We’re headed back to the rink soon: we could have skated through the summer, but there was so much work we needed to do, and of course personal events intervened—so we hope to get back onto the ice without cracking our skulls or anything else essential.
We’re still working on Closed Circle, and hope to have that going very, very, very soon.
And we are actually making progress with the house organization, which has every room but the living room and the basement in good shape…those are next on our list. And it’s our earnest desire to get at the models this winter: we love to do models. Who knows: maybe I’ll try to reconsitute my calluses and remember my guitar chords. So between work, skating, reorganizing and modeling, we’re going to have a full slate.
One of the things we’ve discovered is a source of shelves: Collections, Etc. is a marvelous little company that sells really inexpensive (under 20.00) shelves, some as cheap as under 10.00. They’re really fragile wood, but if you pick carefully and use a little carpentry to improve on them, they’re great. Jane’s room theme is Chinese, so she’s been able to bric-a-brac to her heart’s content. Mine is nautical—arrrh!—and tropical, so I’ve been a little less committed to shelves, but by golly, we’re organized.
We’ll be skating, feeding the birds, shoveling snow, and building miniature ships if things go as planned.
So what do you do when the weather turns?
You know, it’s sad. All I do is close the windows and turn on the heat when the weather turns cold. Start to seriously shop for Christmas presents. No real traditions until Thanksgiving, really, when family starts gathering. But then the weather doesn’t really “turn” for us until January, so…
Try to really, truly get all the sources documented in the family tree. If I get tired of doing that there’s always DH tree to start.
I’d love to do that. Unfortunately, some of the less-documented work was done decades ago and in libraries several hundred miles away. At least we have some idea of what and where ….
Keep swimming. I am not a good swimmer (‘staying alive while in the water’ always sounded like a good description to me) but it is a wonder for the required exercise I am supposed to get on a daily basis, especially now that it is near dark (soon to be full dark) when I get home from work, as well as when I leave (at 5 AM) – too dark to walk and soon both too dark and too icy.
So I swim – at the city pool. I am old enough now to get the ‘senior pass’ so it’s dirt cheap as well as convenient. I am becoming a competent swimmer at my own version of a breast stroke (thank you very much but NO, I will NOT put my face in the water). The city pool closes at Thanksgiving, and doesn’t reopen until after New Year, so that means finding one of the hotels in town that has ‘memberships’ so I can swim through the cold months.
Hotel indoor pools are sure to be warmer than the city pool, too, which is in an aged 1970’s vintage glass enclosed building. (There’s an outdoor pool as well, but it is already closed for the winter).
Other than that – keep on with work and home and kids and try to stay out of debt, now that we are finally out – maybe even save a little bit of money….
oh well, one can dream, surely?
Aside from work, work, work, I’ll likely continue on my reading list for the year. Seriously, work will occupy most of my waking time from now until January, but that’s the consequence of working in an industry where the last 2-3 months of the year are the busiest.
I’m going to be healing. Hopefully, my right knee won’t have the same healing problems as my left knee did after both replacement surgeries. My right knee is scheduled to be replaced on Tuesday morning. If that weren’t bad enough, I’ve got at least 4 weeks of physical therapy to look forward to completing. 🙁
Good luck to you! I’ll be watching for an update and hope that all goes well.
Oh, then best of luck to you and I hope it goes very smoothly! Keep us posted!
I just, with the help of my son, bought a TV set, a Wii, and a Wii Fit Plus (with the balance board). He hooked everything up for me, and I’ve been playing with it this weekend. My Mii (avatar) is plumpish and I hope to slim her down this winter. Just now I’m sure she is bruised; I’ve been playing at taking her down a curvy river, and we keep wrecking the boat on the banks. (To do this, you stand on the balance board, shift weight forward to move the boat ahead, and to left/right to steer. It’s harder than it sounds, at least for me; I’m sure figure skaters would have the knack right away.)
Otherwise, I’ll be working pretty much full-time through the winter; accepted a new research job before wrapping up the old one. The extra money will go for a trip someplace, maybe I’ll finally get to Australia before I’m too old!
Oh its always trying not to fall on the ice. I do every year, last year’s being the worst, cracking the back of my head on the pavement.
Other than that, just the usual painting and writing, setting the bird feeders out and dreaming of spring.
Love to read and write. Love to knit and crochet when it starts to get cold. Rarely have time to do all that I want and when I do I often find out I need more money than I have. Sigh.
my goals for the winter are the same as my goals always are: work on sewing projects, clean/organize my office (a perpetual project), and keep on working.
i have a studio to reorganize and r&d to do for new items before my first wholesale show in feb. hopefully will get last minute orders from retailers needing inventory to catch up with sales so am trying to get motivated to create inventory now. and there’s the xmas decorating 😉 LOVE lights, especially moving changing lights. and working on the family ancestry research.
The weather has turned! Two weeks ago we had green leaves. But we had a week of 60’s, and the trees turned over night. Then we had a week of 70’s, and now we’re barely scraping 30. The leaves have all fallen.
This winter I start a really big project at work that will eat tons of my time. If I have any left, I’ll quilt. And then there is the perennial first novel. I’m still learning how to write. Maybe this winter I’ll finally have enough skills in place to not feel embarrassed about the beginning when I get to the end.
I’ll tell you a deep secret: when you’re starting out, you re-write the beginning once you get to the end. It’s the first thing an editor reads, so you want it to be your most recent, most polished work. So don’t worry too much: you’ll get better as you go.
Living in the Phoenix area, winter is the time when activity starts, not when it ends. Now that the 110 degree days are behind us, we’ll have pretty much perfect weather until May. So I have three young horses to train to ride, two weanling foals to halter break, and lots of yard work to do. Come February, it’ll be time to start breeding the mares (my stallion can’t wait for that day!) and staying up nights waiting for the new foals. I just started planting my fall garden and am looking forward to some fresh produce. This time of year I write mostly at night when the horses are eating and sleeping, and we go for rides in the desert when the sun is warm in the afternoon. Ahhh, fall/winter is my favorite time of year! 🙂
Oh…can I come visit this spring? I so miss my baby horses…
Dressage Video: Shire and Shetland Pony. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SB-2P5dpxtc
Oh, the usual… read, play the piano, draw, sew, knit, make beaded and wire jewelry (crocheting with wire is my newest development there), and keep my website updated with new work. Also hopefully (in both the correct and incorrect-but-overused senses of the word) break out the guitar and try to stretch my tiny fingers around the neck or give up and find a thinner, smaller instrument to tangle with, and hopefully make more masks (I am on my first, “on” being a loose word—I am trying to re-start working on it so it is done by hallowe’en, but there’s schoolwork now, of course!). Also I really want to try ice-skating again, especially now that I have Carolyn’s advice (thanks again!)… And I’ll probably be working on my thesis project… or at least well-meaningly intending to work on it!
winter for me means much less light, and lots of sawing wood to keep wood stoves going, indoors in the evening and in the pottery studio when I am working in there. its harder to dry the pots out; I love summer for that. trying to keep doing the same things in worse weather and short days basically. of course the sailing stops this week, but I walk for an hour every day with my dogs. designing next winter’s knit collection will be the imperative.
if finances would allow I would escape to Spain, for more wood stove stoking but more light and better walking, but that’s not possible unfortunately.
there will be more reading and DVD watching I guess …..
we hardly ever have bad enough weather to make it impossible to go out for a walk at some point during the day, very different from so much of the US – nor of course do we have hot enough weather in the summer to need swimming pools or AC.
Best of luck with the knee surgery, joek6nix!
thank you all for the best wishes. Even though it’s my third time doing this (first time on this knee, lol) I’m now starting to get nervous that it’s less than 24 hours away. I’ll have a computer handy when I get home and I’ll let you know.
Thanks again.
Oh, wowsie! I’m just getting over here. Lots of luck, Joe! Hope this one goes smoothly.
I’m going to continue with my water colour painting but instead of landscapes am going to try flowers. Am also handpainting my Christmas cards this year. Aside from that, will be catching up on my reading and generally trying to avoid going outside if it snows!
Fall is my favorite season!
I referee football games, youth (9 years thru 12) on up through varsity High School. I love working with the kids, though by the end of the season I am a bit tired of parents (and coaches!) who would not recognize a rule if you beat them over the head with the book. If coaches only knew how their kids emulate them on the field! Whiny coach –> whiny players…
Then there’s hunting season–archery for elk and then rifle for deer. Family affairs and always fun whether we get something or not. And oh, the lovely meat when you do! Dark and rich and fine-grained, and none of that growth hormone garbage.
And in my spare time (ha!) I keep up my Naval Slang dictionary, fiddle mit der computers, read, and read some more.
Rewrite the ending to this damn novel for the third time. And since we’ve just been informed our dept is going to be consolidated with the rest of the company’s art depts in the midwest (I’m in Vermont) sometime next summer, I’m going to be job-hunting. Oh joy. In the meantime, having rediscovered the lovely energy-producing effects of red meat, I’m getting back on track learning Japanese and maybe I’ll even break out the harp and try to learn that again (starting with, yes, lesson one, again, for the fifth time). I suffer from a serious lack of follow-through. (It would help if the danged thing would stay tuned.) Maybe a diet that doesn’t make me sluggish and depressed will help with all this…
My thorough sympathies, and may the job search be short and better than what you have now.
Jane and I do very well on Atkins (meat, eggs, cheese, low-carb stuff) and keep cholesterol in line better than on low-fat. We do find it helps with the energy level, and with staying warm in the winter.
I’m really looking forward to the closed circle opening. (I guess that sounds inadvertently a little odd.) There are a lot of out-of-print/semi-out-of-print books that you’ve written, edited collections of, co-authored etc. And while I don’t think I’ll ever be a fan of e-books, I see that some versions of readers (was it Asus introducing one a few weeks ago?) appear to be coming down in price. I’m in at $100 or so.
I need something that I can curl up in bed, or on a couch with. And that I can read on the subway.
Paper books do nicely, but….
Also, there are a lot of public domain books that I would like to be able to download. I’ve downloaded Through the Looking Glass (never read), but never will read it on a computer.
The computer is OK, but my back and tush can’t take sitting and just reading for hours. And laptops frustrate me. ‘m an inverse typist to CJ. Years of practice and professional use and still about 25 words a minute. Brain wiring controlling motor functions just isn’t there. (My sister, drat her, is of an age and speed with CJ.) Big clumsy fingers need big keyboards. And I really love my huge Dell screen that my son gave me.
But I can’t take a 20-inch screen to bed with me.
Figure I might start on the linked short story collections of Abby, CJ etc. I can sit through a chapter or short story, but not a whole book.
On another subject, is there a way to copyedit one’s posts after one has hit the “SUBMIT” button. I’m kind of used to being able to preview my posts before submission, and have half consciously/automatically submitted them here before reading them over. A couple are kind of illiterate seeming, and I was talking about writing.
If self correction is possible, could someone direct me to the appropriate HELP screen?
Thanks.