Here we go...

All of these are combining -- as they typically do each year -- to pile on a good case of the January blues:

• Li's birthday is tomorrow. She turns 7. How is this even remotely possible? I can't believe how fast this past year and, really, all of her life have raced past.
• Ian heads back to Norman mid-day tomorrow for the upcoming start of the spring semester of his fourth year of college. Has he really been home for three weeks already? It's never been easy on any of us when he leaves but the past couple departures have really been hard; this one will be, too.
• Li goes back to school tomorrow. She's really excited about this and about her birthday, but also really struggling with Ian's impending departure.
• I go back to work on Tuesday (the day after tomorrow), after having been off work for a full three weeks. 

Holiday Traditions

This post comes out of a recent conversation with friends over coffee, in which we were talking about our respective families' traditions for the Christmas season and where those traditions came from.

• Food: we cook much more frequently over the Christmas break than during the rest of the year, where by "cook" I mean really cook (as in make stuff that takes more time than we would normally have during a typical day). A big part of this is tied to work schedules: the lab where I work shuts down between Christmas and New Year's Day each year and I usually bracket that with additional personal leave to stretch it even longer. This is something we've just sort of grown into over the past 10 years or so.
• The Christmas tree: usually up around mid-December (these days tied to Ian's arrival home from school) and down on the 1st or 2nd of January. My least favorite tradition, truth be told.
• Christmas music: we almost always have some sort of Christmas or holiday-ish music playing during this same period, with "The Andy Williams Christmas Album" occupying a special place in the play list as the most important. I remember listening to this each year as a kid, and at some point we ended up with it on CD. Cheesy, but still my favorite Christmas album (probably as much for the memories as for the actual music).
• Baking Christmas goodies: my fudge, Ian's peppermint strips, sugar cookies (most decorated, of course), Deb's pecan fingers, holiday breads. Some to eat, lots to share and give as gifts. This is something both Deb's and my families did as we were growing up.
• Clam chowder and candlelight church on Christmas Eve: the clam chowder part is from my family; we both grew up going to church on Christmas eve.
• Hot chocolate and cookies before bed on Christmas Eve: something my family always did after coming home from church.
• Cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning: this is something my mom did some years as I was growing up, and I love getting up early on Christmas morning and making them for my family.
• Christmas stockings before breakfast on Christmas morning, opening gifts after breakfast: definitely from my family, rather than Deb's. Stockings were always one of my favorite parts of Christmas growing up, and still are. The challenge at this point is convincing Li to let Ian sleep until something he would consider a "reasonable" hour (maybe a little after 8:00 am, these days).
• The bibliophilic elf: each year, each of us gets a book from a certain literature-loving elf, something we started about 10 years ago.
• Jigsaw puzzles: more from Deb and Deb's family than mine. Deb always gets a puzzle started and everyone helps, whether it is looking for a piece or two as they walk by, or pulling up a chair and sitting down for an extended period of time to work on it. There is almost always a puzzle or two under the tree for all of us each year.

We also tend to play lots of board and card games, and we tend to stay up late watching movies (or, the past couple years, binge-watching something Ian has found like "Firefly" or "Battlestar Galactica"), but I'm not sure those have yet reached what I would consider full tradition status. We also almost always spend a few days with my parents and with Deb's parents somewhere during time around Christmas, either here or at their respective homes; again, part of our typical Christmas Season but not necessarily what I would call tradition.

I've thought about some of these things this Christmas, given a conversation with Deb back in mid-December when we were talking about Christmas. There is actually quite a bit about "Christmas" I really don't like: the busyness, shopping, unwanted obligations or things we do just because we feel like we ought to or are expected to (we all have them, right?), dicey travel conditions, the clutter. The parts I really like are the time spent together as a family (all of us home from work and school) and the food (the eating but even more so the preparation together). Some of that almost certainly comes through in looking at what we've turned into our family traditions. 

Goals for 2014

I'm not really a "resolutions" person, but here are my goals for the new year (in no particular order):

• Read more
• Write more
• Listen more and speak less
• Contribute more
• Consume less
• Simplify

That last one probably deserves a bit of explanation, if only because that's a such a broad characterization of what I have in mind. My (our?) lives have gotten too cluttered on many fronts and would clearly benefit from less clutter on several different levels including stuff, commitments, technology.

One thing I know

If I have learned anything in this first half of my life, it is this: there are few things in life more satisfying than a well-constructed sand castle. And when your daughter helps you build it, the list gets even smaller.

(untitled)

Oh, sweet nectar of life: few things taste as good as this first cup of home-brewed coffee after a 42+ hour fast! That peanut butter and honey sandwich was a distant second.

Sounds

Sitting by an open window this evening, listening to the low rumbles of distant thunder as a late summer storm rolls through on one side and the trickling water of Deb's fountain on the other, and enjoying a couple of finds from the music Ian left us, thinking we might like it: Robert Miles' "Dreamland" and Kruder & Dorfmeister's "G-Stoned". The K&G, in particular, is both a little surprising (but not a lot, given Ian's tastes in music) and pleasing.

(untitled)

Rough day...

Just wondering...

Deb and I spent yesterday morning on our (typically) twice-per-year task of washing down the outside of our house. Deb almost always couples this task with washing all of the windows, inside and out. The only really enjoyable aspect of this 4-hour job is that it is a good excuse for me to get out the power-washer, but other than that, it is a pretty lousy way to spend a Friday off from work.

Every time we do this, some variation of the same question comes to mind: why do we never see anyone else washing their house? I can't believe we're the only people who do, and although I've never walked right up to a statistically significant sampling of homes in our neighborhood to see how dirty they are, I have to believe other home-owners (aside from those "responsible" for the nearly-abandoned house just to the west of us) have some means of keeping their house clean.

Thoughts?

Stuff Li says

Li doesn't like licking envelopes to seal them. She says they "... taste like couscous."

A surprising highlight

Li's U-8 girls team played their first match of the fall season this morning. The end result was, in truth, pretty ugly (a 9-1 loss) but one of the real highlights came from Li. She played the third "quarter" (yes, quarters in soccer: they split the match into quarters to facilitate substitutions) as goalkeeper, and kept a clean sheet. She managed to grab a couple balls, and blocked a couple others.

This from the player who, before the season started when she found out we had a goalkeeper on the field at this level, was pretty emphatic that she did not want to play in goal.

The importance of purpose

Li started first grade this week. In her class, each of the students is assigned a job and they rotate through the jobs over the course of the school year. I love the fact that Li is so excited to have been assigned the job of "paper and pencil monitor" even though she indicates she has no idea what that job means or what she will have to do...