Bigger or Better: Life outside of Texas

You can tell I'm out of school because this is my third blog post for the month. Ah. Free time. December is an odd month in Houston. Temperature swings can be between different seasons: yesterday it was in the 70s and sunny; today it is in the 30s and more overcast. This last fact made Mark happy, because it was more in line with the Christmas he knows. Singing in the car to xmas tunes. Note the short sleeves; he loves the chill. I am more familiar with shorter days and longer nights in the Christmas season; when I go to work it is dark, and 12 hours later when I come home it is dark. [This is probably more true the more north you go, but I meant as essentially the sole indicator that Christmas is coming.] But this is a fantastic setting for the Christmas season, because it allows us to celebrate Light.  In a neighborhood of houses we know we will never be able to afford, we looked at how magical the world seems when Christmas lights are emphasizing the best and most

In our apartment, I am Queen of the Kitchen. And I make a Royal Mess. Even though I've been baking since I was 6, I didn't realize the blast zone I created was in any way atypical. Until college, when one of my best friends informed me that she had never seen anyone make as much mess in the kitchen as I did when cooking. This actually explains why my mother wasn't as eager for me to cook as my dad was--that, and I usually baked sweets. I haven't yet figured out how to avoid  making a mess, but I thought I had at least gotten better at containing it to a smaller area or cleaning it up or something. I don't think I had adequately tested that theory before marriage, because I didn't cook every night as a single person.  I ate a lot of green smoothies, cereal, tomatoes on toast...hey, as one of my favorite jokes says, if it's just me, why cook?  So I now present better evidence to the public.       As mentioned earlier, I'm in charge of the coo

Fun fact: my sister is super into decorating for Christmas. Sometimes before Thanksgiving. My contribution is usually less tangible (think "singing carols in the shower") Somehow, this is still basically true. I have practically no Christmas decorations (I found one ornament...) and Mark's decor can all fit in a foot-square box. So to fluff up the winter impact, I scattered around some of his penguin collection above the reach of my cat Ruby. But there was one decoration that I couldn't figure out how to safeguard from Ruby: the round holly-berry tablecloth that Mark has (for some unknown reason) that does not fit our rectangular table. I ended up putting it on the back of the couch, and Ruby has been all over it. So our decorations are heavy on the animal impact. Well, there were animals at Christ's birth.