Christmas lights are up. Kids and Gordon bought this horrible Yo Gabba Gabba inflatable monstrosity and put it in the yard because it’s funny. Will take pictures later tonight with all the lights on. They had to go to a Dollar Store to grab another string of lights for the tree outside.
I need to clean up my space and sit down and put a couple of hours of work on this thing. I probably don’t have that long before Anne comes back with edits, so I need to get a jump on other stuff while I can. The faithful Demon Dog, also known as Small Dog, is laying by my feet. I am the designated human companion for the day, I guess. Maybe I’ll make some tea.
I miss snow. I miss the crunch under my feet. But I’ve surrendered to my fate – Gordon can’t do cold weather. He will be miserable. Not that it’s been super-warm here in hill country in the past few days, but it’s not going to snow any time soon.
I am tired. Not from writing, although that too, but from all the other stress and worry and problems of this year. I feel worn out a little, but at the same time eager to just end the year. There is some kind of magic significance to that New Year date. It’s only an illusion, but it feels like the new year is like a clean page. This new year I’d like to be a better parent. I’d like to spend more time with my husband and my kids. I’d like to write smarter and better. Exercise more.
I probably fail once again with spectacular results, but there is that strange little hope that I can do it, because it’s the new year. Odd how the human mind works, no?
Well, people are back from the store, and I have to go.
My grandma was a wee bit supersticious, and she believed how you spend you new years eve sets the tone for the rest of the year. Ive found she was right more often than not.
So i hope you have a delightful nye w your family eating a delicious food while laughing over happy memories and rejuvinating your creative energies. Then drift to sleep on the couch with a smile on your face.
Hope springs eternal, where would we be without it? My wish for you is to have more days to relax. To re-energize your soul. Just a few short weeks and that clean slate will be yours. Revel.
Totally agree!
cant wait to see the ‘monstrosity’ in your yard. your right, new year is a great way to start with a clean slate. im sure the new year will see great new books from my favourite author(s) (AKA you and Gordon). have a nice christmas!!
or you can stand on the porch in your jammies, bang on the pots and pans to “ring” in the new year
and kiss your kids and sweetie for good luck….ah the good old days….
wishing you the very best joy, love and health for the holidays and a shiny new clean slate for the new year.
**hugs**
I get the spend more time with family, exercise more, be a better parent…
Remember, you love your kids. You want good things for them. That’s a huge thing.
As to the exercise thing… if you can make yourself stick to it for a few weeks, it gets to be a habit. After that, you want it and that makes it easier. I figured that out the hard way. I get cranky (crankier) if I don’t get three-four good workouts a week now.
I wanna see the Yo Gabba Gabba monstrosity.
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absotively posilutely right about excercise… made myself go to A water zumba class and have been in love with it since..best decision I ever made
Water zumba? Oh my gosh, that sounds like fun!
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great cardio resistance especially with a weight belt and fantastic ab work out with treading water…Best thing of all…NO STRESS -even with the belt- on a knee that seems twice as old as the rest of the 40+ year old me.
I think Carrie said it perfectly. After Christmas, lay around like a slug and do NOTHING for a few days. You will be rested and ready for the New Year!
Still mulling over your gumbo disaster. I have always heard the phrase ” First, you make a roux…” so that may be where you went wrong. I may have to query my friends for recipes.
Thanks for posting the book ranking lists. I will buy NOW buy the print books in addition to the audio & e-book versions. Didn’t realize non print book sales don’t carry the same weight.
Hey Jane,
I decided upon reading much of gumbo advice that I must’ve burned the roux. Apparently even if it doesn’t look burned, it can still be burned.
Please don’t buy extra copies.
Ebooks count just as much as print now. The ebooks actually put us on that list. 
Have you tried a traditional roux of butter and flour cooked down unt the “nuttiness” is gone. I was a chef and never used oil or saw it used in a roux by anyone else.
It’s not traditional, but I’ve made recipes that call for an oil and flour roux – meant to be a healthier choice. The taste is a smidge different and I’m not sure it thickens as well, but it’s serviceable.
I’ve never made gumbo though and now I’m a bit intimidated.
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I’m not trying to be rude so please understand, I just fear it would taste horrible from the sounds, it’s kind Of a misanomer because butter has a bad wrap but is so much better they’re finding out than hydrogenated oil or margarine. Unless its canola oil, my fear it would just add a nasty burnt oil taste( which is bad, if you’ve ever had foof cooked in burnt or old oil you can taste the foulness). A slurry will thicken as well, but is harder to use. A roux, while a thickener, us often also used to add or cut a favor of some sort. A slurry is equal parts water and corn starch, but if used wrong can turn your broth into cement..I wouldn’t recommend it for a Gumbo. You can always try cooking longer and lower to simply reduce and skip the roux all together. Good gumbo isn’t easy so don’t beat yourself up.
Forgive the typing errors. It’s hard on my cell phone. I swear I’m not an illiterate hump.
Oh my goodness, not rude at all, at all! I totally agree that in nearly every instance butter is preferable to any other fat you can add. Both in taste and in the velvety feel it gives sauces. And cookies. I’ve three pounds in the fridge waiting for cookie baking next week.
I made roux for the first time in my life a couple of weeks ago for this turkey noodle casserole dish that I wanted to try, and I was paranoid and I thought I’d totally screw it up, but… I didn’t. I was told that you add in your cold milk (cold, so there wouldn’t be any lumps) when the butter-flour mixture smells like baked pie crust.
Can’t wait to see your picture of the Yo Gabba Gabba… thinger. If it’s any consolation, there is a blue Rudolph that sits in front my parents’ house every year… year round…..
Haha. Love the year ’round blue Rudolph!
There are houses in my area that leave their Christmas (or Hanukah?) decorations up all year. There’s one house on my commute that has a GIANT tree with the colored/mostly blue lights lit all year. I used to think “WTF?” when I first saw it, but now I look forward to the sight and it makes me happy.
There is an episode of Good Eats where Alton does a breakdown of making gumbo. Don’t know if anyone else has mentioned it, but you might be able to track it down.
Thanks for saving me the cost of print books as well….even though I would gladly shell out the extra bucks for the privilege of reading your work. I must admit that print books have lost a good deal of their luster after having to haul about 5000 moldy, water-logged books out of my house after Katrina. I now read using my iPad and listen using my iPod.
Yes, this the time of the year when we question ourselves and ”review” what we did in past 12 months. This was a stressful year for your family and your tiredness is understandable. It was a rough year for me too, and I kind of just wanna get it over with. As a reader of your books, I was moved with your wish to be a smarter and better writer, because I already love your writing, and for you to want to be better, tells me not just kind of writer you are, but also what kind of a person. Thank you, Ilona.
Good luck with your goals. I have found game night is a great way to spend more time with the family. Disney Scene It is very popular with my family, and so is Family Feud and Scrabble.
We make Scrabble fun by allowing everyone to use the dictionary to make words with whatever letters they have, and we allow well known abbreviations like Fx or Dr.
As for working out, find something you actually like to do. My sister walks on the treadmill on a high incline while watching tv. She zones out and before she knows it, 45 minutes is over. My other sister loves workout videos because she gets bored easily. She goes to the local library and rents a different video every week or so. (The library dvd rentals are FREE) They have everything, ballet, kickboxing, cardio bellydancing, yoga, etc.
As for writing smarter and better, if you wrote any better, my head would probably explode. You both are so talented. Now if you want to write more, and more, I would do cartwheels.
I was reading your post and as ever my dad’s wisdom whispers to me. After your bumpy patch in life and as you look towards the clean slate of new year I offer you these wishes:
As you slide down the banisters of life may the splinters never point the wrong way and if they are let them be large. Quick to hurt but easy to pluck.
In the New Year, may your right hand always be stretched out in friendship and never in want.
What a fine and clever set of wishes! I’m taking those to heart.
First, love the Christmasy banner on the blog. It really fits.
You’ve had a lot go on this year…the move from h*ll, the dogs “attacking” the pool guy, the kids lost in the mall and challenges with kid 1. What I got from all your posts was the humor and the don’t give up attitude. On top of all that, you had books to write. Your fans on the blog will stick with you and your family and only wish you and yours the best.
I wish for you, your family and your fans a new beginning for the New Year. Hoping all those pinching pennies will suddenly have quarters!
Thanks for letting us into your life and making us laugh.
I never thought about it before, but how true … the new year gives me hope for a do-over of all those things that I didn’t get quite right this year.
Bah, I don’t want to decorate..grumble. I just got the Halloween decorations down. I need more time : /
It snowed the first year we lived here (Houston) we made snowmen on the beach, just weird. There is hope you’ll get your crunch and a world coated in white. (at least for a few hours)
Last year I decided to lose some weight and tone up. I joined a gym and we were doing some cardio tennis (move for an hour, don’t care about form or hitting the ball). I planted myself, turned, and my knee didn’t come with the rest of my body. I tore my ACL and the miniscus in two places. Nine months of physical therapy, surgery, and I weigh more now than I did a year ago.
Excercise is BAD for you. ~_^
Just LIVE. Live everyday in every way possible. Don’t promise yourself that moment with family LATER take it now and grow as a person from that. There are times I want to knit something for them but that item isn’t as important as me playing with my kid or my husband.
This is what saved me when my kid’s life went into the dumper: be a good enough mom (and dad). There’s always room for improvement, but we all just do our best. Guilt over coulda woulda shoulda just makes things harder to bear.
As for me and the whole fitness thing, it’s all about moderation. Try to eat smart but not obsess, workout when you have time and energy but don’t beat yourself up if you don’t make your goal (it’s a goal, right? not a hard and fast finish line). Practice kindness towards your self first. You deserve it.
I might get some lights out tomorrow if the weather cooperates. Otherwise, I just purchased and potted up a good-sized Norfork pine today. It wasn’t planned, but I found out today that the new(ish) kitten has been peeing in two of the potted plants for a while now, which explained why they suddenly died. So, my living room is now festive, anyway.
This has not been a good year for me either and I can’t wait for it to end. I do hope you get your wishes and that good health returns to all of you in spades.
Oh yeah. I just had to look up Yo Gabba Gabba. The sleigh?
I would happily share our Buffalo snow. It’s just a dusting that’s lasted several days so far, but we’ll have more, much, much, much more in the not too distant future. My husband’s the opposite of Gordon. Dave doesn’t do heat, where as I could bask on a hot slab of concrete next to a pool all year long.
For what it is worth, I have never (in all of my 30 years) been able to keep, or complete, a New Year’s resolution until this year. It wasn’t always easy, much less fun, but all of my credit cards, medical bills & student loans have been paid off. I’m not sure about what this upcoming year’s resolutions will be but for once I feel optimistic about it. Perhaps I will try the exercise resolution again but with hope for actual results & discipline.
When I was in elementary school, I made a resolution to not bite my nails anymore. And shockingly, I don’t bite my nails at all anymore. I was a really bad nail-biter too. I did go through a phase in high school where I chewed on pen caps, but I’ve largely stopped doing that as well.
That’s pretty much the only resolution I’ve ever kept though. Good luck with yours! And good luck to everyone else on here posting about resolutions!
Perhaps you could take the same approach regarding the lack of snow that a lot of families here in coastal California do, and rent a small place for a couple of days at the nearest place that it snows enough to have some fun?
My parents found that it was a good way to ‘get away’ from my medical crises and just have fun together, even though we still had to do the maintenance stuff. (‘Website’ link is a pic of Dad and I on one such trip, 4 hours from home.) It might work similarly for you guys.
Goodluck with your New Year Rez’s
I have a few myself but I want to start acting on them NOW lol
We missed y’all at game night last night, but I’m glad you were enjoying some downtime with the family. I don’t really do New Year’s resolutions, but my main goal is to continue doing what I’m doing: eating in moderation and running my ass off. I’m thinking about running a half marathon at the end of January. I might be crazy, but it’s a good crazy, right? Right? Bueller?
I think you’re probably more successful at your New Year’s resolutions than you give yourself credit for, Ilona. I’ll bet you’re a terrific mom and wife and I know for a fact you’re an amazing writer.
I won’t mention the exercise resolution since I flunk on that one every year…
I feel the need to hide on New Years Eve – don’t know why, but historically we do not play well together.
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I’m with ya on the “new year, new start” thing. I also tend to start diet or exercise regimens on Mondays… because apparently a Thursday start will have worse results?
The thing to remember is that you are striving for “better”, not “perfect”. I am feeling a little low that I haven’t been doing as well on my diet & exercise lately and as a result my weight has stayed the same for the past 3 months. My friend had to point out to me that my weight is also 20 pounds less than last year, so even though I have 30 pounds to go, I have made progress. Better, not perfect.
Sending you hugs and encouragement.