A SHAKY BEGINNING

The new year has had a pretty shaky beginning; hopefully, not a predictor of things to come. Wyatt and Kahlil are faithfully guarding my monitor and cords, while the guts of the computer--the tower/hard drive--are vacationing in the computer shop. Grrr...one doesn't realize how dependent he's become on these annoying machines until he's crashed after five years of almost daily duty.

Vale and I also had a shaky--albeit hilarious experience with gingerbread. I finally remembered just a day or two before he left that I'd bought a gingerbread house kit and a package of pre-mixed gingerbread man cookie mix, so one day we launched upon our project. There was no gingerbread cookie cutter in my kitchen drawers, so Vale carefully drew his own pattern. He rolled out the cookies, cut them out and baked them, all the time talking a mile a minute about the state of his latest video game. While we waited for the cookies to cool, Vale began the house, propping up the walls with cans of turkey gravy.

Once the walls were cemented with icing, and the walls were propped up with cans, we went to the movie, planning to return and frost the gingerbread men. When we returned home, we found only three gingerbread men!! Grandpa had had a midnight snack. Vale gallantly conceded that they were a little mutated anyway. On to the house. Vale worked hard on decorating the house, sharing his thoughts, and he created a beautiful house. As he finished the last touches, he said, "Grandma, how do we get the cans out that are inside the house??" Good question. With the icing we'd made, they were so entombed in the house that there was no way they would escape!! Later in the evening, Vale decided he'd really made the house so he could eat the gingerbread, so he snapped a picture of the cans!!

Vale wanted badly to have snow while he was here, and we did get some on Christmas Day. He would be so envious!! Today, we have 8 to 10 inches of the stuff with more on the way. We'd always said that when we got older, we wouldn't worry about snowy days; we'd just take Louis Lamour's counsel and hunker down. We'd stock up plenty of food, wood, books, and movies and leave the snow shoveling to the working stiffs. After five or six snowstorms back to back since October, we've cleaned the house from stem to stern, eaten all the stocked up food, read the books, and watched the videos. We're grateful to be able to start teaching our classes again tomorrow--Provided we can get out of our driveway! Snowed in. Love, Mom