Tag: Christmas
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Driveway Tuneup
For several years, I have been planning to make improvements on Rosslyn’s driveway. Not dramatic changes, nor a huge project. With 2023 swiftly vanishing, we have initiated our long overdue driveway tuneup, completing the brunt of the work with spring 2024 “fine tuning” slotted in once the new work has weathered in during an Adirondack…
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Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas from our home to yours. We wish you merrymaking, loving laughter, a banquet shared, an opportunity to cherish “old chestnuts”, and the desire to dream up plans for new adventures. This evening’s post is a kind of scrapbook collection of images from our Rosslyn Christmas gathering with family and friends collaged together with…
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Christmas Eve
This evening I would like to share a memory of our first Christmas Eve at Rosslyn in 2008. It was to be our first Christmas at Rosslyn. For weeks we had been racing the calendar, coaxing the team forward, cramming days into hours to ensure that construction would finally end and Rosslyn would at last…
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Champlain Cresting?
Will Lake Champlain set a Christmas high water record? We certainly hope not, but the current lake level is flirting with flood stage (prompting me to refresh the USGS data tracker obsessively.) I’ve spent about 30 hours willing the graph’s upward arc to bend, to level off, per chance to vein falling. At last the…
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Christmas Countdown
If the 12 days of Christmas refer to the interval between Christmas and Epiphany, then the same duration beforehand — the 12 days *prior* to Christmas, — are the Christmas countdown. And they’ve now begun… We’re already several days into this beautiful tree from Karen and Jim Thew, owners of the Spruce Mill Brook Christmas…
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Evening Emanation
This evening emanation greeted me while inspecting progress of the driveway improvements being undertaken by Bob and Phil, or *endeavoring* to inspect their work in the darkness that descends earlier and earlier and earlier this time of year. A glowing beacon. A bucolic barnscape. An icehouse lighthouse… After a year and a half of creative…
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Holiday Homecoming
What a wellspring of euphoria this evening! We returned to Rosslyn after briefly sojourning in Santa Fe, returned to a delicate frosting of snow underfoot, early dwindling natural light, holiday lights glowing in windows, 28° outside, toasty inside, the promise of savory stew and spicy cider wafting like a whimsical Christmas carol,… Rosslyn welcomed us…
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Epiphany on Epiphany: Shirley Bacot Shamel Day
Susan chuckled this morning after reminding me that her family hadn’t celebrated Epiphany when she was growing. I had reminded her that my family had, and for some reason she considers it slightly droll. It’s true that we did celebrate some holidays that my peers did not. I’m not certain why. In addition to Epiphany,…
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“On Lake Champlain” Singalong
With Christmas leftovers diminishing, Christmas tree needles succumbing to gravity, and Christmas carols beginning to sound slightly cloying, it’s starting to feel a lot like… time for a transition. Sure, New Year’s Eve will briefly wrap us in Guy Lombardo’s “Auld Lang Syne” and Bing Crosby’s “Let’s Start the New Year Right”, but then what? How…
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Leftovers as Ingredients
Last night, I enjoyed Christmas dinner, the sequel. No, not the movie. The leftovers. Leftover turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, green beans, roasted, butternut squash, all smothered under her blanket of gravy. And for dessert, pumpkin pie, and pecan pie. And, as you may have predicted, it was delicious. Perhaps even more delicious than the first…
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Christmas Spirit
A retrospective look at some of our Rosslyn Christmases. The Christmas spirit is alive and well!
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Upcycled Christmas Gifts
What wintery wonders shall I share with you today? How about a celebration (and showcase) of upcycled Christmas gifts dreamed into existence by three allstar members of our icehouse rehab team? Pam, Hroth, and Tony stopped Susan and me in our just-barely-post-winter-solstice tracks with an early Christmas gift (or three) that exemplify the apex of…