Video
🤔
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me gives us Laura’s side of the story. Between tasks in my travel preparations, I watched the Twin Peaks movie. Some of the actors in the retrospective documentary said they were disappointed the show’s small town community feel was lost because the movie dropped the other plots and focused on Laura, but I agreed with this review. The movie had a different purpose from the show. The TV show told us what had gone on with Laura as it was uncovered by the investigators, which ended up fairly sanitized on screen. The movie cranked it up several notches and showed us. An emotionally wrenching portrayal.
Christmas
🙂
Last week was the Christmas trip that’s been a tower of unease looming over me since we started planning it in the middle of the year. But we made plans to keep it free of illness, and it turned out to be a satisfying time with the family. I’ll be watching our health in the next week to see if our plans worked.
Wednesday
Wednesday was our drive down to the cabin we were renting in the Ozarks. My brother picked me up and drove the whole way. One of my worries had been that my intestinal issues would give me problems somewhere in the 9-hour trip, but they were in a calm period, and the ride wasn’t too bad.
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Even though we were away from our usual gathering place, we kept some of our Christmas traditions: Dinner was tamales, refried beans, and Spanish rice. And my sister brought a puzzle, a painting of a cat library.
An accidental tradition we seem to keep every year is too many desserts. This time we each made at least one to bring, and we ended up with nine kinds for the five of us. I made molasses cookies.
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Thursday
Thursday was Christmas Eve. Breakfast was Michael’s Christmas quiche (with sun dried tomatoes and spinach). I spent the morning making Google Cardboard panoramas of the cabin. Lunch was our usual chili dogs. In the afternoon we took our sibling walk around the neighborhood, but this time our neighborhood was a leafy dirt path past some other cabins and a view of the mountains. Our Christmas Eve service was a livestream from Michael’s church. Dinner was tortilla soup by Abbie.
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Friday
And then, at last, Christmas. Breakfast was our traditional cinnamon rolls, plus eggnog coffee cake by Michael. After breakfast we opened presents. The other main event of Christmas is lunch, and while we find it tempting just to repeat Thanksgiving, we’ve been making an effort not to do that. This year we had ham, mashed potatoes, mashed butternut squash, roasted broccoli, green bean casserole, potato rolls, and Abbie’s “frozey fruit.” The rest was a team effort between Michael and our mom.
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In the evening we played a board game Michael had picked up, Wingspan. He won. I tied for second with Abbie.
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Saturday
Saturday we checked out at around 9 a.m. and trekked back home. I did a lot of sleeping on the way. I tend to dawdle on my road trips, but Michael’s great at making good time, and I was home by early evening.
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View this post on Instagram
Christmas labels
🙂
This year my secret Christmas gift labels were names made out of math-related shapes. This theme came from my math learning project from earlier in the year. I didn’t find any math fonts that made letters out of shapes like I’d found for food in a previous year, so I made my own letters out of things like fractals and measuring tools.
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Life maintenance
😐
This week starts the Thinkulum January project month, and I’m continuing with some general life maintenance. This will include task management (mostly using Elastic Habits) and finances (switching software, updating my budget, and investing).
