Well...that was certainly a phrase I'd never heard used before during sex...

"David...David...your nose is bleeding..."

Tyrannasaurus Rex - it's dinosaurs and monsters week here at SDHQ!

I did not have a Saturday adventure ready for today and did not feel like going anywhere anyway so I went to the gym! 30 minutes on the treadmill at spiky intervals. It ws fine. I'm coming to the end of a good book so that was nicely distracting. The Saturday morning usuals were there. No drama. Just usual. I'm sweaty and ready to do nothing for the rest of the day!

Dinner at Ron and Ann's was delicious. He is a great cook and it was just perfect. It was fun to visit with them and their son and his wife and their perfectly delightful granddog.

Nice nice and I am stuffed.

Travis was super exceptionally snuggly last night and this morning. Every time I woke up he was curled around my shoulder or my neck or in my arms. It was just lovely.

We had a nice couple of hours in bed with coffee and computer.

Then I got up to make Neighbor's Ann and Ron a Christmas DVD. This year Fox ran their Yule Log show (fire in fireplace with Christmas Carols) continuously for about six hours so I had set the TiVo to grab a couple of them and then I dumped them onto a DVD and decorated it with red and green sharpies and put it in a nice gift bag and took it down and tucked it into their front door.

Then I turned on a PBS show I had recorded of a guy doing 40 minutes of exercises. Joel Harper's Firming After 50 He does 20 minutes of upper body and 20 minutes of lower body. I did the lower body first and by the time he was done, I was breathless and sweaty. My upper body can wait.

I took a shower and got dressed in the soft red turtleneck sweater I found in the back of my closet a few weeks ago. OOOPs. Now I know why it was in the back. The sweater fits fine and looks great except for the neck which is for strangulating... Sorry, Goodwill, I should have brought this weeks ago so someone with a tiny neck could have a nice Christmas sweater.

Then I made breakfast. A few weeks ago I got these cups for poaching eggs. I finally tried them out the other night and ugh. Disaster. The eggs had cooked for a long time and were still not done and they stuck to the cups like glue. So... then... I RTFM. Oh... cover the pot. Oh... butter the cups... hmmmm So I tried them again this morning. And, wow! PERFECTION!! The eggs were pretty and delicious and perfectly poached. When he was here, my brother was griping about how he could just never get poached eggs right - his hollandaise was great but his poached eggs were always a disaster. I got Amazon to ship him a couple of sets of these. I'll all over helping the cook!

And now we're caught up. It's 10:30 and so far it's been a wonderful day!!

I think I'll knit.

Ok, I'll admit it, I had no idea what this would be when I started it and I'm still not entirely clear. I had little balls of left over yarn that Travis kept stealing when I'd forget to close the lid so I thought I'd just use them all up. I think I just started the head...

It will be a good Christmas after all. I was just informed that my favorite little ho ho ho will be up tomorrow :-)

Happy Commerce Day everyone!!

Both of my parents (here we go again letmesaything) grew up in German households with German Christmas traditions which bled over into my growing up family.

We rarely put the tree up much before the week of Christmas. When my Mom was little, the tree was put up by her parents in the parlor behind closed doors on Christmas Eve and she and her brother only saw it after Santa had come and gone. But, Daddy loved the getting of the tree and the decorating of the tree and he loved having helpers. So we were the last in the neighborhood to get it up but we probably had the most fun.

Then after all the cookies were delivered, we went home where Mom was deep into Christmas Eve dinner. I remember beef, mostly but who the heck cared what the menu was? The main attraction was only a few hours away! We ate and cleared the table and cleaned the kitchen and then... is it time yet????... we scampered upstairs to get into the new pajamas the Aunt Etta had sent.

Mom always came up to help us and always always, just as we were nearly totally pajama'd, we'd here the sleigh bells. Big old jangly bells dangled from the wreath on the front door and that's what we'd hear. Then Daddy's big voice would boom out... "Well WELCOME SANTA!!! How nice it is to see you!!!!"

We were quiet, quiet, quiet and we could hear Santa and Daddy talking in the den where the tree was but we could never quite make out what they were saying. But, pretty soon, they'd be near the front door again and Daddy would be saying "Thank you, Santa! I hope you have a good rest of your journey!" and Santa would say "And a Merry Christmas to" fading out "you" barely audible "all..."

And Daddy would come to the bottom of the stairs and say "kids! You'll never guess what just happened!!"

Every year. The same script. Exactly. Every single year.

We'd scamper down and find everything that Santa brought under the tree.

As we got older, it was hilarious but it still never changed even by a syllable. We would find out many years later all of the funny stories about near disasters. Like the year 'Santa' brought us all snow skis. Which 'Santa' stashed at a neighbors house til Christmas Eve. And then said neighbors went on an elongated day trip somewhere and 'Santa' had to break in to their house to get the goods. And another neighbor called the cops.

I was very lucky and privileged and I treasure the memories. I do hope somehow both my Mom and my Dad know how much I appreciated what they did.

I am so over my Treo Pro and Windows Mobile, for that matter. Google has exactly 1 year to get a spectacular phone and OS ready for me and they had better get the fuck with the program.

Today I reset the damn thing back to factory settings and started from scratch with the bare minimum. At least, now, if they battery starts draining out like a sieve again, I can more easily troubleshoot. GRRR.

I spent most of the day fucking around with the phone and waiting for Amira. I do love her cleaning but I have taught her now that it's fine with me for her to say she will be here and then not show and it is not fine. I was being nice and trying to be understanding and sympathetic. I know that the money she makes here is important to her so if she can't make it at the appointed time, once or twice, I was ok with moving the time so I could get a clean house and she could get paid.

But, I'm done. If she can't make it, then we just skip and wait until next time. Last time she called and asked if she could come Saturday instead and I said fine. On Saturday she came and dropped off a card and gift (a re-gift, obviously) and asked if she could come Sunday, I said fine. Never heard a word. On Tuesday she called and asked if she could come Today. I said 'but Amira, that's Christmas Eve, are you sure you want to come Christmas Eve?' Oh yes, she assured me - early 10:30 in the morning.

It's 3 pm and I haven't heard another word. She might still show up today. If so, I'll tell her. If not, I have an email ready to go. No more Ms. Sympathy here. I'm done. Ho Ho Ho.

I did my duty. 20 minutes on the elliptical with intervals and 10 mins on the no-back bike with intervals. I am sweaty and planning on being a slug the rest of the day.

I need to clean up the kitchen before I go to the gym and so before I do that, I'm finishing my coffee in hopes that something will cancel the gym thing. I know it won't, but still...

When my parents got married in 1948, the first thing they did was move 1,500 miles away from their parents and never moved back. They started creating their own family traditions and they were very good at it. Christmas Eve was our biggie. Santa came to us first cause we were special. He came after dinner just as we we finished putting on the pajamas that Great Aunt Etta sent to us each year.

But the morning of Christmas Eve is what I'm remembering now. My Mom baked acres of Christmas cookies every year. Pretty ones, tasty ones, traditional ones, weird ones - dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens. Then with tin pie pans, white tissue paper, cellophane and red ribbons, she made beautiful packages for dozens of family friends.

It was the job of Daddy and my brother and sister and me to deliver them all on Christmas Eve. We loaded up the station wagon. (I should link to Wikipedia for that one, probably.) and set out. Most people on our route looked forward to the delivery every year and it was fun. We called out dibs for the best folks like Old Mr. Hanes (yes, the original Mr. Hanes who started Hanes underwear... Daddy's boss). They had a grand house with a butler who was the best hugger in the world and Mr. Hanes always gave each of us a silver dollar.

This morning I sent my brother an IM telling him that I was calling dibs on taking cookies into George and Helen's. George and Helen were a couple who were special family friends. They had no children so everyone's children - us - were treated like royalty. Their house was so pretty.

(The other thing I remember is that George and Helen did not smoke cigarettes. This was HUGE since we lived in Winston-Salem which, only had two industries then... RJ Reynolds tobacco and Hanes. George and Helen were THE only two adults I ever knew, as a child, who did NOT smoke. But at cocktail parties, they always had an unlit cigarette in their hands. Always. I asked my Mom about this and she explained that it was only polite to support local industry and if you didn't smoke at least carrying a cigarette showed your support. It sounds bizarre now, I know but then, not so much.)

It occurs to me this morning that my family's traditions also lived practical lives and died nicely when it was time. Around the time that my sister (we were a year and a half apart) and I had just gone off to college, they shipped my brother off to boarding school and they moved to New York City. Christmas in New York City was so thrilling that no one noticed we weren't delivering cookies any more plus, we left the station wagon behind.

Ok, enough. I need to get to the kitchen and to the gym. Then I have knitting to do. legalmoose just twittered that the project in Today's Basket might be "A frog-pig; the love child of Kermit & Miss Piggy." My first thought was oh, how would that look... but that was soon replaced with eewwwww. Plus, Miss Piggy is nobody's fool, she would never do the nasty without iron clad birth control.

I'm using up some of the small balls so the next creature, at least, will be colorful.

I buy nearly all my yarn online because our local yarn shops do not carry the cheap acrylic yarn I like to use for my toys (soft is a must for me while knitting and then for the toys themselves). I order mainly from two places although one is probably dropped since they repriced their shipping and their website kinda sucks a lot.

My main place - Herrschners - has a free shipping sale a few times a year. I got a snail catalog from them a while back announcing one of their free shipping sales. I made a mental note that it ended in at the end of December so be sure and order before then and I put it into my Yarn Order folder.

Today I was organizing the yarn basket and thought no sense in waiting until next week. I can just place the next order now... I dug out the catalog and the sale ends tomorrow! I would have been sooooo pissed to have had that window close on me. It's only $13 but that could be 8 animals!

But, all's fine. Fat order placed. I should be good now until the next free shipping sale or easily mid-Summer whichever comes first. Plus, they had a deal on stuffing, too, which is a bonus!

One of the funnest things about knitting toys is the yarns. All I care about is cheap, washable and soft.

When you knit sweaters and important stuff and use important yarns, it can get pricey really fast. You can drop $75 on a short vest before you know it and that's just the yarn! A nice pair of socks can run you $8-$10 before they even meet the knitting needles. So the yarn selection process is far more critical.

For toyland, I can just pick my yarn and then get one skein of each color except the boring ones like white, black, cream, gray. If a color sucks, I make a fun toy out of it and it sucks way less. There are now three brand/flavors of yarn that are perfect for toys - Red Heart Soft Baby Steps, Red Heart Soft Yarn and Caron's Simply Soft. I stick to these three and get a fair amount of color variety.

For $150 today I got yarn enough for probably 70 animals (at least) and enough stuffing for most of those. Not bad!

And with free shipping - it's really silly how much I love free shipping.

Whew. Last time I complained about my lower back. It's obvious from today's line up of stuff to do, that she heard me. It was good but whew.

On the up side, I noticed that the giant red spot on my left hand is nearly gone. Now it's faintly yellow like a nearly healed bruise. Maybe it was a bruise. From when I punched somebody/thing. I have no punching recollection but, hey, who knows.

(infrared, by Jonathan, the other morning, not long after waking)

I'm not totally happy with any of these four bears but if I remove the stitch by stitch criticism, they are a happy little group to look at.

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Why in the heck won't my Amazon movie download to TiVo? I've been trying since this time yesterday. I've tried now to two different TiVo's and it's beginning to piss me off. It tries. I get the blue light and when I look it says it's downloading but duration = 0:00 and then it gives up. Sometimes it tries on its own and sometimes I have have to go to Amazon and click download. It's beginning to annoy me. I paid $.00 but still. Stuff should work!

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Nadia time!