The Blog Goes Ever On and On

OK, I'm back. I've spent the past week-and-change in Pittsburgh, visiting family for the holidays. It was fun. It was family. I got a lot of work done on a short story and made a lot of small blog entries, which I will get around to posting here over the next week or so.

The day I have written this, Western Washington State was hit with a massive windstorm. The winds came from the East this time, funneled by the Cascade passes to come down directly in my neighborhood. No real damage, though my umbrella for the patio table took flight and my neighbor brought it back, and it looks like another large tree came down in the backyard scrub, opening the vista on the Grade School behind us a little more. Power was out for about eight hours, during which time both Kate and I were at work. Of more concern was the fact the traffic lights were out, creating a traffic jam as bad as any I have seen up on the hill since the Nisqually Earthquake a few years back. Other than that, we weathered it pretty well.

Anyway, power is back on, and Kate and I made pudgy pizzas with a sandwich iron in the fireplace. We keep dry wood in the garage just in case we have an outage, along with a lot of candles. What are pudgy pizzas, you ask? They're a sealed sandwich - two slices of buttered bread with tomato sauce, mushrooms, pepperoni, and mozarella cheese, held together by a device that looks like a waffle iron with two long handles. You press it together and set it on the fire for a few minutes to toast it. Not bad at all.

We're also catching up on our sleep. In addition to being time-shifted from the West Coast, the guest beds were a tad bit hard compared to our heated waterbed, so both Kate and I have been enjoying deep, luxurious sleep, awakened only by the sound of large branches crashing into the yard.

More later,