago:

The caption under the picture was, "Campfire tales." It occured to me that the cozy feeling of sitting around the campfire and telling tales is exactly like the feeling of gathering together to decorate the tree and then sitting around afterward admiring it and telling stories. I suppose a scene like that would likely be captioned, "Christmas tales."

The morning after the campfire picture, I remember standing near where the fire had been the night before and hearing a strange zip-zip-zip sound. I looked up to see a crow flying over us, and the sound was the sound its wings made with each pulse. That's how quiet it was in the mountains of Pennsylvania that morning - quiet enough to hear a bird on the wing.

This morning, however, I woke to the howl of a biting wind and to snow. I hope you all are warm wherever you are, and out of the wind, and telling tales with your families.

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Weathering the Holidays

The weather has just begun to turn cold. We had snow the day after Thanksgiving, and then on Saturday we had one more mild day with the sun. Toward the end of this week, however, we will be dipping into the 20's at night.

And the cold weather leaves me no excuses to be outside instead of inside where I need to do some deep cleaning and some painting of a couple of rooms before a bounty of guests descends for my husband's departmental holiday get-together (at our home this year). Frankly, I'm not sure everyone will fit comfortably in our home without slopping drinks and finger food on one another.

Sigh.

Hubby had the swine flu last week. He's better now and the rest of us are symptom free still. I don't know if it's because the bug is still incubating, or if it's due to wiping everything down constantly with Clorox wipees, spraying Lysol liberally in the rooms where hubby was lying about, or the "Stave Off" tea (one of my little concoctions) I made the rest of us drink everyday.

I'm really hoping that I don't come down with it, because then I don't know how I'll get the painting, and readying, and holiday decorating of the house done in time for the get-together.

Well, I'm hale and hardy now, so off to look at paint samples....