Fiber Fool

Despite the weather causing worry about the holiday it was one of the best in recent memory. The drive was uneventful other than it being very difficult o drive overnight when the night is so darn long. I don’t think we’ll try that tactic again in the winter.

We got to Pipestone, MN just before sunrise on the morning of the 23rd. We were both fighting sleepiness so we stopped off at their McDonald’s so I could have some breakfast and coffee, then DH took over the rest of the driving. Just as we were out of town I realized that everything had a thick coat of ice on it and that the low angle of the winter sunrise made everything sparkle just so. So, we pulled into a terribly icy wayside rest (rest area for non-Interstate highways) and I capture what I could as best as I could. It was lucky timing as soon the sun had risen high enough to be behind clouds and the magic sparkle disappeared.

I’m putting the rest of this behind a cut because it is kind of lengthy. You can see all the photos and get a shorter version of the story at the MN Christmas 2006 set on Flickr.

Tomorrow I think I’ll be peppering the blog with some reviews of the year in few different categories. This is more for my benefit so I apologize in advance if you are not interested in that and give you fair warning.

(Read on …)

We made it to MN. Pulled in around 10:30 am on Saturday morning in fact. We got home last night (Wednesday) about 10:30 pm. Now it is snowing again and the NWS is calling for another 5-9 inches overnight and an additional 2-4 inches tomorrow during the day. We definitely made it home just in time. Unfortunately, it seems this may be putting a wrinkle in the plans to have the holidays with DH’s family as his parents have to be in Arizona by the 6th so they can depart with their fellow RV park residents on a cruise. But, we’ll just sit tight on the presents and see what unfolds.

Grandma and Grandpa surprised my mom, my sister, and me with a bonus for the year with instructions to do something special with it. I’m thinking a new laptop, but I’m torn between Windows or Mac.

My Adobe programs are woefully out of date and are old enough to not allow for upgrade pricing so it seems that if I am to switch platforms the time would be now. However, that just about doubles the price of the laptop (ignoring the dual boot option you can do on the Macs to run Windows-based programs) whereas I could put that off a while longer if I went with a Windows machine.

Before Christmas I think I would have had no trouble choosing as there was a Sony Viao with what I wanted in the way of hard drive and memory for less than going Mac, but now they are about the same price. I was a little worried about going with a smaller screen, but looking at others with the same size screen as the Mac Books, it didn’t seem so bad… I’m worried about some changes that are taking place with Windows Vista regarding drivers and such so if I choose Windows I want to buy soon before everything comes with Vista pre-loaded.

Please, if you have an opinion in this arena let me know! I know DH has decided Mac is for him which means before too long I’ll get to take one for a test drive… But are there knitting programs out there that you can’t live without that are not available for Macs? What are you using for photo editing? Can I limp along for another 6 months or so without Adobe or just using Adobe occassionally on my desktop machine? Does the screen seem too small for photo editing?

I’ll be back next week with much more Christmas stories and pictures. But now I have to make room on my hard drive for the ~200 photos I took on our trip and sort through them.

Thanks to all of you who pulled for good driving weather for us. We really appreciated it!

With any luck we will be departing this afternoon sometime. I really wanted to time it such that our last three hours are in daylight as those are non-interstate roads which have at least one kind of tricky path to follow through a town if I remember correctly. This will have us rolling in on Saturday morning which means we’ll have the rest of Saturday and the early part of Sunday to recover from the drive before jumping into the festivities.

We also go news that DH’s parents car trouble was even worse. They needed a new engine (this is a two year old truck - hopefully warranty covers it). They can’t get an engine until Tuesday. So, they rented a car and drove the three hours back home where they will have Christmas. By the end of next week they should be good to head out west so it looks like when we get back we’ll head to CO Springs and celebrate the holidays with DH’s family as well. Hopefully we’ll get to hitch a ride with SIL3 so we don’t have to do that drive right on the heels of the MN drive!

It’s been hair pulling crazy around here but it is mostly working out. The visit in MN will be about a day shorter than planned, but whatch gonna do? I want to thank all of you for your kind support and encouragement and positive thoughts during all this back and forth about the trip. I really appreciate it!

I’m leaving you with the eye candy of some of our holiday decorations this year. I may or may not be back until the new year. It all kind of depends… I hope everyone out there who is traveling for the holidays does so safely. Enjoy!

Oh, and you can see some more pictures of the big dig out and such at Flickr.

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1. The New Star Lit, 2. Half-Wall and Wreath, 3. Lights on the Wall, 4. Half-Wall Decoration

That is my car in the foreground and DH’s car under the “wave”. Don’t believe me?

It appears to have stopped for the most part. However, I suspect it’ll take the better part of the day to get the cars uncovered. DH is on it already though. Nevermind getting out of our street that doesn’t ever get cleared.

We had so much wind that it is near impossible to guess at the accumulation totals as there was just too much drifting. But, an educated guess (both in experience growing up in MN and college studying meteorology) would be about 1.5 feet probably. There are totals of about 2 - 2.5 ft in Denver and south.

We also got word from DH’s parents who were headed out this direction for the holiday. They got stopped only three hours into their drive with a break down. Fortunately they broke down in a town with a train station so they should be able to make it out here in time for Christmas, though the trailer may not which will slow down their retreat to Arizona for the winter.

I haven’t looked into weather in NE yet. Frankly I don’t care to be depressed anymore than I already am. But the earliest departure we may see would be tomorrow morning, though I seriously doubt that. I don’t know if we’ll go at all. There is no point to roll in late on Christmas Eve off of a 16+ hour drive straight through. We’ll be dead. Plus there were plans back here on the 29th and again on the 31st of course. I’m kind of mad at myself for ever thinking I’d get to spend the holidays with my family.

Thoughts of not getting to celebrate with my family aside, yesterday was a pretty nice day. I got home about 1pm from getting Emma groomed. DH had gotten home shortly after I left to drop her off. He went into work for about an hour or so and decided to head back home. So the day was spent napping (me), and reading (both). Emma spent the entire time in bed with us and refused to go outside until bed time, LOL! Today I think we’ll bake the pepperkakor and I may finally get started on my skirt.

This has been done for weeks. It is a PITA to photograph. It’s long and somewhat boring but isn’t easily dressed with photostyling either so the photos of the full length are BORING. But I offer one if you are curious.

I think these were in craft fairs and such at least a decade or more ago. DH has had from his mom since well before he and I met. I used the dimensions of those as a guide, but I switched things up a bit. I added wider strips that I made from squares pieced together. While DH’s has some lace on it, his is kind of ruffled and this one is straight and nearly missed. I thought mom could feel the piecing and the lace.

While this project doesn’t produce very exciting photographs I think grandma is going to go through the roof when mom opens this. She’s going to go nuts over Amber’s skirt too. It’s going to be so much fun. Well, if we make it that is…

I’ve had some e-mails inquiring about the weather. It’s not good at all. Right now it isn’t too bad here in Ft. Collins, but they are talking the entire NE quarter of the state will be closed by sometime this afternoon. Flights are being cancelled in Denver, though they already have snow packed onto the interstate down there. Most of the schools to our east are closed for the day already too. One of the local news stations is speculating that if you are headed east for the holidays you won’t get out of here until Christmas Eve day. I guess the system is moving very slow. We’re to get snow through noon tomorrow. It looks like most of our route will be getting snow through Friday night and much of that will be snow on top of freezing rain. *sigh*

Well, I got a new pepperkakor recipe mixed up this morning. In just a few I need to take Emma to the groomers and I will go play water volleyball (water aerobics ended last week) while she’s getting cleaned and hopefully she’ll be done when I’m done. I’m debating whether I was to hedge my bets that I’ll be able to get my bad tires out of my street tomorrow afternoon for my hair cut or if I should just take my pics of what I want done to the walk-in place by Emma’s groomers just so my hair is cut and cancel tomorrow’s appointment. Oh, and I need to stop at the store and get some more flour so I can make my sugar cookies tomorrow.