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January 9 movie: 3 Idiots. This was great! It's a new movie -- we went to a theater, woo! -- starring Aamir Khan as one of three friends at an engineering college in India. We wanted to see it because we saw it featured in a "new Bollywood movies" TV show while we were on Staten Island over the holiday. I have to admit, I went into it expecting Khan's age to be a problem. He's 44, and the TV show spent a lot of time on their efforts to make him look like a college student. I thought it was going to be ridiculous, and in truth, he is way too old for the part. But the movie is so fun and engaging that I got over it almost immediately.

Like all Bollywood comedies, 3 Idiots has everything. It's a college comedy which seems inspired by Real Genius, and a romantic comedy, and a family melodrama, and a coming-of-age story, and a send-up of previous movies. At one point they visit the friends' family homes, and one impoverished family is described as "something out of a 1950s movie." It was pure Satyajit Ray and they even switched to black and white for those scenes.

There's a fun song which is a pastiche of Bollywood dance number cliches. Because the movie is still in theaters and the DVD isn't out yet, I couldn't find a youtube clip of the full song. Here's an excerpt:

(direct link if you can't view the embedded video)

We also very much enjoyed the dance number "All Izz Well." This was Aamir Khan's motto throughout the movie, and they do a very funny number in the men's bathroom at the college. Again, I found a decent clip though the full number isn't available yet.

(direct link if you can't view the embedded video)

In general I thought that the songs were not as good here as in Dev.D. the songs in 3 Idiots were just more ... conventional movie songs I guess. But the staging of the dance numbers was terrific. They were a joy to watch; the whole movie was. It was also interesting to see a movie about college life in India. I wonder how realistic it was. My guess is probably exaggerated to some degree, just as movies about college in the US are generally exaggerated. But it most have had at least some degree of reality, judging by how much the audience enjoyed it. There were lots of moments that seemed only mildly amusing to me, which got big laughs from the Indians in the audience.

January 8 movie: Dev.D. I confess, I didn't watch the whole movie. Just the songs. It's a modernized version of a historical novel. We gathered from the songs (which were pretty well integrated into the movie) that it's about a guy who's in love with a girl, he's a jerk to her, she marries someone else, he falls into a downward spiral of booze and drugs, and eventually turns himself around through the love of a prostitute with a heart of gold.

The songs are terrific. My favorite was the fiendishly catchy "Emotional Atyachar." Elvis impersonators and a brass band. What more can you ask for?

(direct link if you can't see the embedded video)

The song is performed at a wedding reception, and it's the most inappropriate wedding song imaginable. The lyrics, according to the subtitles, are like "love is torture, why did you ditch me, why don't you kill me too, the devil take your beauty, the devil take your love." Here's to the happy couple!

Even more fun is the obscene version. I gather it's hysterical if you speak Hindi, and there are several audible "fuck"s in English. It sounds like they're rhyming "mind fuck yar" and "atyachar." Georg looked it up and emotional atyachar means "emotional blackmail" or "manipulation" so maybe they are singing "mind fuck."

There's also a good song set in a nightclub with old school breakdancers:

(direct link if you can't see the embedded video)

I come up for air after a long work day and discover that this morning, Rudy "A Noun, A Verb and 9/11" Giuliani said that there were no domestic terror attacks during George Bush's presidency.

Without 9/11, what is Rudy ever going to talk about?

January 4 movie: I Live My Life. Joan Crawford stars as a spoiled socialite who, while on a cruise around the Greek islands, stumbles onto Brian Aherne's archeological dig. She spends a couple of days toying with him because she's bored, pretends to be a working class person like him, encourages him to fall in love with her, then when he promises to follow her to America, she gives him a false name and address. Put like that, it makes her sound like a miserable piece of shit. But we've all been there, amirite?

This movie was hard for me to watch because I spent the whole thing yelling at Aherne to get the hell away from Crawford. Run, man, run for it! A life with her wouldn't be worth living! This is not the best response to a romantic comedy.

This evening I went to Michael's to get a gift box for a belated Christmas gift (their leftover holiday stock is picked over, scattered all around the store, and super super discounted!) and then went to Backyard Barbecue Pit for takeout dinner. On the way in I saw my favorite FedEx guy from when I used to work in Chapel Hill! We used to have a friendly chatting acquaintance because he came to our office several times a week. From him I learned that a good route is one with lots of stops within walking distance of each other, and mostly letters and small packages. A bad route is one with very few stops and lots of big packages. For instance he mentioned the hospital was one of the worst routes in his area, because the driver might spend the whole day unloading boxes at one dock.

I kind of messed things up with the FedEx guy one day when he came in and asked me if our office was going to be open on Friday. "Why," I said, "is it a holiday or something?" He literally recoiled, with a look of sheer horror, and then I realized that he was talking about Good Friday. Whoops! That company was all workaholic atheists, and while not the former I was very much the latter. And so I tended to lose track of holidays (especially the religious ones) when I worked there.

I tried to cover but it was too late. It was never the same with the FedEx man. From then on he acted polite but uncomfortable around me. Today he was distant, though of course I have no idea if he remembered me beyond being one of the thousands of people he has met in his years with FedEx. He told me that he works in Durham now, and he seemed friends with the people at Backyard Barbecue.

Georg said the FedEx man should have gotten over that Good Friday thing, and maybe so. Then again, yesterday someone on my Facebook friends list posted their beliefs that 1. this week's cold weather proves that global warming is a joke; 2. the Rapture is real; 3. evolution is not. Because they "never saw a monkey turn into a man." And the look on my face when I read that was probably the same as the FedEx man's reaction when I didn't know when Good Friday was.

January 4 movie: Footsteps in the Dark. Errol Flynn stars as an upper-middle class businessman living a double life: his conventional, proper wife and mother-in-law have no idea that's he's secretly a detective novelist and amateur detective. Flynn's character is kind of a smug asshole. The kind of guy who isn't satisfied with running circles around the hapless police chief (Alan Hale); he has to be a jerk about it, get in Hale's face and make fun of him in front of his staff. Come to think of it, there's a touch of smug asshole in all Flynn's romantic comedies. It makes me wonder how much of that was the real him.

Plotwise the movie was enjoyable enough. The secret identity of the killer was completely obvious because a minor character with no apparent purpose in the movie was played by an actor too big for such a trivial part.

January 4 movie: Honeymoon for Three. Completely forgettable comedy starring Ann Sheridan and George Brent. In fact, I've already forgotten it.

It was a pretty good year for One Life to Live, at least from my point of view. My least favorite character in the history of the show, Antonio Vega, left. And they finally resolved the dead baby swap storyline. I really, really hated the fad for dead baby swaps, which All My Children and One Life have both done in the past couple of years. And the kookiest villain of all time, Mitch Lawrence, came back from the dead again.

Maybe I'm feeling optimistic about the show because of something that's happening right now: a groundbreaking gay romance. One Life has tried to do gay storylines before & have always mucked it up: the first time was notable just for being the first (and was a really long time ago, in the late 80s I think) and the gay character was a teen who was completely chaste, and the storyline was all about other people's homophobia, not so much about the gay kid himself. Then a few years ago they had a villain who was married to a core character and was secretly schtupping his teenage son's best friend. And he was a murderer. That was kind of a disaster.

This time I feel like they're doing it right. The couple, Kyle and Oliver, are treated like any other soap couple: the romance has built over the months, giving people a chance to get to know them and root for them; each one has a life & friends besides each other, so they're part of the whole canvas; they've faced obstacles which are wacky in that soap way, but not completely over the top (in that soap way).

Kyle and Oliver had their first love scene last week and it was just like any soap love scene. Candles in the room, cheesy music (they have their own theme song!), the whole thing. I didn't realize it was such a big deal but it was reported in Huffington Post and on Andrew Sullivan. Apparently it's the first gay love scene ever on daytime. (I thought for sure Bianca and Reese had had a love scene on All My Children, but maybe they just snuggled a lot.) This may sound corny but One Life is "my" soap, the one I will always keep tabs on. And I'm proud of my soap.

Behind the scenes, when All My Children moved to California, One Life inherited AMC's studio in New York. AMC's space is much bigger so I hope this will be a good change. The move is happening right around now and I don't know when episodes filmed in the new space will start to air. I don't expect we'll see a difference, except that maybe we'll start to see sets AMC left behind, redressed for One Life. We may also see some actors who declined to move with AMC showing up on One Life. I fear this means Patrick Thornheart, who I hated almost as much as Antonio, will come back. The actor just left AMC because he preferred to stay in NY with his wife, who plays Marty on One Life.

In 2009 there were 46-47 days (once it was unclear whether a new day had started or not). They had the following holidays: New Year's Eve, Valentine's Day, Halloween, Election Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve again.

Click here for the crazy goings-on in Llanview in 2009

January 4 movie: If I Had a Million. A dying millionaire who hates his family decides to give his money to eight random people, a million to each. This premise sets up a series of eight vignettes showing what people do when offered a million dollars.

The movie features tons of stars of the day: Gary Cooper, Charles Laughton, George Raft, W.C. Fields, Gene Raymond, May Robson, and Mary Boland among others. Each segment had a different director, including Ernst Lubitsch who directed the Charles Laughton segment, which is the shortest and maybe most effective of the bunch. It's uneven, as you would expect. My favorite segments were the funny ones where the new millionaires take revenge on people who had power over them in their old lives. In particular one with W.C. Fields and Alison Skipworth: they play a married couple who have saved their whole lives to buy a new car, which gets totaled on their first spin around the block. They buy a whole fleet of cars and hire drivers to follow them, so they can spend the entire day on the road seeking out "road hogs" to crash into.

Another favorite featured May Robson as the resident of a group old folks home which is run more like a prison. She uses the money to convert the facility into a fun, homey place for all the old ladies. Then she rehires all the staff, pays them a salary so high they don't want to leave, and then makes them sit in rocking chairs all day with nothing to do but rock silently. Revenge is sweet!

I also really enjoyed one of the not-funny ones, where the money goes to a prostitute. She checks into an expensive hotel and methodically puts away one of the pillows before going to bed: all she wants is to sleep in a nice, clean bed with only one pillow.

I think the show today went well! Surprisingly so considering how ill-prepared I was. All I did beforehand was make a list of all the theme shows & events from 2009, then made sure I had all the CDRs I'd made for those shows in my case. During the show today I just pulled up the flowsheets for all those shows, and picked out the songs I wanted to play. These were the theme shows I covered this afternoon:

• January: memorial tribute to Eartha Kitt
• January: interview with Sammy Davis impersonator
• January: "Latin a la Lounge" all Latin music
• February: memorial tribute to Blossom Dearie
• February: birthday tribute to Harold Arlen
• April: "Jungle Madness" all lounge/exotica
• May: birthday tribute to Bing Crosby
• May: Memorial Day
• June: birthday tribute to Richard Rodgers
• August: memorial tribute to Les Paul
• September: birthday tribute to Mel Torme
• October: "Let's Misbehave" all sweet dance band music
• November: birthday tribute to Hoagy Carmichael
• November: birthday tribute to Billy Strayhorn

The only themes I skipped today were the July 4th and Christmas shows, which I do every year. Ahh! I just remembered that I was going to promote 2010 and mention all the great theme shows I have planned for the upcoming year, and I totally forgot. Dang.

It's going to be a good year too, with theme shows for Valentine's Day, July 4, Halloween, and Christmas, plus birthday tributes to Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman, Dinah Washington, George Gershwin and Frank Sinatra. Plus I'm working on an interview with a lady who attended Duke in the 1940s and sang with Perry Como in the Duke Chapel. I hope that works out!

On air today from 2-6 pm, I'm planning a recap show with a set for each theme show I did during 2009. I didn't plan a flowsheet in advance, just going to wing it, which I may regret. Especially since I just found out one of the 3 CD players is randomly malfunctioning. It's never a dull moment at WXDU!

January 2 movie: Shalako. A Western starring Sean Connery and Brigitte Bardot? Why not?

Bardot plays a countess, part of a group of European big game hunters. Connery is a outlaw, and it's not specifically explained how a Scottish man got to be a wild west outlaw, but the movie begins with a title card of a quote from Louis L'Amour, saying that there were lots of Europeans who visited the Old West and that some of them stayed and became cowboys, outlaws and what-have-you. So there you go.

The plot is pure cliche. The European big game hunters are assholes who piss off the local Apache, and Connery tries to rescue them. The portrayal of the Apache is pretty bad. I was expecting that a movie made in 1968 would be a little more even-handed -- heck, John Ford made movies in the 40s which portrayed Native Americans as rational people with three whole dimensions -- but no. The Apaches in Shalako are unstoppable killing machines and sadistic monsters. Except the chief, who can't speak English in his first scene, and then can by the end of the movie.

The best thing I can say about Shalako is that I predicted an ending which turned out not to happen. So I can't say it was totally predictable. Also, there's a topless love scene between Connery and Bardot. Which is nothing to sneeze at.

January 1 movie: Rollerball. First movie of 2010! The first time I saw this, I hated it. Now I think I was being a bit too harsh. Well, just a little. It's still a deeply flawed film. The non-sports scenes are talky and boring, and the ideas driving the plot, which should be thought-provoking, are so vague and poorly developed that it just doesn't come together. Still, a movie that fails to execute good ideas is better than a movie with no ideas. (I think.)

My main criticism of the movie, on this second viewing, is that the movie can't help but glorify the violence it's trying to condemn. You know that saying that there's no such thing as an anti-war movie?* That's exactly the problem with Rollerball. Before the movie started Robert Osbourne said that when a group of investors contacted Norman Jewison about starting a real-life Rollerball league, he was appalled that people had misunderstood his movie so badly. After watching it last night I wondered, why was he surprised? The Rollerball scenes were the only part of the movie worth watching.

On the bright side? Well, it's pretty interesting that it only took 35 years for the science fictional dystopia of Rollerball to seem almost commonplace. Right right, our corporate overlords use violent entertainment to work out any aggression in the population so we'll remain docile and conformist. Bread and circuses, Society of the Spectacle, I get it already. John Houseman's corporate master seems almost benign today. I mean, he's not eating people; he just wants them to do what they're told. So the movie was worth it just to see how fast things have changed (or maybe what I mean is, how cynical I've become). And the Rollerball scenes are well filmed, exciting and easy to follow, especially for a made-up sport.

*if you've ever seen Stalingrad you know that saying is false.

I really regret letting the movie list go in 2009. Not only did I stop posting about movies, I even stopped keeping track for two weeks in December. And now I have no idea how many movies I saw. The list (minus those two weeks) has 323 movies. So I'm going to guess the total was somewhere under 350.

Because so many months went by without writing up movies, I'm going to post the whole list. here. Behind a cut, because it's really long. This is my unedited list; here and there are notes on alternate titles, shorts which appeared along with the movie, and quotes which I found amusing and would have included in my write-up, if I hadn't been such a slack-ass and had actually written up the movies.

click here for a very long list which reveals my embarrassing appetite for cheap entertainment

One last thing from the NY trip: on the way back to the ferry, on the subway, we saw a young couple who barely spoke English being given directions by a young family (couple and sleeping toddler). Lots of gesturing and pointing. As it happened we think the directions were wrong -- I heard the New Yorker tell the tourist, "you can get off here with us and walk for five blocks, or you can go one more stop and get off at Fulton Street," and the next stop wasn't Fulton St -- but close enough that we felt pretty confident they would find wherever they were going.

Not a big deal, just a nice little moment. And a far cry from the last trip, when we saw a young tourist couple who barely spoke English being dragged out of the subway car by 5 cops for daring to take photos of the station. (Which is legal.) I still think about those people & wonder what happened to them. They had backpacks and walking shoes and they looked so harmless, and so scared. Welcome to New York!

A few people have asked me about learning to make knitted and crocheted toys. And in general, they are much easier than they look. For me they are much, much easier than sweaters and scarves. Because my problem is having a short attention span. So I'd much rather make a toy that I can finish in a day or two, even having to learn new stitches, than a sweater which I will never finish.

Of the knitted amigurumi I've made, if I were starting as a beginner I would make the cherry pie first. It's done on regular sized needles, and the only new technique is the bobble, for which the pattern provides nice photo instructions. A real beginner could make the crust first and then they would have gotten some practice in before trying the bobble.

If I were comfortable with double-pointed needles, I'd start with the slug. (Probably because I did, that was the first amigurumi I made.) It's simple and made in one piece with almost no sewing. So it's a good way to learn a few key techniques like short rows and how to increase without making a hole. The only reason I wouldn't recommend it to a super-beginner is the first few rows, when you only have a few stitches on the double-pointed needles, are kind of fiddly.

For crochet, they were all equally easy. Well, that's not strictly true. The katamari was a bit more difficult because the pattern said to crochet as tightly as possible, so the weight of the magnets couldn't pull it out of shape. And I ended up crocheting so tightly I couldn't get the hook through the stitches. It took a while for me to get a feel for the right gauge. But anyway, the point is that crochet is really not hard to do. There just aren't any difficult techniques, so a beginner can start with anything they like.

If you don't know how to knit or crochet at all and you want to make amigurumi, there are some terrific sites with instructional photos and videos. Or I have a great knitting book called Reader's Digest Knitting Handbook, maybe we can have an amigurumi party and I'll bring the book! It really, honestly doesn't matter if you've never made anything more complicated than a scarf before. Any stitch or technique you don't know, you can google and find either photo or video instructions. (I personally prefer photos to videos because I'm left handed and everything I do is the mirror image of what most people do. I have to translate the instructions, and that's easier for me to do with a photo. Videos go by too fast.)

As for me, I have a few more presents to make, and I need to make a hat for myself while it's still winter. And then I think I'm going to try some more challenging toys. I found a pattern designer on ravelry.com with some really complex, realistic patterns for sea creatures like octopus and angler fish. And maybe I will try designing a pattern of my own!

Why, oh why do I read Dear Prudence? Her advice is frequently terrible, and when called on it her response is belligerent. This week's Best and Worst of Dear Prudence in 2009 is a case in point. It's not at all a list of best and worst columns; instead it's a list of columns which her readers are stupid for disagreeing with. She does this every year. You'd think by now she would have gotten over knee-jerk defensiveness and would be willing to acknowledge the occasional mistake. But if you thought that, you'd be wrong.

Maybe I need to make a New Year's resolution to stop reading Dear Prudence.* On some level I'm still incredulous that they replaced Margo Howard with this judgmental bore.

*funny aside, throughout this post I have been typoing it as "Dear Produce" and having to correct myself.

The other thing I did on my vacation was knitting! And crochet. I made presents instead of buying this year. I made:

Two slugs: Sluggie and Sluggo. As you can see, Sluggie made friends with Sholem Aleichem in his new home.

An alien, who is basically the same as the slug, with extra eyes.

Another zombie! For this one I added a dangling arm and exposed viscera. Also I made the blood drips out of the thick cotton yarn, rather than embroidery floss, so it would show up better. I skipped the hair and necktie so he wouldn't look cluttered.

An immaculate heart. It was a gift for Santa Salsera, and we gave it to her on the day of the Virgin of Guadalupe festival. Timing is everything!

The Prince and the katamari from Katamari Damacy. The katamari has magnets inside so it picks things up.

A pair of wiener dogs for my sister who, coincidentally, has a pair of mini dachshunds.

A slice of cherry pie. This was maybe the easiest because it was made on regular size needles. Most of these toys are knitted on extra small needles so the gauge will be small and the stuffing won't leak out. It makes it a little harder to knit them, in fact the tip of my index finger is still a little sore from poking the needle through on decreases.

A Cthulhu. Funny story: I wanted to make this for my brother-in-law, and there's this awesome book Creepy Cute Crochet with lots of amigurumi patterns including Cthulhu. And I tried to get the book out of the library, but it was out constantly. I guess because everyone was making Christmas presents just like me. Since I couldn't get the book I had to wing it. I used the same shape as the zombie and I guessed at the tentacles. And then on Christmas day, when I gave him the Cthulhu, he gave me Creepy Cute Crochet! I thought maybe Georg had told him to get it for me but no, he came up with it on his own. What synchronicity.

A fat cat and mousie. The mouse is made with an angora blend so it's nice and soft.

Finally the piece de resistance, a Flying Spaghetti Monster. I gave it to my dad, and that's his Richard Dawkins book behind it in the photo. The person who created this pattern is a damned genius. The meatballs alone are amazing: perfectly round and they have a texture that makes them look almost like real meatballs. Pipe cleaners make some of the noodly appendages posable. The FSM would have taken forever to make, except I bought an "Embellish Knit" cord-knitting machine which speeded things up considerably.

I'm getting a jump start on one of my New Year's resolutions: to post regularly in my blog again. Starting with today's entry, What I Did On My Christmas Vacation.

We drove. Traffic was bad on the way up to Delaware before Christmas, easy up to Staten Island on Christmas Day, and a slice of hell coming home yesterday. Some of the worst traffic I have ever seen. It was so bad that eventually we pulled out the map and left I-95, and found the state road just as backed up. Probably it was full of other people fleeing 95 just like us. We expected to get home about 8:30 and actually got in just before midnight.

We saw snow! Both Delaware and Staten Island had had heavy snowfalls a few days before we got there -- 17 inches in DE! -- and there was still plenty of snow on the ground when we arrived. It got warm and rainy and all melted off while we were up there, but still. That was the first "white Christmas" I've seen since I can remember.

We ate Sri Lankan food. It's a lot like Indian, with a lot of coconut. Apparently there's a Sri Lankan community on Staten Island. (For those nearby, the Sri Lankan restaurants are all together on Victory, in walking distance of the ferry.) The place we went to, called Dosa Garden, served mostly Indian with a Sri Lankan page at the back of the menu. I read on chowhound that they specialize in dosas. Thus the name, I suppose. We had pittu, cakes of dark brown rice with coconut, served with hot spiced coconut milk. And chicken kothu roti, which was chicken, onion and a dosa, all chopped together and sauteed, and served with sambal. We didn't realize the chicken had a dosa in it, so we also got a dosa. I'm pleased to report that the dosa at Spice & Curry or Green Leaf are just as good as at Dosa Garden in NY. Go Triangle!

We saw Sita Sings the Blues on the big screen at the IFC center in Manhattan. We didn't spend much time in the city; just rode the ferry in, went up to the movie theater, then took the ferry back to Staten Island. We spent way more time in transit than we did at the movie, which must be breaking some kind of rule of city life. I didn't mind, it was great to see the movie like that (even with the Amazing Talking Audience, this time perpetrated by two chatty old ladies who I think knew the director somehow). And just walking to and from the subway we got to see a few blocks of Manhattan.

We learned that lots of New Yorkers have the same gripe with the iPhone map that we did: you can't fine tune the directions, for instance it may try to put you on a bus and you can't make it give you subway directions instead. So it's very frustrating if you know basically what you want to do but can't remember some detail, like the location of the subway stop (or the exit number you want off the turnpike, and it keeps sending you a different way). On the bright side, the phone has the subway schedule with times, which was a big help. And it even has rudimentary drawings of buildings -- just the basic shapes -- which I think would be really really useful if I were lost in the city.

We went back to the Russian grocery near Georg's mom's house. There must be a sizeable Russian community on Staten Island because the store is a full sized supermarket. At least as big as the Red & White on Club & Roxboro in Durham. We went once before and didn't buy anything, I just took photos. This time we had a cooler so we stocked up. We bought:

• cheese pierogies (the sign said pierogies but the receipt calls them "vareniki with farmer cheese")
• pork & beef dumplings
• lamb dumplings (the receipt says "manti handmade 10 pieces")
• lithuanian cheese (the receipt says "kastromskoy"). We have no idea what it's going to taste like, there was a whole case of cheese named after former Soviet countries & we picked one at random.
• fresh crepes and farmer cheese to make blintzes. They had a wide variety of farmer's cheese, many of them labeled "Amish." Are the Amish known for farmer's cheese? They also had a huge variety of yogurt, kefir and feta cheese. We didn't buy any because we can get all that back home (even the same brands of yogurt).
• a couple of items from the amazing wall of sausage If you count bologna there had to be 50 different kinds. We got "kielbasa moskovskaya" which I guess means Moscow-style kielbasa. And a little tube of goose liver pate.
• a couple of teas for a friend who always serves tea to his guests & clients, and I think he will have fun offering people Russian tea. We got chamomile and one called "linden" on the signage and receipt, but "lime" on the tiny English-language sticker on the box. The picture on the box doesn't look at all like lime. Who knows what it actually is.
• a package of bialys. Which aren't Russian at all, but we always bring bialys back from NY and we didn't have time to go to a bakery.

We also looked at these beautiful frozen cakes with lots of layers, but decided that if we were getting the blintzes, we didn't need cake too. And we skipped the horseradish soda because we only wanted to buy things we genuinely wanted to eat. I do have a desire to try horseradish soda, but they only sell a big bottle. And besides, I don't even like regular soda very much.

While I was browsing the teas, trying to figure out what to get for my friend, a short, rotund old lady kind of pushed me out of the way (no physical contact was made but she definitely took over the space) and started grabbing boxes of tea while muttering to herself in Russian. It sounded like she was reminding herself of the kinds of tea to get. Mostly she got rose hip. She must have taken 6 boxes. It was kind of cute. I guess she really needed tea.

Winter has finally arrived here. Of course it's a typical NC winter -- it was about 45° yesterday, and today is supposed to be close to 70°. Which I like better, actually, than unrelenting cold.

I put up most of the outside decorations on Monday. Well, the lights on the porch were easy. They get left in place all year; all I had to do was find a new extension cord (the plug on the old one had gotten mashed & wasn't usable anymore). Then I put up the tree: we have a 6' white tree we put on the porch every year. No room for it inside the house, and it looks nice from the road with all the lights on it.

Sad to say, every year the hardest part of putting up the tree is cleaning the porch. It's amazing how much stuff collects in there. I got everything pulled out, threw away a bunch of stuff, sorted the rest into piles on the front lawn, then got the tree out of the shed, put it together and put the lights on it. The porch is small and there's not quite enough room to move around comfortably when the tree is set up, so I have to be careful when I'm going around and around, winding the lights around the tree.

I made the same mistake I always make -- start at the bottom and end up with more lights on the lower branches than at the top. The problem is that, when you're standing on the porch, the top of the tree seems to be hidden by the roof overhang. Because of that, I usually convince myself that there's no need for many lights on the top. But the house is kind of up a hill. So that to someone on the road, the top of the tree is completely visible while the lower branches are out of view. Which I discovered when I walked down to the road to see how it looked.

I went back and moved a bunch of lights up. There are still some gaps near the top, but it's good enough. You'd think I'd remember that from year to year. Maybe I should write myself a note and leave it in the light holder thing. (We have this nice zippered thing that holds four spools of lights.)

By the time I got the lights rearranged it was getting dark & I just managed to get all the porch stuff put back before it got too dark to work. Whew! I'm glad I did it Monday, when it was chilly, rather than Tuesday when it was super cold and raining too. Today would have been bad too since the ground is all wet.

We've been converting to LED lights, buying some on sale after Christmas each year. And I think this was the first year we had enough to do the entire porch with LEDs. I'm really happy that we switched to LED lights, they use so much less electricity. Though I confess, I miss the brightness of the old lights. They used to light up the porch almost as much as if we had the overhead light on. That tree would positively glow, and it looked really nice with the colored lights on the white tree. Now the LEDs are so subdued that you can't really tell it's a white tree from the road. You can make out the tree shape from the lights, that's all. Then again, with LEDs you can safely string way more together. So we can add more lights if we want to brighten it up.

We still have to put the big star lights down front by the road (and we may need another extension cord since I had to use one of the big ones for the tree), and decorate inside. We don't have room for a full sized tree in the house, so we always put up a fresh pine garland between the living room and dining room and hang ornaments and lights on it. Plus we have two small tinsel trees for the coffee table and dining table. (Yes, we have three christmas trees. I don't know when I stopped being a total grinch and got so into Christmas decorating.)

You know, we rearranged the living room furniture earlier this year and we might actually have room for a tree inside now. I'm looking at a spot where a small tree might fit. I think it would. It would be hard to use the front door though. Hmm.