Food Coma

Christmas was nice and quiet for us. I've spent the last few days baking - 4 different kinds of cookies: gingerbread, snickerdoodles, apricot/shortbread pinwheels and chocolate chip (ALL VEGAN!) and one set of vanilla cupcakes with cream cheese frosting. So. Much. Good. Food. Lots of good friends too. I had friends from work join us for Butternut Squash soup and Dutch Chocolate Silk Pie on Christmas Eve, and they brought their 3-year-old son who just had us laughing all night. Then, Christmas morning was spent with another vegan family we know and we stuffed ourselves silly. Once we could move enough, we spent the afternoon playing Rock Band on the Playstation 3. Hahahaha - that's a hilarious game to watch.


Yesterday, our friend Nick came up to spend a few days. After a lunch of falafel, we wandered around the mall playing with gift cards that we received, then headed home. It's just too rainy and cold out to enjoy the day outside.


For tonight's dessert, I threw together my vanilla cupcakes with soy cream cheese icing.

Almost all of the snow we got a week ago has been washed away by the rain.

67 days later...

I've been busy, I swear. I've been knitting too. Mostly just busy though. The only reason I've even writing now is because I have no actual plans for 17 days. I heart the holidays.

During this busy semester, I joined a choir, and we gave 2 concerts. Joy!! I had forgotten how much I loved to sing - in a group, not solo. I met a lot of amazing women and I'm trying to move the class I teach in the Spring so I can continue to sing. Here's hoping!

At the beginning of November, we went to visit a friend on Shelter Island, which is at the east end of Long Island. Monty had his first ferry ride.

Actually, he had 4 ferry rides in 2 days. And a nice long walk out onto an amazing peninsula. It was a great weekend.

He seemed scared to slide off the painted turtle and wouldn't hold still. Oh well.

Also at the beginning of November, I received my second PRGE package from LifeJunkie.

An amazing collection that I will surely use in the new year. I was also more timely in responding to LifeJunkie to thank her for her generosity - this blog is WAAAY behind the times.

The Thanksgiving holiday was full of friends, family and food. So. Much. Food. Also, being a vegan made it interesting. Everyone around us was VERY considerate. I did get to see the sausage stuffing, boiled kielbasa and roasted turkey though, so don't think I missed out. A good time was had by all.

Right after the holiday - maybe as a stress reliever - I got a new tattoo.

Introducing:
Joyce, at the top, and Angelina, knitting on the tree stump. These are two girls created by Henry Darger in his posthumously discovered 15,145-page, single-spaced fantasy manuscript called The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.

We have a book about Darger that contains a number of the illustrations from this work, and I love them. I love looking at the colors and tracing the altercations and wars. After looking at this book so much, I decided to get the tattoo done with two of the girls that refer to me. Angelina, the knitter, is obvious. Joyce, the flower child, is for my music side, since I plan to have the roses colored for the music fraternity that I belong to. Altogether, the whole tattoo is based on a visual art that I respect and admire.

That said, I love that Darger was pretty crazy. From Wikipedia:
"In 1968, Darger became interested in tracing some of his frustrations back to his childhood. It was in this year that he wrote The History of My Life, a book that spends 206 pages detailing his early life before veering off into 4,672 pages of fiction about a huge twister called "Sweetie Pie," probably based on memories of the tornado he had witnessed in 1908."

Make of that what you will.