The snowstice

 Here's what we woke to on the morning of the solstice. About three inches overnight.

Beautiful and I don't have to go out in it!

Out front my glass ornament which I forgot to bring in before the snow, is a dot of color.

Lovely indoor time working on gloves, listening to a well narrated Horowitz, while outside workers are shoveling and sanding the walkways. 

Cream soup with a ham and cheese sandwich for lunch. Someone swept the snow off my car, so nice. I ran the engine for a few minutes while I checked the mail and consigned it, the junk mail,  to the recycle.

Happy day everyone, whichever Solstice you're celebrating.

Happy Solstice

In a few hours we'll be at the Winter Solstice, and it came fast this year

I like the cosy long dark nights,  and grew up at a latitude where today would have daylight from about 9 to 3.30.  You went to and from school in the dark. By midsummer there would be nights where it hardly got dark at all. I live far south of that, and dusk will be about 5 pm. Not such a short day.

Nearer home than the movement of the planet, I measured my bp yesterday and it was back in the normal for me range, high but not fire alarm. So far so good.

Today there is the usual high level activity next door, involving moving my car to let a Pod-carrying truck unload a Pod for Gary to put his furniture in while something very radical is being done to his floor. 

Too complicated to go into, involving a crew to pour leveling liquid or something before they can lay his new floor. We'll see. He does get involved in complicated situations. When I got my floors replaced, they didn't empty the room, so it was much easier, one day's work twenty years ago and I lived happily ever after. But his floor saga has been going on for months. This is the latest onslaught.

And at some point another friend is coming by to visit. It's all go.

Happy day, everyone, try not to complicate your life. Unless you like it that way.

Happy solstice with Flowers

 The Christmas cactus has started flowering, and the color is different from the buds, as you see. I sent a picture to my cleaning family who gave me it,  so they can enjoy it too. 

Perfect timing for the solstice, so a happy Solstice to Northern hemisphere blogistas, days to start lengthening, and to Southern hemisphere blogistas, shortening, but there's summer coming right now.

And yesterday's mail brought the blessing of a President who knows what he's doing. My new batch of free covid test kits arrived, timed for the holidays

and in other news, my Arabic reader arrived, ready, I thought to help me stumble along.

Alas I found their notion of beginners isn't mine. On their first page they say of  course the beginner is expected to have a basic understanding of the language.. Honey, that's not a beginner. 

It reminded me of the construction kit in a Child's Christmas in Wales: easy for little engineers, oh, easy for Leonardo!

Jamal will have to wait for me to catch up, then I'll read his adventures. A stretch goal at this point. Maybe this time next year I'll be looking back kindly on my current ineptitude.

Meanwhile here's a lovely manuscript page with a Christmas Chi Rho, the abbreviation for the word Christ. It's a symbol and a devotion in itself, as is the X in Xmas, an early respectful way of expressing the Holy Name. 

And on to less reverent things, here's a seasonal puzzle you absolutely will get. As usual, post funny clues not the actual answer

Happy day, everyone, longest night comes right before the return of the light, good to remember.

And today AC's photograph is totally right for the day.

Photo AC 

Happy Solstice, winter and summer!

 Yes, we have blogistas in northern and southern hemispheres. Sandra Boynton never forgets

Some other thoughts about the season which is about looking forward to the return of light, and the reason Christmas was put about now. It's all a metaphor.

This is also a thank you to some of the people I follow on Twitter, who are wise and funny and gentle and scholarly. 

And they remind me that January in the northern hemisphere is not the time to be leaping around starting new projects. It's for resting. And maybe doing jigsaw puzzles. In that cosy terry robe I made a while back.

Happy Solstice, everyone!

Winter Solstice Cake

Today's the winter solstice, longest night of the year, after which the daylight creeps up again, yay.  My 99 Honda Civic may soon be going into that long dark night.  I had her in for a pre winter inspection today, and found that to keep her safe and on the road will require thousands of dollars, which I'm reluctant to pour anywhere, much less into a rusty 16 year old beater.  Sigh. She's been a good car, never broke down nor failed to start once in her lifetime.  But bad winters, massive snowstorms and ice storms and floods and salted roads have taken their toll, and I am now looking at options.

These range from figuring out if I can manage without a car -- not very practical in an area where none of the local, rare, buses goes where I need to go -- or using the cost of owning and insuring a vehicle to pay for someone to tote me about to meetings, not sure if that's practical either!  Or if there are any other good ideas, short of being forced to buy a new car.  No mad rush on this. Just musing.

So it seemed like a very good idea, in the course of these musings on the turning of the earth and my car,  to make this festive cake, which is a five star version of this (from the Sunset Basic cookbook, owned by Handsome Partner in his single days, and with various dear notes in his writing in and on it)

Making this

  
you see the parchment paper, important if you are ever to get it out of the pan, and you see the fat raisins and the banana, which I don't mash into oblivion, keep a few pieces for the texture.

This is to the standard banana bread as my old beater to a new Honda, well, the other way around, but you get my gist.

What I do is to soak golden raisins in white rum ahead of time (friend gave me a fifth of this, very good stuff, from when he was in Puerto Rico, and I don't drink spirits, so I had the onerous task of figuring out ways to use it, beyond a swipe into hot milk at night).

Then I just drain the raisins (the rum goes into my jar of homemade vanilla essence) and add them in to the flour part of the bread. Mix all together, and you get a really nice sort of fruitcake, the kind that people would like if they got this instead of those dried out old building bricks commonly sold as such.  And you inject a drop of rum here and there, over the first couple of days, just to keep your spirits up, sorry, couldn't resist.

All in all, a good Winter Solstice Cake, I think you'll agree. Happy Solstice!