last one of 08

Another year has come and gone. It's hard to beleive that it will be 2009 tomorrow. How the time flies.

Well, here's what we've been up to lately...

On Christmas eve I made a Thanksgiving dinner. Complete with a 16 and a half pound turkey which fed three people for a while.

Christmas day, Iffy had to work, but after heading out in the morning to feed the horses he came home and we opened presents. It was very cute to watch Sara tear off a quarter sized piece of paper at a time and hand it to me. The rest of the day was spent lazing around, watching "A Christmas Story" , eating leftover turkey and knitting (mostly I knitted.)

The day after Christmas Sara, Doug and I went for a hike up into the mountains. I carried Sara in our hand me down backpack for the first time. She seemed to enjoy herself, when she wasn't napping, she was looking around at everything and just being generally happy. We saw LOTS of bear poop piles, answering the question once and for all about where a bear craps.

The following are some pictures from our hike.

In other more crafty news, this is what I have been up to:

I am knitting my first pair of gloves. I have finished the first one, and am now half way up the palm of the other one. Of course, as fate would have it, now that I am almost done with it, the five days of the year that necessitate wearing gloves have already come and gone.

Due to the fact that I was always annoyed with our computer set up, I finally did something about it. I didn't have both printers hooked up at once, so everytime I wanted to print in color, I would have to drag out the color printer, hook it up and crawl under the table to plug it in. It was a bad set up. Meanwhile the B&W printer was at Sara level, so I was always having to take the paper tray off and set it somewhere in the already too crowded work area. So I built the awesome plywood shelf to elevate the printer and moved the other shelves from a different area of the house to put the color printer on. I am much happier with this set up, and it is Sara proof as well.

Santa Iffy Claus brought me this wet belt sander. Now I can grind and sand the edges of glass. It makes it much easier to do the edges of a plate or a long edge of a rectangle and keep it straight. I used it when cleaning up the edges of the scrap melt that I did a while back before I slumped it into a plate:

Unfortunately the stainless steel ring that I melted all the scraps in is slightly off-circle, so the plate is ever so slightly ovalish. I guess it's not a huge deal, but I wish it was perfectly circular. But I don't think it came that way. I have a vague memory of doing something to it and thinking," I hope that didn't warp it." I guess it did.

This is the first year that I will not even make an attempt to stay up 'til midnight. Last year we were in the NICU at midnight, and due to the fact that all four clocks in the room were slightly off from each other by a minute or so, we didn't know the exact moment that it changed, but we sat there with our baby:until about 12:02 or and then walked across the street to the parking lot and went to sleep (in the RV, not on the asphalt). This year will be better.