Raven’s Range
Blather around a virtual range

The sight of snow plummeting from the sky in great wispy flakes is incredibly peaceful for me, and I’m enjoying it very much. It seems to bring me back to simpler times, and to give me a feeling of festivity that hasn’t been present for a long time now. I am content, and amused as the thermometer plummets down to 20 Fahrenheit while I remain warm inside.

Don spent some significant time this last week putting insulation on the windows, and wrapping the sewer and water hoses in bubble wrap. So far so good — no frozen pipes this week, unlike last week. We went down to Redding on Wednesday, just overnight, and stocked up on everything we needed for the next month except perishables. I figure we won’t leave now until it’s January and time for the Unconvention.

Kerry, Tina and I are in the process of plotting a little solstice craft fair. I threw together a flyer on MS Publisher today and Kerry’s putting together display boards and the like. We don’t expect many people — perhaps only a dozen — but it’ll be fun. Tomorrow we’re going to brave the roads to Weaverville and put up the flyers.

This time last week I was in a bad mood after getting utterly frustrated with the Markeroni revamp. Well, the bug that was driving me crazy is fixed; there are still other bugs and I find fresh new ones each day, but my to-do list is also getting shorter every day except today, when I did not do any work on the site at all but walked around in the snow feeling happy. ;)

So, Markeroni is once again open, and I am getting a huge kick out of people uploading their avatars and seeing them pop up here, there and everywhere. There is only one weird bug that I don’t comprehend yet, and the rest are niggles and not-done-yets. I’m catching my second wind and imagine that by the end of next week I’ll be a lot closer to completion.

Sometime yesterday I seemed to flip into end-of-year mode. This is an introspective time for me as I figure out what I didn’t do this year that I wanted to, why, how I’ll change it, how I was pleased with some of the things and might wish to repeat them, where I might want to go in 2009. This energy will coast me through the next four weeks before starting to fade, and even though I know this and it’s the same every year, I still enjoy that sense of possibility and hope.

Other adventures for the week have included watching and thoroughly enjoying O Brother Where Art Thou with Kerry, Don and Gavin after a delicious home-cooked meal; being outside just as the first snow of the year began to fall; and sending off 75% of my UK Christmas cards in time to get there by the 25th, which is somewhat of a miracle.

Woot!
Woot!
Woot!

First time living in snowland since I left England!

Woot!
Woot!
Woot!

Don and I had joked that there was no point in buying a Christmas tree; we are literally surrounded by them! So I bought a set of “sun catchers” from the dollar store, painted them, and hung them off a branch that one of those trees had shed. About half an hour later a savage wind stormed up and blew everything over, but that’s okay. I might hang them off one of the live baby trees in future.

After two days of wall to wall erranding, I couldn’t face another store. So Don went off to buy hoses and other hardware–I can’t get excited about hardware, I’m sorry–and I stayed and looked at the moon. Meanwhile, the sun set, an hour later than it does up in Trinity, but we were home within the hour.

Going up the Buckhorn Summit, on the Trinity side the frost was still thick and there was a thin veneer of ice on the road. At times I wondered if it hadn’t even snowed but yes, it was just frost. We had to wait until noon today for the fog to clear. And yet, when we popped over to Shasta County, there was the sun. I guess it just takes a little longer to reach us.

It’s funny to see the cycles of things — 10 in the morning is when the sun is high enough to make the frost drip off the trees. So every day we get that same little “rain” shower as the sun goes on its merry, predictable way.

The world was ice-cold and beautiful this morning. I know it’s been frosty before now, but this is the first time I’ve actually seen it. In fact, I am pretty sure that this is the first frost I have seen since I moved to the USA.

We had quite an exciting night. I wrote about it on Raven’s RV.

Another shot of the weather vane on top of Tops. This time the moon was almost directly above it (well, plus or minus a few thousand miles). Don and I ran out to Weaverville to do our food shopping. When we got back, not only was I well-fed for the first time a couple of weeks, I managed to find and squash my evil photograph display bug, and in fact killed two annoying bugs at the same time.

Thus, Markeroni is once again open. You wouldn’t know it from the front page — I haven’t updated that part yet and won’t until I’m reasonably sure the innards are working — but it’s 75% a very prettified website now. Go look.

It’s amazing what a curly brace in the wrong place will produce. When I saw this line of happy smiling faces I got my first belly laugh for weeks. If only they could all be this amusing!

It’s Sunday night and I’m in a bad mood. Earlier in the week I had that flutter in the tummy that told me it was exactly the right time to start rolling out the new Markeroni, and so I did. I’ve now been at it for 48 hours straight plus the intense work leading up to this weekend. Now, depending on where you look, either none of my stupid photographs will display or all of them display with the wrong data alongside them. These are things that were working and now aren’t, and I can’t see the screen straight enough to figure out the problem.

I don’t even think eating an entire bar of chocolate at one sitting will help. (No, I’m not going to attempt it.) (more…)

Right now it’s all about staying warm. This little space heater is lovely, but last night I ran the propane heater and that was really lovely. And then I found out that we were almost out of propane. :: rolls eyes ::