Little Tiny Pieces

I woke up and I was back up North. It was startling. Finely sifted snow is on the ground and even though there are only a few inches so far, it makes for some seriously rip-shit fast sledding. I've been so, so, so busy and the relationship between my computer and my camera really disintegrated, I'm not sure how or when or who is to blame. I can take a thousand photos, load them all and be able to view them, but they can't be uploaded to the Internet, printed, or edited. Well that's not true- a few arbitrary photos are workable, they are completely random and I do not have a choice which ones will be successful. In a way, since I can't select the 'perfect' photos, it actually produces a more realistic view of the last few days. That, plus the intensely slow Internet here, and, well....you get what you get.

 My best friend from high school, Sophia, and her fiance Jenny went over to Castleton Vermont to see our other best friend, Elissa. This diner was a neon-green gem that offered blueberry, cherry, blackberry, butterscotch, chocolate cream, banana cream, razzleberry, peanut butter and apple pie. All of those. Liss and I both went for the grand slam, the Patriarch of all diner pie slices...coconut cream. (I finally found a friend who can keep up with me at a meal, now that she's 9 months pregnant....)

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 Our whole extended family still lives on this land in Vermont, and my generation still gathers here for Christmas, and I still have a dog, and it's grand.  

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So far, there have been a lot of visitors. Friends driving up from New Hampshire and Boston and from just down the road. We've read stacks of christmas books to Jen and Rob's four year old twins, and I met Kerry and Sam's tiny four month old daughter for the first time. We've cooked lots and lots of food and baked ridiculous things like peppermint whoopie pies and gone for long, snowy hikes through the acres and acres of bare forest. But you're not allowed to see any of that, because my computer won't let you. I will show you this instead, a picture of some beer.  There has been a lot of Windsor Vermont's Harpoon Brewery beer consumed. And the electronic world deems this is more important that anything else.

 

And that's about all we have time for now, as we gear up for Christmas day. My family is totally secular. But we go seriously ape shit for Christmas. There's no other way to put it. And to answer the nice emails I've been getting- the blog will be back. The last two weeks of Seattle were nutso, stories to come, and I had to take a totally unanticipated but apparently completely essential vacation.  

Wherever you are, I hope you have something as entertaining and seasonal as a Christmas at the New Yorker Anthology, and little cousins to run around and knock over your glass of beer.