Christmas!
Some day, I will post about the rest of my Puerto Rico trip. Honest.
Xmas was low key this year. The trip to PR was sort of our family gathering for the year. My family has never been big on the holidays, so we celebrated with a nice dinner after our amazing kayaking trip my last night in PR, when my brother and H were there as well. Not that we mentioned Christmas during dinner, but it was close enough.
I spent most of the weekend studying coding, cleaning, and trying to generally catch up in life a bit (though my xmas shopping is still way, waaaay behind. Sigh). Christmas day itself I joined my brother and H and went to H's dad's house, which is out in the country a ways. It was lovely and low key, and I quite like H's brother. H's dad is a good cook, and has a new puppy, Sam. Sam is 9 weeks old. Sam is a mastiff puppy. Sam is adorable. Sam is f'ing HUGE.
My brother got me an incredibly cool gadget for my iOS programming - it's a little device that is a bunch of sensors in one, and comes with sample code and all sorts of things so you can use it to learn and test how to make an iOS device talk to an external device over bluetooth. Very cool, and I'm sure it'll be very handy.
He and H also got me a book called "Dick's Encyclopedia of Practical Receipts & Processes or How They Did It in the 1870s". It is, of course, right up my ally, and I'm excited to try some (but only some) of the literally thousands of recipes/formulae in the book. I say only some, because, well, they are instructions from the 1870s. And nowadays we tend to look askance at 'medicinal tinctures' that include arsenic. And while I have no desire to try out the dozen options for making pommade (generally some variation on '2 parts lard and 1 part beef suet'), the gooseberry wine sounds delightful, and also not likely to kill me, so, you know, bonus. And making my own ink would be pretty cool, too. It even has sections on artificial gemstones (paste and otherwise), which sounds fascinating. This is going to be a lot of fun.
It's winter here, though that is still taking some getting used to for me - not nearly anything like New England, but while it looks like the winters I grew up in, it's colder. I haven't quite figured out the optimal level of dress, still, and I need new boots.
I think it must be a year's end thing, but I'm missing people even more than usual this week. Thinking about you all lots, wish you were here (mooooove wessssst...), stay in touch.
Xmas was low key this year. The trip to PR was sort of our family gathering for the year. My family has never been big on the holidays, so we celebrated with a nice dinner after our amazing kayaking trip my last night in PR, when my brother and H were there as well. Not that we mentioned Christmas during dinner, but it was close enough.
I spent most of the weekend studying coding, cleaning, and trying to generally catch up in life a bit (though my xmas shopping is still way, waaaay behind. Sigh). Christmas day itself I joined my brother and H and went to H's dad's house, which is out in the country a ways. It was lovely and low key, and I quite like H's brother. H's dad is a good cook, and has a new puppy, Sam. Sam is 9 weeks old. Sam is a mastiff puppy. Sam is adorable. Sam is f'ing HUGE.
My brother got me an incredibly cool gadget for my iOS programming - it's a little device that is a bunch of sensors in one, and comes with sample code and all sorts of things so you can use it to learn and test how to make an iOS device talk to an external device over bluetooth. Very cool, and I'm sure it'll be very handy.
He and H also got me a book called "Dick's Encyclopedia of Practical Receipts & Processes or How They Did It in the 1870s". It is, of course, right up my ally, and I'm excited to try some (but only some) of the literally thousands of recipes/formulae in the book. I say only some, because, well, they are instructions from the 1870s. And nowadays we tend to look askance at 'medicinal tinctures' that include arsenic. And while I have no desire to try out the dozen options for making pommade (generally some variation on '2 parts lard and 1 part beef suet'), the gooseberry wine sounds delightful, and also not likely to kill me, so, you know, bonus. And making my own ink would be pretty cool, too. It even has sections on artificial gemstones (paste and otherwise), which sounds fascinating. This is going to be a lot of fun.
It's winter here, though that is still taking some getting used to for me - not nearly anything like New England, but while it looks like the winters I grew up in, it's colder. I haven't quite figured out the optimal level of dress, still, and I need new boots.
I think it must be a year's end thing, but I'm missing people even more than usual this week. Thinking about you all lots, wish you were here (mooooove wessssst...), stay in touch.