Susie's Meanderings

Gummy Bear outpost

I finally, after much dragging of feet, made gingerbread houses with my nieces (who ordinarily live on a severly sugar free diet) One of them said "It's just like Candyland!" Anyway, here are some of my favorite pictures. They're not always pretty, but they do have more candy per square millimeter than most.

Christmas Eve Sunset

Yet one more sunset picture for the collection. Who knew there were such nice susets outside of the South Pacific? There are three more equally nice ones on flickr.. otherwise my Christmas eve has mostly consisted of baking and hoping that the last of the presents I ordered online would arrive in the mail.

Christmas Tree Shopping

We went to pick out our tree today. I think this photo sums it up best. Even with the giant golf umbrellas, I still managed to get wet. Nothing that wasn't cured by a little hot chocolate with marshmallows though...

Seasonal CSS

A slight change to my stylesheet in honor of the first day of winter.... (which is the 21st). It'll be back to the pansies again after New Year's. Unless something else strikes my fancy...

icy leaves

Continuing on with my ice theme... here are two more pictures, though lately the precipitation is choosing to present itself in a more liquid form..

Squirrel Wars

My mom has this bird feeder, intended for the use of cute little song birds, but mostly it's ruled by the jays and the squirrels. I like the squirrels, so I bought them some hazelnuts, but after a day of this, the jays would lie in wait for me, and fly in like a squadron and clean out the bird feeder of nuts before the squirrels were even awake. So, I bought a squirrel feeder... it's a little wooden box with a lid that has a plastic window that slides out so that one can clean the feeder...

Day 1: Squirrel feeder utterly ignored by the squirrels, while the jays make ever more desperate attempts to get to the hazelnuts they can see so clearly behind the plastic barrier.

Day 2: See above

Day 3: A grendel has arrived in the night and utterly cleaned out the feeder - we suspect a raccoon, but the squirrels spend the day visiting and using the feeder as intended. A few entertaining moments are spent watching new squirrels learn their way into the feeder. One finds his way in accidentally, then grabs the feeder with both hands and shakes it when he can't remember how he did it before.

Day 4: One of the squirrels learns to remove the plastic slider and toss it disdainfully into the garden below so that he can lie down in the food and scoop it into his mouth. The jays are delighted. I spend the day running down into the garden and refilling the feeder.

   

Day 5: I put a rubberband around the feeder over the sliding panel. The squirrel rolls his eyes at me as he pushes it aside to remove the panel and toss it into the garden.

Day 6: Tired of the whole slider game, the squirrels chew off just the side of the feeder that holds the slider in place, and toss the slider into the garden. Dad spends the morning in his workshop, reconstructing the side and adding a lock. The squirrels haven't touched it since...

Ice Crystals

I went out to feed the squirrels this morning, (and to retrieve part of the squirrel feeder that they had flung aside in their haste to get to the food, but that's a whole separate entry) and discovered the whole garden had become a cactus garden. I put the seven best pictures up on Flickr.

Winter

Here's how I've been spending my days... cooking that is, not eating...well, a little of both. I'm working on mini gingerbread houses next, with real glass (melted lifesaver) windows....

More Pictures

Here's last night's sunset from the back deck. What you can't see are all the hungry jays circling like sharks in the hopes I'm putting out more hazelnuts....

Christmas Cards

In a great fit of organization (largely spurred on by boredom and lots of advertising pressure from Shutterfly and Ofoto - whose new Kodak name I can never remember), I actually decided to do Christmas cards this year, and carefully designed them up in Photoshop, and for once, I actually have them all in the mail before Christmas (actually there's a big stack of them waiting for stamps, but they'll be in the mail tomorrow). And once again I have papercuts all over my tongue and I'm ready to throw my printer out the window. I always think it will be fun and easy to do a mail merge and print all my envelopes, even though long experience with printing envelopes should have taught me otherwise. In the time I spent trying to figure out how to make my printer print in the right place (it insisted on pretending I was centering the envelope in the printer tray, even though I was clearly putting the envelopes in the envelope tray) I could have hand addressed fifty envelopes. So for anyone who thinks mail merged envelopes are cold and impersonal... I can assure you I have lots of strong personal feelings about them right now....

More Tinkering

After much gnashing of teeth and several false starts, I finally have my calendar page updated and matching. I really really really hate tables. Not that there's much interesting to see on my calendar now that I'm home, but I thought it was good practice. It's a little prettier in IE, since I can do transparent filters, but such is life.

Tinkering

After four consecutive nights of nightmares in which I am trying to stuff unwilling people into snippets of code, I've finally taken myself in hand and fixed the majority of the jumpy hover links on this page. I haven't quite resigned myself to giving up the ones on the side bar, because I know there's a way to fix it, I just don't remember what it is...
Now, on to the rest of the site.

Animal House

My mother runs a bird feeder for the benefit of all the junkos, ruby-crowned kinglets and warblers who frequent the neighborhood, but the ones who really benefit are the squirrels. I've named this one Cassius, because compared to the other one, he has "a lean and hungry look"...three guesses what I've named the fat one. Here you can see him lifting up the seed tray to get at the seed that's fallen underneath. Usually he just lies down in the seed and scoops it into his mouth. So yesterday I bought some hazelnuts, thinking that then the squirrels might leave some food for the poor little birds. Who knew that Blue Jays like hazelnuts too? And they're a lot faster than the squirrels.

Cleaning out my Bookmarks

I was sorting through my favorites today and ran across this one, that I think Libraryman featured a long time ago. Just when I thought I'd seen the whole world, I realize I still have whole continents I haven't touched....

create your own visited country map
or check our Venice travel guide