How quickly things change

Let there be (another) light!

We now have 2 of these babies hanging in the kitchen and family room:

Snowzilla: Day 5

Fred and I went out for a walk this morning. It was nice to get out of the house without a shovel in my hands!

This is what the parking lot at Petsmart looked like:



Back home I found a hungry friend on our back porch:

Snowzilla: Day 4

Progress! Thanks to Fred and our neighbor Jeff, we can now get a car to the road:



Guess who's buying a snowblower next year?

Snowzilla: Day 3

Being stranded has been fun, but it's time to start digging out. Seminole fans need someplace to park:



Fred focused on clearing our driveway and then started making a footpath down the pipestem to connect to the main road.









I cleared off the back deck and both front porches then turned my attention to our pipestem neighbor's house. She had ridden out the storm elsewhere, and I knew that when she got home she would need at least a way to get to her front door:



I took a regular shovel and created a path so narrow that you had to walk as on a balance beam. This is looking back from halfway there:



This was her front porch:



I made it!

Snowzilla: Day 2

This is what it looks like out there today:

Needless to say, we stayed hunkered down.

Fred had a brilliant idea yesterday and put a piece of carpet padding out in the yard. Every couple hours he goes out and brushes the snow off of it, lifts it back, and voila! instant dog potty:





Ginger is most appreciative:



My poor car is disappearing beneath the drifts:



We've done a little work around the house. Fred focused on installing some lights. This is a huge improvement over the naked lightbulb we've had hanging there for months:



Meanwhile I got my beloved ceramic monkeys, which I got at Gold Rush 2006, out of the storage boxes and restored them to their rightful place between Scarlett and Ceiling Cat:







I also got a little knitting done:



No cabin fever yet!

Snowzilla: Day 1

Today was my usual work-from-home day in the afternoon and evening. I spent the morning at the mall and then got home at lunchtime, just as the flakes started to fall.

It was 23 degrees when Fred and I took the dog out on my break:



It wasn't a very long walk, as the snow was really coming down hard:



As we were headed back to the house, we ran into Susan and Buster:



Before we knew it, there was a little impromptu dog party going on:



Before the sun even went down, the snow was starting to get thick:

Snowzilla Eve

I got into work with no trouble this morning. I sure felt sorry for the people stuck on the Beltway:



My friend Dave managed to score the last snow shovel at Rite Aid on his way into work:



Soup is another very important snow food:

Storm's a'comin'

We are a couple days out from what promises to be a truly epic snowstorm. We stopped by Wegmans on our way home from work to pick up necessities. I never knew cheese was such a necessity:



When we left the store, we walked out into a somewhat unexpected micro-storm:





Although this burst was very small, it well and truly gummed up the roads in the area:



There were plenty of people who wound up having commutes of up to 5 hours. We got home in the nick of time!

Read in 2015

Here are the books I managed to read this past year:



It came out to over 2 a month, but there were months where I read nothing and others where I really got into the groove. I'm hoping to have a lot more of the latter type of months in 2016!

Made in 2015

It's fun to look back at the end of the year and see what I accomplished.

My sister's Grumpy Cat hat:



Annabelle's Wonder Woman sweater:



Sarah's Christmas stocking:



A pair of FSU socks:



One of my most off-the-wall projects was a viking helmet with detachable beard for my friend Joanne's husband (the pic on the right is me showing it off at work before taking it to the post office):

Brunch and goodbye

This holiday weekend went by way too fast. We finished off this morning with brunch at Pinstripes in Georgetown, wandered around a little, and then put Mike and Sarah on their plane back to San Antonio.

Photo shoot

Well, for as warm as it has been lately, it sure was cold today when we met Marisa of White Sparks Photography for a photo shoot at the Air Force Memorial! I've been wanting to get a professional portrait of Mike in his uniform and some shots of Mike and Sarah together to go with my pic of Annabelle and Harvey. Here are a couple of my amateur shots, just clowning around:





See why I need a pro?

Here are the portraits of Mike in his uniform that inspired me to book this session in the first place. I'm getting the top on in an 8X10 and the bottom one in a big square to hang next to the Annabelle/Harveys pic:





Then there's this really nice shot of Mike and Sarah:



And some goofy ones too, but I'm ordering them because I think their personalities shine through:









I'm also going to order a couple more pictures from Annabelle's photo shoot last year. Here's one for the grandparents:



And Annabelle wants this one to give to Sam:



And I need this one because it's the most perfect picture ever taken of any cat: