3 November 2003

It's snowing here! Well, not so much snowing as flurrying: it's coming down more than most flurries but isn't accumulating. But it's making a practice run at snowing, which is good enough for me. Better than good enough, actually: we have no snow shovel. And I feel like creamed crap on crackers, so I don't really want to be hopping out to shovel the steps and the driveway anyway.

Yesterday I kept telling Mark that I had a feeling I was going to get sick as soon as he left. But was not, of course, already sick. Naturally not. Wouldn't dream of it. Despite the scratchy throat, the postnasal drip, the occasional sneezing, the general feelings of wanting to hide under the blankets...no. Not sick. Not until I dropped Mark off at the airport and came snuffling home. Then, sick.

It was a good weekend, though. I learned a lot. First off, I learned that I am not cut out to be a traditional Indian woman.

It's not that it looked bad. It looked good, I thought. And I did have a good time.

Especially when C.J. added Mark's hat to his Japanese festival costume. But a sari is six yards of fabric, wrapped and tucked, and the only thing that worked without crushing the drape of it was my cloak, which is floor length. I have to say that it was kind of fun to sweep through the airport in a long cloak and get grins from people. But negotiating the stairs repeatedly in that much fabric -- remember how I've been doing the Stairmaster moving thing, up and down and up and down? -- was a bit much. Timprov was worried that I was going to break my head. I was worried that I was going to rip my sari.

Because of the stairs, I ended up reading Zilpha Keatley Snyder's The Headless Cupid: I'd left A Well-Timed Enchantment upstairs in the office and didn't want to negotiate the stairs again, so I grabbed The Headless Cupid from the pile of library books on the kitchen counter. It was quite good, and I'm now eager to read something else in that series. I liked that the message was not just "the world is weird" or "the world doesn't have the kind of spooky things you expect in it," but a combination of the two: that the weird things we expect and the weird things we get are quite different. A Well-Timed Enchantment is so far...not impressing me nearly as much. Maybe I'm too old for it, but I keep thinking that the best books are the ones you can't be too old for. It clunks and thumps and only goes where it's going in fits and starts. Meh.

Anyway, I read The Headless Cupid until Mark got to the airport, ahead of schedule. (We are 10-15 minutes from the airport, so if we check the Northwest webpage and it says they're early, we can usually actually get there in time.) And then the huggings and the squeezings and the fetching of the luggage. (Not, happily, of the Luggage.) And we headed off to Yore's Halloween party, where I got to meet Yore's girlfriend and Yore's sister and Vanya's girlfriend. And some other people, too. Good time had by all, but we left fairly early in the evening with much to do yet at home.

Forget what I said about accumulation. What it isn't doing is accumulating on our west-facing blacktop driveway. Thank you, west-facing blacktop driveway! It is, however, accumulating on the grass and the wood steps and the leaves and the rocks and all. Snow. Wow.

But it wasn't snowing Friday night, and I was miraculously almost warm enough in my cloak and sari. (The almost bit comes along because the petticoat and choli don't meet in the middle under the sari. They don't even come close. And the area of skin they don't cover was feeling a bit exposed.) And Yore is That Guy, you know, the one who gives out whole full-sized candy bars? I'll bet the kids in his neighborhood all know where he lives and make detours to get there. Or else they'll figure it out within another year or two.

Saturday was largely taken up by party preparations and party. We had a good time -- Mark and I did, and I think Timprov did, too, by his behavior. I can't speak for the guests. We had eighteen adults and four little ones come, and they spread themselves out enough that I got to talk to everybody who came. And they brought presents! That's another thing I learned: if you label it a housewarming, people bring you stuff. Mostly wine, but also a pressed fairy book (which I've already devoured) and a wall tile and a gift card and some little bags and a Musketeer plant. It is. It had a typo on it that said it was Pothos, but we all knew what it really was.

A big difference between parties in the Bay Area and here is that in the Bay Area it was always a link fest, and here, there was Stella, and I think that was it for people who have links. Stella brought her spousal unit and her ornery little biped. (This is what she called him. I didn't find him ornery at all. He has marvelous dimples and is, as Mark puts it, so adorable he's almost two dorables. And he has a rabbit with teeth.) This was all to the good, and coffee will ensue later. Also one of our neighbors came, the one at the end of the circle who has been warm and friendly since we moved in, although his wife has yet to appear. (Their son is multiply disabled, he said, so it may be that someone needs to stay with him.) And to finish out the roster of people I didn't know before, my almost-cousin's cousin brought her husband, whom I had not met. Everybody I didn't know was perfectly amiable, and the people I did know behaved themselves, in some cases better than one could have expected.

And bless them all for not coming early. Beth and Josh brought the small and nearly perfect Jane (she had a cold and an eye infection and was out of sorts because she had been trying not to sleep so that she could see her daddy, who had been out of town all week), and they arrived a good 15 minutes after I told people it was okay to arrive. And I was still in my bathrobe with my dress hanging on the kitchen chair, hollering to Mark that he should take them through the other side of the house first so that I could pop into the bathroom and get changed. I misjudged time a bit.

We ended up not having the time to make gyoza, pickle yummies, or deviled eggs, but the spinach and artichoke dip was a hit, and the caramel apples seemed to go over well, and some people were enthusiastic about the cheesecake bars, and the dill dip was nice, and of course Gavin's cookie radar is well-developed, and so is Mark's. (Gavin will be 2 this month.) The veggie pizza dealies did not go: too much work to grab a piece and too wholesome, is my guess. So we've got the leftovers of that. I also have more crusts in the freezer now. The recipe for thin pizza crusts said that it made nine of them (!) and you could freeze them at a certain stage, and I thought it made sense to have pizza crusts just hanging around, especially as we have a chest freezer. However, they make nine very small pizzas. Very small. So we have seven supposed pizza dough bits left, which is enough for maybe three meals but more likely two.

I need a recipe for thicker pizza crusts, though. That would be good.

I had gotten Moose Drool at the store, because Mark had said he wanted a brown sort of an ale, and how could I resist? It was brown, it had moose in the title, it wasn't too expensive. Turns out I should have bought more than a six-pack, because my friends like Moose Drool. How often do you get to say things like that?

Uh-oh. It's starting to accumulate on the west-facing blacktop driveway.

Anyway, I would say you should feel sorry for us for the lack of gyoza, but you should feel sorry for Mark and our guests, because I still have all the necessary ingredients for gyoza, including a Timprov and a C.J. to make them when they feel well enough.

I've got the pictures from the move now. Also I have some pictures of the finished product. That is to say, I have pictures of the library. I could have taken some of the music room, too; it was fine. I forgot to take pictures at the party -- I was too busy talking to people and making food and showing the house and all that -- and then there were toys from the kids scattered through the living room and food remnants on the kitchen counter by the time I got around to it, and then Mark took away the computer that makes it easy to get pictures off the camera. I may try the difficult computer if we do anything photogenic before Mark gets home again. We'll see. But I'll be putting move pictures here when I get the chance.

Which may not be this afternoon. Maybe. I have very little idea what I'll feel able to do today. I'm going to see if a hot shower and some hot lemon chamomile tea help me feel a little less like death on toast, and then I'll...umm...do some stuff. And then some more stuff. Then, most likely, lunch; then more stuff. Got it? Good.