In an effort to distract myself from fear about the future,

I will inform you that my kids have had ELEVEN DAYS OF SCHOOL IN THE LAST SIX WEEKS. They're now completely sick of staying home. (I am so grateful that they can take care of themselves. I have friends and coworkers who have been scrambling to find coverage for the snow days, and it's a great relief not to have to worry about it...)

It's an indicator of my mental state...

... that I just sat alone, weeping, in a darkened room, for 38 minutes, watching Barack Obama presenting the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Joe Biden. Wait till you get to the bit where Biden says he has never doubted Obama's judgement in even the most difficult decisions.

Snow Day!

The girls have missed SEVEN days of school due to "snow" so far this year in December and January. What with that and the 11-day holiday, they basically don't go to school any more. I suggested on Monday (yet another snow day) that they get jobs. They didn't think that was funny.

Most of the "snow" days are actually "ice or some snow makes the roads slippery and because the City isn't set up to respond to that, it basically paralyzes the entire transportation system" days. However, we woke up this morning to find half a foot of snow had fallen overnight, and it didn't stop. By the time the snow stopped and Cook and I went on a walk,* nearly a foot of snow had come down. THAT'S a snow day. 

*City employees (and almost everybody else) got a snow day, too. We've had one other complete day off and several "late start" days when the kids have had "snow" days

Other notes

I started 2017 by cleaning some old condiments out of the fridge (composting the contents and cleaning the jars, not just chucking the whole thing - this is why I hadn't done it before), and that felt perfect. A small, easily-accomplished but long-delayed effort to impose order.

Also, I wanted to report that this weekend we watched two movies: Hunt for the Wilderpeople, which we all enjoyed, and also The Lady in the Van, a movie Skipper has been agitating to watch for weeks and was super-excited to finally get on hold from the library. I didn't even try to watch that movie, because I don't like crying ALL the time, and Duchess watched for a while and then gave up, declaring it "too old" for her. Skipper has a weird inclination toward things that are "too old" for her, like this movie and the book she recently read cover to cover, Lab Girl. It's hard to know how much she enjoys them and how much she gets out of them - it could be just determination to be seen as a sophisticated eccentric. She's certainly an eccentric.

2017

Well. It's a new year!

Things I expect to happen in 2017:

• Duchess will become a teenager. 
• Skipper will sleep over at a friend's house for the first time.
• Duchess will move into the basement (aka The Dungeon of Asbestos and Radon).
• I will get a new job. 
• Cook will finally get fed up with his job and will also get a new job.

I don't have any resolutions, though of course I'd like to be a better person. Though I think I'd like to wear more wool. And sing more. Sleep more. Try not gain all that weight back. (I don't have any actual plans to make these things happen, so they're just New Year's Vague Notions.)

We've had an exceptionally mellow two weeks. The girls have pretty much just laid around and read a LOT of books.  Duchess is done with it and ready to see her friends, but Skipper, unsurprisingly, says she'd be happy to log a few more weeks of this. We've also been enjoying a nearly-complete hiatus from extracurricular activities, and are musing over how nice that is and what that might mean for future choices.

Duchess attended one day of Zombie Camp this last week, and her reportage from that experience was interesting. She was one of the few kids who didn't get caught and "infected," and she spent the entire day pretty much running away from and hiding from the ever-growing zombie hordes in the woods. She said she was on high alert all the time, and that her vigilance, while exhausting, was what kept her "alive" because she was the first to realize whenever the zombies were attacking, and the quickest to leap up and sprint for safety. I find this reassuring given the growing likelihood that society will completely collapse in the next few years - Duchess will survive, at least for a little while. (She will, however, NOT protect any of the rest of us. She figures we'll be the sacrifices she'll have to make in order to get away.)

Skipper chose not to go to day camp that day. Skipper hates day camp, because day camp is all about new stuff all day - new place, new kids, new teachers, new activities. Ugh. New stuff is the worst. She instead spent half the day at my office and half at Cook's, with a shared pizza lunch interlude. Both offices were very empty and she was very quiet, so it worked out fine.

So - 2017. Let's hope for no zombies.

Merry

We did it! Christmas happened. It was lovely. Lots of sloth and food.


















Cook and Duchess played a game. Cook won the first round.
















Duchess won the second.
















Skipper did some hard-core slothing.
























Duchess got a hat, which completed her transition into tweenyness.

Skipper got a globe.
















We went for a walk. Skipper took photos with the new family camera.

Duchess took photos with HER new camera.

And that's pretty much the news from here!

Holiday

So it begins!

We're having a delightful, if only slightly snowy, snow day - work and school were cancelled and it didn't even start to snow until the middle of the day. So we're making cookies, doing puzzles, and contemplating the holiday. Also, snowball fights and sledding, which I avoided so I could stay inside and eat cookies by myself.







































The kids have another week of school before they plunge into the Great Holiday Sloth, which they're anticipating with relish. Skipper won't be going to any day camps this year, and the two of them are planning hot cocoa and a LOT of reading. Also, tuneless singing of songs from Hamilton, as Duchess has now convinced Skipper to enter (reluctantly) her fandom.

Thanks

We gave thanks! (Though the political climate put a wet blanket on our thanky-ness. Cook, on his turn to offer up a thing to be thankful for, said glumly "We don't have Mussolini for president.")

I forgot to say a thing I was thankful for, so I'm offering it now: I'm thankful I have two kids who are old enough and competent enough to stay HOME ALONE TOGETHER on a day when they have no school and Cook and I have to work. They did this for the first time on Wednesday, and it was uneventful. They fought some, were bored some, went out together to the local coffee shop to purchase hot chocolate, and they decorated for Thanksgiving. 

We had a wonderful holiday, as it turned out. I decided last weekend that I'd like to actually do Thanksgiving food this year instead of burritos (I love burritos, but I love stuffing, too), and everybody got on board. We had stuffing and mashed potatoes (I ran the starch department) and brussels sprouts (Cook ran the vitamins department) and lemon bars (Skipper ran the dessert department with Cook's help) and apple pie (Duchess ran the other dessert department with Cook's help). I think that between those menu items we ate a few sticks of butter apiece. We didn't bother with the cleaning or decorating other than the girls' festooning, and didn't stand much on ceremony with the meal, but we had a really good holiday. It rained torrentially all day. We draped ourselves around the house and played games and watched a movie and bickered and digested and just goofed around. Lovely. I hope you all had lovely holidays of your own, in your own style!

Duchess turned twelve

Media consumption

Since I told you what I like listening to and watching, I feel that I should catch you up on everybody else.

Skipper: Ida B and Steven Universe and Horrible Histories
Duchess: Hamilton cast album (this was inevitable; you know that) and Alexander Hamilton and "all reality shows"
Cook: The Amazing Race (rewatching)

Ice dragons and television

Oh hi.

We're fine. We're kind of grumpy. (Actually, Cook isn't, but the rest of us are. Okay, FINE. I'm kind of grumpy.) Kids are still thriving, while also going through normal developmental ugliness. Duchess trick-or-treated with her friends on Halloween, leaving poor Skipper with nobody to lead the way up every set of porch stairs. You have never seen such tentative body language on an ice dragon before - she shuffled cautiously up to each door with hunched shoulders and said very quietly "trick or treat..." Even after she got comfortable in a groove, and even skipped a little, it was a careful, tense skipping. Skipper's world is a fragile place.

I, on the other hand, am feeling weirdly powerful lately - I think it's because I turned forty and decided to just be an old eccentric lady with a beard and weird pants and loud opinions. I've taken to just saying things assertively at work meetings even though I have no reason to think that I deserve to take up airspace and I have no particularly great insights. (I figure if men get to do this, I might as well get to, too.) I'm really enjoying it, and so far experiencing no negative feedback. (Hey, this is what it's like to be a man!)  And I'm also feeling really joyful, as well as grumpy. The world feels enormous and indifferent and amazing - and I feel like I have room to be expansive in a way I haven't before. Forty, you guys. It's awesome.

And I get to balance my growing and definitely unhealthy addiction to political podcasts* by watching so much awesome TV,** which just reinforces my understanding that I'm incredibly forking lucky.




*NPR Politics for the win. Keepin' it 1600 for the chance to listen to nerdy frat boys obnoxiously saying everything out loud that I think inside my head. (Oh my god. I am, deep in my heart, an Obama Bro. This explains the entitled talking at work meetings, too.)
** I finally know who I am, after forty years on this planet. I am a person who really enjoys watching Brooklyn Nine Nine and The Good Place. And yes, New Girl. And, yes, unlimited reruns of Parks and Recreation. We live in a golden age of television that was apparently designed in a laboratory to please me.