Snow and Christmas

[Hana]

Hehe, he said erecting.That was weird. I was reading Dwip's post and somehow thought it was Conner's, and as he went on about Christmas I thought "but you're Jewish?". lol. Must have been the length of the post. Love that outside shot of the surrounding of trees. Could you wrap one up and send it to me?Someone buy Conner a calendar, because that's a serious amount of events happening in short spans. *wonders if he knew those dates from memory or not*My family Christmas tradition includes a draw for all the adults in the immediate family, so that we're only buying for one, and can expect to receive at least one surprise gift (as in not the things you tell the kids to get you). Of course, those under 18 all still get bought for. Then we have an extended family get-together sometime in Dec. for dinner at a restaurant, just to make it a point to see the family. We didn't get to do that this year though Bad weather canceled it as a precaution for the out-of-town travelers.

[Conner]

Thanks, Hana, you know Dwip's been known to outpost me for sheer length of post and quantity of content before... :PAnd, yes, those were the events that I could remember dates for. Dragona just reminded me that her other sister's birthday is in August and her two brothers are January and June, so I guess we don't even have August event free either. :shrug:On the other hand, if someone wants to send us a free calendar, I'll be happy to provide you a mailing address... ;)Sorry to hear that you missed out on the reunion this year, we actually are missing ours this year too but basically because we can't afford the gas to travel to New Mexico or DC, let alone both, this time. Instead, my sister and niece are coming to visit us in a few days (for a few days) and Dragona's uncle dropped by to visit with us for the day yesterday, and of course we always try to stay in touch with all the family by phone, IM, email, etc most of the time anyway, and my wife and most of the rest of the crowd (from both sides) are on Facebook.

[Dwip]

Conner is the most verbose of us, ayup.And alas, I can't wrap up my house and send it, or I'd send it to myself. I can show more shiny Christmas type pictures, though:Neighbor's House (shot by Dad, who actually knows what to do with a camera)Our House (in the middle of our clearing, our house)Front Yard (same stuff as the other pic, now with scenic snowed-over burn pile)

[Conner]

I'm the most verbose of us? This coming from Dwip who can write a wall of text too long for even Samson's attention span.... :PShe didn't ask for your house, just one of your trees. ;)Nice pictures, Dwip. Love seeing all the snow... "(in the middle of our clearing, our house)" reminds me of a song... Our house, in the middle of our street

[Hana]

That song popped right into my head too :lol:But wow, pictures right off of a postcard. Will your parents adopt me?I have now stolen Dwip's front yard and it will live happily on my desktop until spring, when I will give it back.

[Dwip]

@Conner - You do it more consistently than I do, see.And why do you think I wrote that line that way? (I hate that song, too)@Hanaisse - Chances are good. They've adopted everyone else I know practically, so. OTOH, they're going to try to sell the house next year, so, uh.

[Conner]

Great song, isn't it? Aren't you a bit old for adoption? Well, at least someone appreciates it besides Dwip's family then, eh?

[Tommy]

Dwip (or his parents rather) has a lot of Chirstmas trees growing in the garden!! :lol:You've got HUGE snow there in these pictures.Big Thanks BTW for the book tips!! I'll write the titles down. Spontaneously, the one about the Medieval civilization stirs my interest the most.@Conneryou make me laugh. Could it be that even President Obama does not have a tighter schedule in a year? I got the impression yours are in constant state of festivity. But that's some fun thing in having a big, branched out family. You auto-create a lot of festive events. Hahaaa. Well, we are not so many. Father was a single child and passed away long time ago, brother is pretty recently divorced, sister's husband's family are only hubbie and his sister and their dad; mom passed away there too.... with kids and all we only can scrap together about 12 people... This year we are joined by a very good friend of my sister's. She is actually an American from Wisconsin been living and working in Zurich for a long time already. I like her a lot. I don't see her often but she's very good sports to have around. The only thing that bugs me is that this year, Christmas and New Year are all falling on the weekends and tomorrow we are still working half the day which effectively always ends up being 1 or 2 pm then heading home getting ready for the early evening... little time only.... And here we have the custom that if a holiday falls on a Saturday or Sunday, we do not get say either Friday or Monday off in compensation. Nope, this is just bad luck for us Swiss then. And we had a lot of that this year. I think we overall worked 6 days more because of holiday-bad-luck than what we would be "entitled" to... hopefully next year is a bit better in this regard.

[Dwip]

22 acres or thereabouts. Area looks like this, and keep in mind the brown patches are either freshly tilled or fallow christmas tree farms. There are worse places to live for scenery.Funny thing about the snow - that's one of the highest amounts we had this decade. Used to be like that every winter in the 80s, but dropped to almost nothing in the 90s. Now it's back to moderately heavy. It's a couple miles out of town, which makes getting out fun sometimes. Not much in the way of plowing.As to the books, I like Cantor a fair bit, although he's necessarily overbroad in places - the whole middle ages is a big topic. He's one of the standard texts on the period for college undergrads, though. Grant is a standard Roman text, a bit dated now, but wonderfully readable. I first picked him up when I was 16, and go back from time to time for the writing. The Norwich book on Byzantium is part of a trilogy, 1500 pages or so ultimately, but he's a wonderful writer with a good eye and sense of humor for his subject, an English lord dabbling in history in the very finest tradition of such things, and I highly recommend reading anything by him you can get your hands on.For myself, my light Christmastime reading is apparently Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, in which I am apparently about to break my record of not making it past chapter 4. Alternately, a very interesting book by Juliet Barker on Agincourt which languished for far too long on my to read shelf, considering the excellent quality of the writing.One of these days, on the whole Christianity subject, I have really got to find a good history of the papacy as an institution. Right after I get through these other 13 or 15 books or whatever. I have a reading problem.This post brought to you by the Oregon State University Department of History, who if they didn't quite create it, definitely helped shape me into the ridiculous history nerd I am today.

[prettyfly]

Maybe I should put up an image of what my place looks like at Christmas for comparison...Anyway, I've been going through some history books lately too. Particularly the history of Israel, having several conflicting views to look at makes things a lot more interesting.

[Conner]

Dwip, I missed your previous post. Yeah, apparently I do post verbosely more often than you if Hana thought she was reading my post because of the length of yours. I really thought you and I were pretty well balanced in that regard. :sigh: Basically it's all about wanting to respond to everything I'd missed between posts. Tommy, I actually have a fairly small immediate family without my in-laws or children and so on, my thing is that I have a large extended family (Dad had two sisters who had two and three kids, respectively. Mom had two sisters, who each had five kids, and a brother who had a kid as well. We definitely don't want to get into extended family even beyond that, but I am in touch with second and third cousins too.) and a bunch of children (between three marriages) and my wife's the eldest of five kids and of them all three girls are already married with kids of their own and the older of the two boys is already engaged, plus she's got a huge extended family too.. and I won't even get into the extended families of my ex-wives and such. As for my own original immediate family, I was the baby of three kids and my oldest sister passed away a few years ago without children and my other sister only has one daughter. Suffice it to say, while it's not always nearly as festive as it sounds (and certainly can get as expensive as you might imagine), it definitely gives us events for the calendar all year long. (Speaking of calendars, Hana, we generally use Airset for our calendar because we can have a bunch of different calendars to track different things and just have them overlay each other with different folks (or groups of folks) having varying levels of access to the calendars that we want them to be a part of while other calendars they don't even need to know exist. The downside to this arrangement is that Airset was free when we started using it and let us sync it to our palm pilots and cell phones for free as often as we wanted but fairly recently Airset went to a pay model that no longer allows free syncing so we happen to actually be in the market for a new calendar site if you happen to know of any.)Since you shared, Dwip, here's my house on Google, unfortunately, when this picture was taken our house wasn't there yet, nor was our chicken coop or our two ponds, but... Eventually Google's maps will catch up. Prettyfly, pics of my place at Christmas time might not be so impressive, we so rarely get snow here, though last year we did get some, but not enough to even make our cows worry about where their grass had gone. :lol:I take it that you're not talking about the history of Israel just since 1957 then?

[Hana]

Online calendar? Pah. I do it the old fashioned way - write it down in the little square of a calendar you hang up. :lol:All this talk about extended families and history reminds me that in the new year I really must seriously get back to tracing my family tree. As the size of one's family dwindles more and more knowledge and tradition is lost. In today's disconnected age I feel this is important stuff my kids need to know.Slightly off topic but hey, you guys do it

[Conner]

The problem with the old fashioned paper calendars that you just write everything down on is that it's really hard to share that calendar with family members who live thousands of miles away whereas with an online calendar I can put things like our work scheduled and personal appointments on one calendar that only my wife and I see (like all our cousins need to know when her next OB/GYN appointment is, right?) and I can put holidays and birthdays and anniversaries on a different calendar that everyone sees and stuff like the kids' dentist appointments and such on a third calendar that everyone who wants to see it can view and each person sees only the calendar events from the calendars they have access to on their own calendar with each of the other calendars acting as overlays. (I also have another calendar that's set up for stuff related to my mud that my mud staff all have access to, for example.)I definitely agree about the worthiness of doing a family tree, I've been working on ours since '98 or so and what I've got so far is pretty extensive but really only goes back a few generations at this point so I'm always looking to take it further when I can.Meh, I certainly wouldn't worry too much about it, this topic split because we sidetracked from your topic to discuss Christmas and such and so far the topic as a whole seems to have drifted toward family and how each of our families deal with the holidays and such.

[Tommy]

A little bit of off-topic from the off-topic is quite alright I'd say! :)So prettyfly in down-under is probably the first of us to unpack the presents very soon. I will follow suit in a couple of hours, and just I wanted to visit here quickly to wish you all a very Merry Christmas, lots of good spirit, laughter, fun, friendship, food and drink. :biggrin:Cheers!And thanks for having me.

[prettyfly]

Amen to that. Just nine hours to go for me... :grinning:

[Conner]

Back atcha Tommy, and we're quite glad to have you along for the party here. :)So, right about now then, eh prettyfly?

[prettyfly]

@ Conner...you were fifteen minute off, not bad eh?

[Conner]

Oh man! *snap* I was off...