Winter at Virginia Beach

In the middle of last week BD suggested we run away to the beach for the weekend. Actually what he suggested was taking a week off and heading to the Caribbean - or New Orleans or someplace south - and warm - to which I answered with a shriek and then a garbled and totally useless explanation about how I am in technical overload at work and I am the head geek. It was garbled mostly because the moment I mention technology in connection with my job I get the lecture about libraries are books and card catalogs (and silent) and what is the purpose of technology in a library and usually that is where the conversation stops. Unanswerable questions get silence but the lead up to them sometimes gets a turkey gobble.

Still - Someone is sensitive to spousal tensions and kindly backed off the idea of a week's vacation 3 weeks after a 2 week Christmas vacation with the suggestion "How about a weekend at VaBeach?"  - which got a much more enthusiastic response. So once I got to a stopping place at werk on Friday we tooled down the highway to that strip of sand along the southern foot of the state. 

It's seriously off-season this time of year - as far as I could tell, the only thing going on this weekend was a kiddie beauty pageant and I only know that because I saw a family checking out on Saturday with an arm full of prom dresses for an 8 year old. Atlantic Ave and even Pacific Ave, one block in from the ocean, were pretty much deserted all the time. Left turns were a breeze and you could drive the 60 blocks on cruise control and never tap a break. Enough restaurants were open to feed we few hungry souls and the boardwalk was steadily occupied with strollers, joggers and bicycles, but never crowded. and of course, off-season prices made ocean front rooms fit nicely within our budget.

One think you better look out for, though, when visiting VaBeach.The handicapped parking spaces along the road are NOT easy to see - the signs face out rather than towards the unsuspecting driver, as she pulls up to the curb. Also, the curbs are NOT painted with a distinguishing color. And though the streets are deserted by tourists and locals at 9 o'clock on a Friday night, there are still patrol cars every 3 blocks, just as if it were summertime. Ask me how I know.

Eh. I do not $weat the $mall $tuff. Or even the Big $tuff when I am on vacation.

We were driving around so late at night in part because it was so easy to. BD loves to bargain for a hotel room and in January at VaBeach, it's easy to pull in and out of parking lots and ask. In the end we settled for a Holiday Inn Express because it had an ocean front room on a top floor with a king size bed, pool and hot tub and nice breakfast setup. We took advantage of the relaxed atmosphere to scout out other hostelry and we found an older motel with some interesting amenities that are tempting us to go back down there next month. Not for Valentine's day or President's Day weekend - which we did once years ago, only to find that rates jumped up, rooms filled up and restaurants, the few that were open, were very crowded, but certainly towards the end of February when even the library director will be ready to run away to join the circus or walk the beach.

Which is my favorite thing to do at the beach after swimming and just one step ahead of feeding sea gulls stale white bread. Bess's Beach Rules start off with - Whenever visiting the beach, feet must step into the surf. Here is proof that I am a good rule follower. We walked about 8 miles on Saturday and maybe 2 of them I went barefoot. I won't do that again. The sand was cold and my feet were numb when I got back to where I'd stashed my shoes.




This is what you see at VaBeach - while strolling towards Ft. Storey - cargo ships leaving Cape Henry.










The sand looks almost empty - but there were actually a good number of people enjoying the sunshine. A few surfers. Lots of very well behaved dogs with even more responsible owners. Nothing nasty anywhere I stepped.

We went first up the beach, away from the blazing winter sunshine - from about 29th street to 60th and back. Then it was off to one of the few sandwich/pizza places for lunch (Chicken chipotle sub for TheQueen) and an afternoon stroll from the hotel to Rudee's Inlet to watch the boats go in and out - a dredger, which was in full sucking operation

and

the whale watching boat which we did not go on. BD seemed to lose interest in the extra ticket price after we'd had our encounter with VaBeach's Best Blues. It was okay though - we saw lots of dolphins capering in the waves. That was enough wildlife for me.

There's a lot of nostalgia wrapped up in visiting the beach. Time was (decades ago), after Easter, the first girl to convince her parents to drive a carload of friends down to the beach for the day was given instant Coolest Chick Status. We could usually count on Myra Medina's parents, Cuban exiles who really missed the ocean, to take us down 2 weeks before Memorial Day weekend. With extreme pleading I could sometimes get Daddy to drive us down too. The object was to get as sunburned as possible so that you could prove your claim when you went to school on Monday. Remember those Copertone ads? Baby oil as a suntan lotion? Then you probably also remember when there were a lot of buildings that looked like these:
  

One of the oddest things about traveling is how .... everybody is someone you don't know. Here, at home, in my little world, I am TheQueen of TheLibrary. I'm just me and everyone is comfortable with that. When I get out in the world - where nobody knows me at all - I realize - I am an old lady. At least - I look like I might be somebody's grandma. I look around and see what hot young things look like - nope. not me. And I look at the young parents ... nope - not that either - and then there are the really old folk, you know, white hair - glasses - wattles. That can't be me, can it?

hmmm. okay. Yes. I guess it can be. Well. Not the white hair but that's because I am such good friends with the L'Oreal and Clairol boxes. But it is a surprise that I might not look like who I feel like inside. BD doesn't think about that kind of thing and luckily, his eyesight is so bad we're all soft and fuzzy with, in my case, a sort of peach colored glow. Guess I shouldn't care either, hmmm?  Both of us are great fans of playing with the sea gulls. These guys got to know our balcony and even long after the loaf of bread was gone, would swing buy the window, just in case, you know?

After a day of beach hiking -  about 8 miles altogether - we flopped down in the hotel room and watched television. Once upon a time television watching was a high point of all our travels. Because we don't get TV reception at our house we would often stay up all night long watching whatever was the current version of Hawaii 5-0 and Mary Tyler Moore Show. We even enjoyed the ads because they were all fresh and new to us. But then along came cable TV which didn't even have ads and we were charmed - even if the same movie about a Droid girl in tight leather pants who was being chased by robot killing thugs with spiked chokers around their necks seemed to be on every channel. I am sure I watched some version of that movie for a dozen years. But now, TV is ... well, I'm sorry to say but it's such an experiment in living life with ADD that I found it hard to focus on even the most erudite BBC-esque cultural offering.

Dinner was a completely unnecessary, but wickedly fun, trip to Captain George's Seafood Restaurant where a large buffet topped off a week's worth of caloric need.

And then it was Sunday. Instead of doing a repeat of the hike - or even driving up to 60th street and walking up the beach to Ft. Story - we decided to drive west through Chesapeake and Suffolk and take the Jamestown Ferry home. You also get to drive through some of the best ham country in VA. At Smithfield we hit a traffic snarl but at Surry we made a left onto 31 to go just enough out of our way to get the world's best ham sandwiches at Edwards Store.
mmm. mmm. I'm still tasting that smokey salty goodness.


It's just a scant bit of a way from Ham Heaven to the ferry where there are More Hungry Birds. I shared my second bag of white bread with 2 kids traveling with their Dad and we had a ball. This free trip across the James River, right past the sight of the original First English colony,  is a delight. You pass the obelisk, the archaeological site, the reconstructed ships and then you're heading up the highway to West Point where you can cross the Mattaponi and the Pamunkey without paying a toll like you do on the York - and you miss all the shopping and sprawl in Gloucester county.

Home again, jiggety jig by 4 o'clock to get the first good cup of coffee in 2 days. My own dogs, ever forgiving, cuddled up against us (Jack is a great one for siting on your feet). A quick scroll through my email and a pot of chicken soup pretty much finished off the weekend for TheQueen. It's back o werk werk werk for now.

Knitting Infidelity

It's true - with only scant inches to go on Brica I cast on with the Cascade 220 just to see, you know? It doesn't mean a thing. I swear it, I was just curious.

It's true, too - I feel so guilty about abandoning Brica at the altar that I am always taking the new knitting along and leaving the chart behind so I can't knit on it - I guess the truth goddesses are trying to make me be faithful.

But I really will finish that sweater. I promise. I'll do better. I'll do better with blogging too - once I get through this patch of busy-ness that is January.



There is good news on the technology front - I got the help I needed with the EReader, I train my staff today, we go live on Wednesday but we'll let it seep into peoples' consciousness for a week or two before we do the big publicity push.

I'll get around to ordering a new phone too - but cell phones rank low on my list of priorities. I need a new one - especially with my aged mother who was ill enough this week to need hospitalization. (She's better, btw) But I am in the same 2 places most of the time and both of those places have land lines.

And of course right in the middle of all this stuff I took a day off to go lingerie shopping. Ever since I watched that first episode of How To Look Good Naked  I've wanted to be fitted by a bra whisperer so a few weeks ago I wrote to Laruen DeLoach, the fashion columnist in the Richmond Sunday paper (just in case she actually lived in Richmond) and asked if she knew who the best bra fitter in Richmond was. She recommended the folks at Blythe which, technically, is in Henrico, at Short Pump across from that vast sprawl of brick shopping,  on the south side of Broad Street. She also said don't try to shop there on Saturday, but I didn't need that advice. A Master Shopper, I know that Tuesday or Thursday mornings are the best times to get super personal attention anywhere.

At my age it takes a little guts to go talk bra fitting with sylph-like twenty somethings in size zero clothes, but Anna was enormously helpful, knew the stock inside and out and brought me dozens of pieces to try on so I could be sure I got what I really wanted. I wore my new acquisition out of the store and let me tell you - there is nothing but nothing quite so wonderful as strolling around in new undergarments that fit you to a T. mmm mmm I was walking tall all day long.

The shop doesn't have a website but they do have a facebook page here.  And for the curious, you can see what I bought here.

And now? Now it's Friday. Friday Friday Friday Friday Friday

Why yes. I do plan to knit a little this weekend. Why would you ask?

Technology Overload

Originally written last week but too overwhelmed to post - and - No. I haven't knit that little neckband on Brica. I haven't knit anything all week. I am blaming it on Technology Overload, with some justification, too, but not with an entirely honest heart. Yes. The library goes live with it's eBooks on February 1 and I still can't get my Nook to open up the borrowed book I loaded onto it. Their website gives you clear directions. Just didn't work on my apparatus. Chat-boxing with Mary from Adobe was interesting and she gave me a nice set of instructions. They didn't work either. The work order guy from India had another set of instructions. They didn't work. If I had this problem, my patrons will too - so ... we have issues. I've tossed problem out among some consortium buddies in the hopes that they have solved this problem. Not good. And I still have to teach my staff.


And then there is Kindle. Let us hope this works more easily than the nook/adobe pathway. Amazon is actually manipulating this process behind the scenes of the consortium website. There are also the two new web pages that have to be created on our library website. oh yes. and the eBooks loaded into our catalogs.

At the same time, my phone died. I always by $10 phones (which, I believe, are now only available in the $15 version). I have to pick a new one and get to know it all over again - and of course - it has to be something my Luddite husband can figure out too. This is the guy who no longer turns on the DVD player because the buttons aren't where they were on the last remote we had - and besides, he just gets angry that the wide screen does not fill up with a movie - unless he's willing to watch everything with extra wide faces and short squatty legs. Which he isn't.

And oh gawd my brain is exploding.

So. No. I haven't really been in the mood to knit the neckband onto a sweater whose shoulders do not promise to make me happy. They might make me happy - but they might not.

Mind now,  I enjoy technology - it's just that I'm overwhelmed and crunched by deadlines. That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

First Glimpse of Brica

Whoa - didn't mean to disappear like that - stuff just happened. PerfectAngelBabyDarlingOnlySon, a.k.a. LD,  returned from a month abroad - which always makes the tempo around TheCastle different. He's another dawn prowler and I don't like to use a computer when there is a PABDOS to talk to. 

Then more family showed up which made electronic devices even less interesting. Only niece on my side of the family is adding a new generation so we welcomed the 2.5 of them on Saturday for a long delicious afternoon of talking, walking and eating the magnificent honeybell tangelos I brought home on Thursday. 

I am in love with her man and think her father would have adored him. I'll just have to love him twice - once for me and once for Ned, who surely is smiling down from that great archaeology dig up in the sky. 

But I know my faithful readers are really longing to hear about Brica (the former Aran) so here she is - in all her penultimate glory.

  

 I'm delighted with the neckline, over which I agonized. I am less thrilled with the sleeves which want to poke up right at the seam and feel a little skimpy at the very cap. Too narrow. This tells me that I either:

a. came in too far when I was decreasing from the body

OR

b. decreased too frequently as I was taking stitches from the sleeve

I'm going to go ahead and finish the sweater. Yes. I know - complete with neck band that I will have to rip out if I decide I'm still unhappy with it. But I'll block this baby and see if that will take care of the shoulder and sleeve cap issues. If it doesn't - there are 2 more skeins of this decade-old Cashmerino Aran to reknit the shoulder area. I can do that.

Something odd cropped up while I was dithering with the shoulder part this weekend. I decided to weave in ends, a soothing task that is my second favorite part of sweater making. (the first is casting on, of course) I found a hole. A hole with ends woven in around it. When I plucked out the ends to see what the h????? there was just that - a hole - and 2 stitch loops on the bottom - 1 stitch loop on the top of it. I can't figure it out. I can't imagine when this happened. This is so definitely not the way I knit - with weird surprises showing up at the end. Eh. It is darned. It shows - to me - but I know where to look. Thank goodness, it's on the side, in the stockinette part of the sweater, pretty much where my arm will hang down and hide it. But - weird.  

I'm anxious to finish this baby up before what little cold weather we've got left is gone for good. I have two other sweaters just begging to be knit and warm weather will be here before you know it! 

And now - it is Tuesday - this week's Monday. Ta.

My 12 for 12 - little habits I want to fold into my days

Those who know me know I love me some New Year's Resolutions. I love making them and I love looking back to see if I kept any. Usually, during that week between Christmas and New Year, sometimes even earlier, little ideas percolate in my brain, nudging me towards that Oz of Perfection that, though I laugh and tease about it, I believe all of us are journeying towards. 

This year was a little different. For the first time in a long time I wasn't chafing with dissatisfaction about myself, my health, my body, my house, my work. Not that there isn't room for improvement or progress or movement - just that - this year I was in a really happy good place. I didn't want to make any grand changes. Who would - when standing in a really happy good place? I just wanted to make some little changes - some 'start small', baby step, trim tab shifts. And I wanted it to feel positive - to feel enriching. I wanted to add some good habits to my life.

Those infamous "They" say that it takes 21 days to create a habit and as I got to thinking about 2012 and how many good habits I might want to add it suddenly hit me - I could
add one good habit a month and I'd have 12 for 12. The cuteness of the thought - because I do realize it's a little sloganey - tickled me. Actually finding 12 things turned out to be something of a challenge since they had to be small enough to be things I'd want to do every day yet important enough to matter to my life.

The ground rules were that I could play around with any of these habits at any time, but each one was to be the star of its own month. Each one would be given a full 30 days of constant attention. And they did not have to be all about weight and health. Each month I could chose the habit that either appealed to me the most, or that seemed the most necessary to concentrate on. If - during the year - some Other Better Habit revealed itself to me I could swap it out for one still on the list.

So. Here are my 12 for 12 in no particular order:

1. Food Tracking
I know this is good for me. I know it's important. I know this is the next step I have to take to get rid of this last 12 lbs. I don't HATE tracking food - but I haven't made the effort to do it. This is the First Good Habit I'm working on.

2. Wear a pedometer and get those 10K steps
10K steps, 4 activity points, whatever you want to call it - the goal is to build into my life more movement - I move - but not enough.

3. Drink 6-8 cups of water every day
I live where the tap water is absolutely delicious. Even at work!! So tell me why I forget to do this? Idunno - but I do. Good habit to get into

4. The Charles Schwab list at work
At least he's the one credited with the idea - you list the top 5 things you need to do tomorrow. Prioritize that list. Then - do those 5 things first, every day, even if you do nothing else. If there is something on that list you did not do today, it becomes the top item on tomorrow's list. The key here is you do it every day. I've diddled with this and know it works - but - I've not been consistent with it.

5. Read my 5-year play every morning - because it is so durn easy to forget what I'd planned to do until it's review time and then I have to confess to all the things I failed to do! (a corollary to this is - have each of my staff read it at least once a week too - but that's another list)

6. Compliment someone on my staff every day
I really like the people who work for me - and they deserve to know it. Also - in order to compliment someone you have to look at what they're doing - and when you do you often notice strengths they have that could be used in other areas of the workplace. People get tired of doing the same thing all the time but they always love being asked to do what they do well. I need to take advantage of these strengths to enliven their day while also enriching the workplace!

7. Read some fiction every day. 

I love stories - I run a library for goodness sake! But I have grown so weary of what's popular in fiction these days that I have quit reading it. One more snarky woman struggling with her dysfunctional family and looser weak man ... ugh. Still and all - I don't like it that I'm so ignorant about current fiction. Time to at least dabble in the subject.

8. Draw 20 minutes a day. I will never get any better if I don't practice every day

9. Select a big life goal - a big personal thing - and take one step towards it ... every day.
I want to take a boat up a fjord in Norway? How would I go about it. What step could I take today that would get me there?

10. Ditto at work - Select something from the 5-year Plan and step one step closer to achieving it - or to realizing it's not the goal we wanted to achieve and getting it out of the plan.

11. Clean the kitchen every night. I am a morning person and am often really tired at night. It's easy to get up at 5 and clean the kitchen - but seeing a dirty kitchen first thing in the morning starts my day off with a tiny bit of ugliness. How about starting it off with something pretty instead?

12. Pray. Take a little time to step deep into myself, deliberately, and touch base with what's really important.

And there you have them. All are things I sort of do or do now and then or do once in a while. But just think how lovely 2012 would be if I made them daily habits. Mmmm Mmmm. My My My. Yes. Just think! 

Hats Off - Or Perhaps Hats On - to Hats

One of my favorite bloggers, E, over at Fillyjonk's Progress  is also having her hat moments and in her most recent post she wished she had more occasions to wear hats. ... Wear More Hats - sounds like a slogan. I believe I need a bumper sticker. I believe there is always a reason to wear a hat. Of course, large brimmed hats fight with compact cars so I usually leave mine on the seat and wear it only from the car into whatever building I am entering - but there are enough times when I am outside, walking, and my hat is appropriate. And those velvet bucket hats and cloches can be worn in the car - so there is really no excuse for a woman to go hatless.

It takes some chutzpah to wear one the first time or two - but after a while you'll get known as the hat lady. Someone once told me he knew I was at a funeral because he saw my hat. Myriad women have sighed and told me they wished they could wear hats but that they look terrible in them.  I always reply that there is a hat that looks good on every face. I suppose I should have prefaced that with "Many hats are butt ugly on my face" because most of the time my compliment-er  just shakes her head in disbelief.

Hats that are ugly on me?

http://www.e4hats.com

Most cloches - only those with either unusually high crowns or with an extend flaring brim work with my  chipmunk cheeks.






Almost any baseball cap, painter's hat or newsboy cap

http://shop.1asecure.com

Hat by Decky, sold on Amazon

Those lumber jack hats or the Andean ones in elaborate knitted colorwork - or any hat with ear flaps. At my age, the jowls do not need attention drawn to them.

http://oregonregency.blogspot.com 

I suspect the huge poke bonnets of the 1820's would also no longer work on a face that has gazed out upon a certain number of years and since these hats really are extreme - it would be difficult to wear them with modern clothes. But oh sigh. They are soooo beautiful. But I could imagine owning a coat that would work with this hat  ...


Ahh well. It is almost 8 on a Monday morning and the work week beckons. I leave you with this one final link - to an absolutely marvelous website on making period clothing - including hats!  Denise Nadine Designs. The whole site is worth wandering through if you have any interest at all in clothing, costume, history, hats ... I am inspired to host a hat making workshop as a fundraiser ... absolutely too cool. Got to talk to the local museum about this.

And now - it is off to werk for me. Ta.

The Shopping Never Ends

A trip into the city yesterday gave me the opportunity to get a birthday present for someone at work. We all pool a little bit, when birthday's come around, and gift each other. Can I help it if I have a weakness for hiring Aquarians? LOL  That's not exactly true - there is now only one Aquarius working with us, but once there were 3!!! Plus my mama, and S, and my college bff! 

Anyway, I managed to snap up a bargain for TheQueen too - who has been looking to replace her red winter hat, because her old one was attacked by m***s last summer. I'm fairly careful with sweaters and yarn during our long, buggy summers and I do box my hats - but I see now that I shall have to box them with repellents from now on. I like a new hat - what (hat) woman doesn't - but I don't like having to buy them. They're too expensive and too difficult to find. 

I had hoped that last spring's royal wedding would have sparked a greater spate of hat opportunities, as an earlier one did in the 1980's. I did find one of those head band fascinator hats - very chi chi - cute even on an old face - but fortunately for my budget, it was the wrong brown to go with my brown coat. It was really a suit hat anyway not a coat hat. Cocktail hats? Isn't that what they are called? Still wool felt, but very fine gauge and heavy with buckram.  It really was cute though. You could talk me into wearing one sometime. Where oh Where is a good millinery shop? Sigh.

But here are a couple of on-line sources worth a peep.

 KaKyCo   with a nice array of well trimmed wool felt hats that won't break the bank.

 Fascinatorhat dot com, an undeveloped website, has a very good page on making your own. 

I Can Do The Hard Stuff

Here is proof that TheQueen really can do what has to be done. As you can see in this photo - the decreases in the sleeve did not a sleeve cap make - a sleeve peak, maybe, but not a cap. The unfortunate thing is that I really knew this within oh - a few inches of sleeve decreases - but thought it might not be so bad if I continued on making decreases into the sleeve every other round. 

wrong

I will know better next time. My excuse is ... no excuse. Just laziness. 

Of course - this is always a disappointment to a knitter and TheQueen is no exception. I just pushed the whole sweater into a corner on the couch and told myself I would get to it later. And of course, I went back to work the next day, and the gym afterwards, and then I was sleepy and went to bed early - after a nice hot bath. And then it was Wednesday and there was no knitting that night because I will not cast on another thing until Brica is finished - but who could finish a sweater that needed 8 inches of shoulder knitting frogged? 

The dilemma then was - if I wanted to knit - I would have to frog first - and so yesterday morning the ordeal began. 

To prevent creating a vast nest of tangled yarn I tied the loose end onto my swift and twirled away at that, simultaneously unraveling my knitting and making a tidy skein - there were 2 skeins worth of yarn to pull out of my poor sweater. 

I'm happy to report: Nasty Task completed (even that length of yarn is nicely wound into a center-pull ball now) and knitting can resume this weekend. 

Ouch! Back to Werk!

Good thing I love what I do - cause I am totally spoiled with this vacation stuff. Lingering over the computer in the morning - doing yoga when I want, walks through the woods during the afternoon sunshine or early evening sunsets ... all those things have to be saved for the weekend now - but then - there are adventures up ahead at the library this month. For one thing - we're adding circulating E-books for the nook'n'kindle folk. Then there are some Web Two Oh things I really want to add to our library website, including a genealogy page. It's going to be a techie January for me.

Alas - I did not finish Brica. There is a miscalculation with the decreases into the sleeves  - I was making the decreases every other round and I really needed to do that ever third round. I suspected this when I had only a few inches to rip out and stupidly continued knitting. Now I have a lot of inches to rip out - but a-frogging I must go. Ah well. There was no deadline on this thing. I can finish it over the next 2 weeks and still get 6 weeks of wear out of it. Of course, I'm itching to cast on the oatmeal Aran and the ab-fab stranded colorwork jacket - and I will give myself permission to doodle on paper with numbers and colors - but there will be No Stitches Before Their Turn - even IF all the astrologers agree - the next 3 weeks are truly auspicious for Starting New Things.

I shall save some of that for my weight issues - which everybody, including TheQueen, deals with in January. In my case, it's not as bad as all that. I am starting 2012 more zephyr-like than I have for oh - maybe - 5 years - but I am nowhere near where I want to be. Happily - not a magazine, newspaper, or publisher's list exists that isn't chock-a-block full of Healthy Eating Advice. Besides - I go to Weight Watchers and am actually rather enjoying it. I'm not much of a joiner or a clubber sort of person - but I really REALLY like their newest plan. It's pretty much South Beach without the meanness of the south beach author - who's book I have read, er, worse, listened to -  but who's name I have forgotten because he sounded so nasty. Both of my doctors really encourage south beach I can get it delivered from WW in language I won't be offended by.

Still and all, I have only given WW a lick and a promise. I'm quite close to goal - I've dithered around almost a year - I keep hearing the leader asking "are you going to pay that $10 a week for the rest of your life?!?"  She did not say this to me, rather, she quoted her husband talking to her, but I love it! My kind of kick in the pants. And the answer is "no." So for at lest as long as  Mars is going forward in my house of ... what? Git-It-Done? I believe I shall give WW my full attention.

Time to take off - time to soar ... also time to get ready for work. Ta.

New New Year, New New Day, New New New Two Zero One Two

While I love antiques and I love old houses, old music lines my CD shelves, and old friends warm my heart. But when it comes to time - I love me some New. A New Day always feels sweet in the morning. A New Week means I can take huge steps forward on some project or another. A New Month and you can make a real change in your routine. A New Year!?! The possibilities seem endless.

But before I dash away from the  old year, I like to take a look back. And with this year - with the monumental changes I've been through - wow - it's worth a look. 

Because there was January - when I had laryngitis - oh my - silence from TheQueen- and I completed my first (so far my only) knitted dress.

And there was February - when I took my HCJ with me on a visit to beloved W&C's island house on Chincoteague - and where the nicest state trooper let us off with a warning about our expired inspection sticker because I was laughing so hard at my stupidity.

And March - when I had the first Mean Girl experience I can remember since I was in elementary school  and when we went to the Picasso exhibit in Richmond

April brought a library function AND a trip to the Grand Canyon, on which we learned to write down the lot number and aisle location when you're leaving your car in long term parking.  

May seemed to be filled with parties - parties parties parties - and time spent with beloved cousins. And the first of the Farmer's Markets 

June struck us with the first of the great losses when our precious dog Priss had to be put down. Paralyzed by a tumor on her spine we said goodbye to her while we stroked her with gentle loving hands. 

July was worse when my Daddy died  

And yet

Throughout both of those months there was loving and goodness and oh - so much more on this side of the veil to hold me up through the long hard slog of adjusting to great loss. 

August felt like a haze to me but my wonderful staff held things together and the month had its own treasures too - like a visit to the Faberge display at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts - and surprises - like an earthquake AND hurricane in the same week! 

September - ah well. September is birthday month - which makes everything just right - and it included a wonderful dinner with favorite author Brad Parks - fundraising for the library. And I knit a whole sweater in 4 weeks!

October BD and I celebrated 40 years of life together - AND visited friends in NYC ... a visit which included a Night at the Opera.

November - why - Thanksgiving of course and a quest for the perfect coconut cake.

December - 31 days of absolute Christmas bliss

Yup. A monumental year has just flowed behind me. What in the world will the next 366 days hold? Won't it be fun to find out?