Puff stitch hat

Candy puffs beanie

Thanks to Colleen for the find.

God is an artist!

Watch it in fullscreen, and with the sound on.
Created by TSO Photography

The Mountain from TSO Photography on Vimeo.

His comments on the filming over the course of a week at El Tiede, Spain, are available at The Mountain on Vimeo

Shrubbery

The Knights who say Ni came to visit us today.
They were guised as workmen looking for tree trimming/removal jobs, knocking doors in our neighborhood, going for no.
We, by contrast, had ~75 linear feet of overgrown juniper that we've been wanting to get rid of since we moved in.

Here's the house as it went to the market last April:
(By the way, yarbhill, those white things are crepe myrtles, which had been trimmed way back too. But they've since sent shoots up again and are looking more treelike.)

And as it was when we moved in, in October:


By January, when there was not a flake of snow in the forecast and the lawns were still the green of "we might grow just as well as hibernate", came knocking The Knights who say Ni. (This is not their professional name... although our grass is cut by a guy who, the first time I met him, was wearing a herringbone Batman shirt, so it's not totally beyond the realm of possibility.)

Within 90 minutes they turned this

into this

Hey, we have a mailbox and everything down there -- it actually makes the mailbox feel closer, because before it was a little labyrinthine.

OK, maybe not quite, but hey, never a bad time for Labyrinth.
Also,

Sorry, got sidetracked. Anyways...

They also cut down a holly tree that I'm sure at one time was a lovely little bush at the corner but had become a behemoth that overhung the second-story window and was a little alarming in the winds this past week, although it hadn't bothered us previous to that.

In an interesting confluence, we also took the Christmas tree down today, so the living room seems significantly bigger as well. And the house smells pleasantly of juniper.

I hope our friends recognize Credo the next time they visit.

New Year's Eve, baby!

For the last dozen years, we've celebrated New Year's at our friends' home back in PA.  And we thought about what it would take to go there again this year... but with our Christmas trip heading west instead of north, we decided instead to host for ourselves.  Inspired by Wil Wheaton's & Felicia Day's Tabletop, we made up our own Trophy of Awesome and made sure we had tape and a Sharpie on hand.

Beads for everyone, invite your friends!

We played Walk the Plank, Clue, Harry Potter Uno (which is like regular Uno, but with a Howler wild card that makes you tell everyone every single card in your hand, and an invisibility cloak wild card that shields you from a negative card), Qwirkle, Star Fluxx (it's a card game version of Calvinball), Dutch Blitz, and Blokus.






The Trophy of Awesome made a couple stops, but kept looping back to one individual in particular! She three-peated! (She also wore different headgear each time.)

Also,


The quote of the evening comes from Star Fluxx, Brain parasites! (It's a Creeper.) We even discovered a tactile reference for them, the head-massager whisk. (Sequined hats additional.)

Russian Watch Brigade?

(scrolling thru the tv listings)
Russian Watch Brigade?
Oh.  That doesn't mean watching the Russians, that means watches from Russia.