Monday, December 21, 2009

The aftermath



The plows came through last night, which was good because they made the road driveable.  Not so good: the fact that they plowed all of the cars in.  Thanks guys. 
 



The snowy mound in the far right of the picture is our two-doors-down neighbor's car.  The giant mound in the center right of the photo is a giant pile of snow blocking them in.  Our shared neighbor must have figured they weren't going anywhere, and dumped the snow from in front of his own car onto the giant pile.  He's a real nice guy.  

 

We dug out the Subaru, but Jeremy's Jetta isn't going anywhere for a bit.

 

Sunday, December 20, 2009

SNOW!

It started snowing late yesterday evening and it's still going!  There's at least a foot of snow on the ground, probably more. Unfortunately, Natasha is still recovering from her first illness - a nasty cold - so she did not get to go outside.

6 am:



9:30 a.m.: Jeremy looking for his phone in his car before realizing that he'd driven my car the night before.





Cleaning off my car just for fun, since we clearly weren't driving anywhere.



5 p.m. Can you see Jeremy's car?




Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Dear Target,

It is only December 14.  Why are you sold out of everything Christmasy except the crap?  Also, how hard is it to sell a humidifier that actually has all the pieces in the box?  Just so you know, I am beginning to prefer Walmart over you. 

Love,
Masha

Monday, December 14, 2009

Why I unfriended Facebook

Disclaimer: This post reflects only my opinion and not necessarily that of my husband, who has a Facebook account.

I joined Facebook a couple years ago.  At first, I really enjoyed finding old friends, perusing all their photos, and learning all kinds of interesting tidbits about their lives.  Quickly, I amassed a good number of friends.  The overwhelming majority were people with whom I had probably never been more than casually acquainted, of course, but that doesn't matter in the Facebook universe.   We browsed each other's pages, but there was precious little real, active communication.  And I noticed that even among my real, close friends, emails and phone calls were fewer and farther between.  After all, we only needed to log on to learn that one friend was expecting a baby, or that another had just bought a house.  But the fact that I didn't get to hear their news and congratulate them immediately in a more personal way made me sad. 

Ultimately, it was Facebook's encouragement of my inner voyeur (a part of me that is better left un-encouraged) that led me to delete my account last January.  I spent way too much time digesting all the teeny tiny tidbits of the lives of people who, honestly, weren't really my friends.  Worse, I found myself envying others based on photos of vacations to exotic places, or how many people had wished them a happy birthday.  Not healthy.  So I quit.

It wasn't long before I began to get e-mails from friends wondering whether I had "un-friended" them.  No, of course not.  I had unfriended Facebook (or so I thought - I'm still not certain that my account has been fully deleted).

Now, nearly a year later, all too often when I catch up with friends, I'm surprised (and saddened) to find that I've missed hearing about significant events in their lives. 

"Yeah, I put those pictures on Facebook."

Because almost everyone is on Facebook.  And it's easy.  And on the surface, I guess there's nothing terrible about that.  But just as the advent of e-mail has virtually wiped out the art of letter-writing, and just as text and instant messages have begun to erode e-mail (not to mention basic spelling and punctuation), Facebook is slowly chipping away at long-distance friendship.  When you keep up a friendship through correspondence and phone conversations, there is the capacity for give and take, for tangents, for real emotion and for reflection.  By contrast, the typical wall post is not only read by all of a person's "friends," but is only a few lines long.  No matter how many photos or status updates a Facebook user posts, a Facebook profile is still just a two-dimensional depiction; a person in brief.  I don't know about you, but I prefer my friends to be the three-dimensional variety.

Quitting Facebook didn't exactly fix this problem.  I am left out of the loop a lot of the time, because my friends forget that not everyone is on Facebook.  But at least I remember to email or call them, because otherwise, I'd have no idea what they were doing.  And then we can interact like real live people.

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Lights

I have always been the type to start playing Bing Crosby on Thanksgiving evening, and to have all my lights up by Dec. 1.  This year, though, there's been nary a Melekalikimaka, and we only got our Christmas lights up today!  I'm hoping our neighbors are similar procrastinators, because at the moment, only three of about 40 houses in our cul de sac are decked out for the season.  It's a little bit sad.

I'll be digging out the Christmas CDs tomorrow, but our tree will have to wait until our return from Nebraska.  One perk of celebrating Christmas on the old calendar is that the season lasts six weeks!  We won't take our lights and tree down until Jan. 13.



Monday, December 7, 2009

Needle on fire

Natalya took a long nap this afternoon, so I was able to spend a few hours at the sewing machine.  I personalized a $1 Target stocking ...






... and then I sewed this fleece earflap hat for her.  It was meant to fit her this winter.  Oh well.  Guess I'll put it away for Moscow!





Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Gobble gobble

I was going to write a long post about how life has changed and how accomplished I felt after cleaning three bathrooms, dusting and vacuuming upstairs, picking up the master bedroom and the two spares, sweeping the main level, starting the laundry and unloading and loading the dishwasher, all during the baby's 100-minute nap.  But she woke up hungry just as I settled down with a cup of tea.  So, I leave you with this photo taken on Thankgiving Day: Natasha with all of her aunts and uncles!