Merry Freakin Xmas Cookies

Holy Toledo!  I spent over six hours yesterday doing Xmas baking with the kid and feel as if someone beat me with a bag of oranges...frozen oranges.  Standing and mixing, rolling, cutting, and baking for that many hours is hard on the legs.  Thankfully I was wearing a pair of my daughter's Crocs otherwise I wouldn't have been able to stand up today at all. 

This morning we went at it again so now we have butter tarts, pumpkin tarts, sugar cookies, shortbread cookies, ginger cookies, and piggies in blankets all bagged and in the freezer.  It is nice to have company while doing this work; last year when I was being all Dora Domestica I only had the radio as company and consequently ended up massively depressed from listening to all the bad things the news always had to report all day long.  This time around we listened to Xmas carols and chatted about books, grandma, religion, politics, the weather, old friends, new friends, kids, school, more books, and more books.  We also spent a lot of time doing the following - 

Me: Get your butt back upstairs!  Go play with your toys. 

Kid: If I have to come up there someone is going to get a spanking!  Mom what else should I add to this?

Me: Can you pour a teaspoon of milk in this mix?  Leave your brother alone!  Do you want grandma to give you a spanking? 

Kid: Get out of this kitchen right now, and take your brother with you.  Go play with your toys or I'm putting you to bed.  Can you get the oven door for me mom?

Me: That consistency looks perfect, just stir it a bit more.  Scooter do NOT touch that it's hot!  Out! 

Ah the joyfulness of the holiday season. 

Beavers R Us

I seriously cannot believe how much my body is seizing up from the tiny bit of chainsawing that the hubby and I did today.  I could understand it if I was the hubby, seeing as his chainsaw only weighs about three times as much as mine.  I would have to start weight lifting for five weeks before I could just pick his up and hold it out for five seconds, let alone having to use it.  Mine is teeny, tiny and it still weighs a few more pounds then I like. 

Sigh.....sigh....I can't believe how out of shape I am.  What happened to the girl who could go for a ten k run then spend an hour at the gym without having to have a nap afterwards?  Oh well, I guess that regiment of lying around playing on my iPad isn't helping me with my fitness level.  So it is back to the old work out routine for me unless I want to get used to feeling, and looking, like Jabba the Hut. 

Walking Company

It was a cold winter's day this morning on my walk to the back forty, the wind was blowing and tiny flakes were dancing between creaking boughs, and rustling grass. I decided to spend the majority of time under the cover of the trees because the wind wasn't making it pleasant to be out in the open, so I strolled around, through, back, forth, up and down on my property.  Leaves crunched under my feet filling the air with that tangy, slightly moldy smell which I associate with autumn.  Me and the dog managed to scare up four partridge which had been hanging out together in a small scrub.  Happily I didn't have my usual heart attack when they leapt into the air right beside me, perhaps I am starting to get inured to the jumpy beasties. 

My walk was chilly and pleasant, and to be honest a tad bit odd, the whole time I was wandering around following all the trails and roads it almost felt as if my mom was there.  Which is extremely strange for several reasons, to begin with she just passed away in August, so it is highly unlikely that she would be skulking around in the trees, especially because she has been cremated.  And second, even if one would buy into the whole spirits hanging around thing, I know for a fact that my mom has never been in the back forty.  She always talked about wanting to come back and see it because of the way I would wax poetic about my land, but she never got around to it.  And third, she was a teeny, tiny little thing and even had she been in the best of health wouldn't have ever been able to keep up with my somewhat large, moose-like strides.  Plus she is still sitting in my closet in a small box waiting for the day I set her free floating over a mountain in the Rockies. 

But nevertheless she was very much on my mind during my walk this morning.  And if she is hanging out and haunting me for once she did not tell me to remember my hat, change my pants, pull up my sock, or brush my hair before heading out the door.  The afterlife must be mellowing her out. 

Wettings

Oh boy, today is a wet, wet day.  Actually I should clarify that, this afternoon is a wet, wet day.  This morning it was just kind of dampish.  I took the hell hound for a walk in the back forty this morning and thoroughly enjoyed it.  It sprinkled a bit off and on but I stayed mostly under the trees and didn't end up a drowned rat.  It's a good thing I did go this morning because it is coming down in buckets now.  So I walked, and walked, and wrote, and wrote.  Well wrote in my head...hmmmm...maybe I should have brought my iPad with me and tried that speech to text app I used for my post yesterday. 

That speech to text app was a pretty funny post though.  I don't know if it was me being a dork as I was talking, or if the app was a bit confused.  I guess I can't complain seeing as it was free.  I'd like to try a real program of speech to text to see if it will work better.  I've done a little bit of research on it and it looks promising.  My biggest concern though is my ability to write by speaking, I'm so used to letting my fingers do the talking for me.  I also found with my few practice runs with the speech to text thing I was feeling slightly self conscious about it. Okay a LOT self conscious about it.  I feel like I am talking to myself, and I am.  Perhaps it would work better if I propped hubby up beside me and talked.  I'm sure he would love that! 

App speech to text

So it's really morning here at Kiku states and I'm sitting here with a nice little fire and waiting for the send. It's a beautiful morning in terms of temperature and in terms of the fact that you don't have snow on ground which I think. And I'm also trying a new app Which changes speech to text and the app is free so it's going to be interesting mother works. 

Hubby is sleeping I just had to feed the cat because she is acting Wright inseam is as it Doublewoods crawling up her butt. I like the dog outside and then another dog inside dog outside and done inside before I decided to stop that game.


Ha ha this is pretty funny it's almost like Likea AutoCorrect after you've typed with not really paying attention to what you're doing. So the stuff that this thing is coming up this is completely crazy. For example

Before about the Doublewoods I don't know where that came. Maybe it's commandments they talking techmedia think I'm saying right things in fact I'm not.

Merry Hollypundia

If anyone has been on Facebook lately, or any other areas of social media, you may have noticed how it is being inundated by these huffy, offended, bad-tempered, over sensitive updates from people who are traumatized about what people are calling the holidays?  At first I was all “meh” about it and ignored them because frankly I don’t give a flying rat’s ass about it.  But lately it just seems like everyone is jumping on the whole say, Merry Christmas not Happy Holidays thing, and getting all hostile about it.   

Which got me wondering if in fact there actually is some kind of movement out there that I was not aware of which is pushing the world away from saying Merry Christmas and trying to make everyone change to the generic greeting Happy Holidays.  I’ve seen these posts a few times in the past few years but this year it just seems to have escalated and it piqued my curiosity, and being who I am I had to do some investigations into it.  My first step was to peruse the news links.  It turned up nada.  Then I checked out Snopes, which reports that this is an urban myth which has been circulating since the 1970’s and the fact is that the whole push to get the government to change the wording by nefarious atheist groups is a total fabrication.  I then checked out some of the more high profile atheist sites who I thought may actually advocate something like this and only turned up a few comments about Christians getting huffy about Christmas greetings.  Then I went to some of the Christian sites and bingo I hit jackpot, on some sites there is a veritable hornet’s nest of commotion about it.  So ultimately what I learned is that the people who are bitching and complaining about it the most, and making a big hairy deal out of it, are actually the ones who are creating the issue in the first place.   

Obviously the ironic aspect of the whole thing is that Christians actually don’t even have dibs on the season to begin with.  Long before Christianity this holiday has been celebrated for centuries by many different cultures and civilizations.  Many pagan cultures celebrated the winter solstice, the Feast of Juul was celebrated in Scandinavia, Saturnalia was celebrated by the Romans, the Wiccans called it Alban Arthan, the Mayan Indians honored the sun god they worshipped with a dangerous ritual known as the flying pole dance.  I could go on, but you get the picture.  So the next time someone gets their panties tied in a knot about the name you can wish them a Merry Hollypundia from the ancient Egyptians with a big helping of warm noodley goodness from the Flying Spaghetti Monster! 

 

Home Again

Well here I am I managed to survive the week, and so did everyone else.  Yipee.  The Poop Brigade has been handed back to the parental units and I am now back at home with hubby and hell hound in tow.  It was a busy, busy week making sure that the munchkins did not a) kill themselves, b) become malnourished, or c) beat each other into bloody pulps (and let's face it, d) did not get sold off to the highest bidder because that could be a very real danger with Iron Bess when she gets annoyed.)  They were cute, adorable, loving, busy, annoying, sticky, loud, poopy and full of energy.  All in all I think it was quite a feat for me to accomplish. 

Which makes me realize that I am very happy not being a full time custodian of little people at this stage of my life.  They just take up wayyyyyy too much of a person's time and energy, even when one is not directly interacting with them.  I am far too fond of having my own space for long periods of time.  And I know this may not be a good thing to admit because it probably goes against some kind of female code of ethics, but I don't think that I am a natural care giver, or liker of little people.  I think I may have missed out on that gene when being built.  My mom was such a huge fan of the little ones that I think she may have gotten a double dosage of it and didn't have any left over to pass it on to me.  She used to get all gushy around them and coo at them and be all maternal and sigh with regret when they went away.  Me not so much. 

I'm still looking for a part time job and I can honestly say that I will be able to scratch Day Care Worker off the list.