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Chilly Christmas weekend
Dec. 27th, 2022 08:32 pmI took off work on Friday (and got off Monday since Sunday was Christmas), and Z and I drove to my parents' place for the weekend. It started off very pleasant and clear, but it soon became Driving Hard Mode: Variety Pack, as we faced down:
But we made it! A few hours after my mom informed me that they'd lost all heat :D :D :D They only just got it back.
Thankfully, unlike many other people around the country last weekend, they still had power, and they also have a wood-burning stove in the sunroom. So after someone came around to look at the heater and order a replacement part, we spent most of the weekend around either the fireplace or the space heater my dad picked up the next day. It never got quite as disastrously cold as it would get in my old apartment when the heat failed, where I once woke up to ice on my kitchen floor where my laundry had dripped overnight.
My mom watched The Wizard of Oz with us - I hadn't seen it in forever, and for all the (literal) pain that those costumes were for the actors, they at least looked great, even today. I'd forgotten there were that many songs in it (still have the Tin Man's one stuck in my head), and I loved Dorothy's courage; she might be terribly frightened of that wizard, but if he's mean to her friends, he's still getting called out! Z and I spent a lot of the rest of the weekend under a blanket watching documentaries about science fraud and science politics and the history of fungi and whatnot.
For Christmas, my parents got Z a box full of Filipino snacks. It was so cute watching him go through them and spot childhood favorites we don't have in our local Asian grocery :D I found him about the only tableya chocolate you can find in this country, and I also replaced his broken phone case with a new one... after painting a little orange cat on it 😊 I received some flower seeds for the shady part of the garden, and Z got me custom-printed merch featuring my D&D character with the art I've made :D (I was wondering why he was asking for those pictures....) And there were many other things to eat and drink going around.
Unfortunately, there wasn't time to meet up with my friend S, but we did have lunch with B before we hit the road back home - which featured zero rain, snow, ice, windstorms, or salt pellets, just traffic. There was one car that drove by us that had a giant menorah fastened to the roof, and we passed a shipping truck where all the reflectors had a dog emblem on them.
I was back to work today, although so many people are out at various times for the next couple of weeks that it's very quiet. Will probably spend a lot of time working on a paper and going through training. I did find out that I may be visiting in person in March or so to help present our work at a local university, which I'm looking forward to.
- Extremely heavy rain
- Sleet that turned into snow with a ton of fog
- High winds shoving Z's lightweight car around
- A highway salter that merged in ahead of us, and we couldn't change lanes, so the poor car got pelted with salt
But we made it! A few hours after my mom informed me that they'd lost all heat :D :D :D They only just got it back.
Thankfully, unlike many other people around the country last weekend, they still had power, and they also have a wood-burning stove in the sunroom. So after someone came around to look at the heater and order a replacement part, we spent most of the weekend around either the fireplace or the space heater my dad picked up the next day. It never got quite as disastrously cold as it would get in my old apartment when the heat failed, where I once woke up to ice on my kitchen floor where my laundry had dripped overnight.
My mom watched The Wizard of Oz with us - I hadn't seen it in forever, and for all the (literal) pain that those costumes were for the actors, they at least looked great, even today. I'd forgotten there were that many songs in it (still have the Tin Man's one stuck in my head), and I loved Dorothy's courage; she might be terribly frightened of that wizard, but if he's mean to her friends, he's still getting called out! Z and I spent a lot of the rest of the weekend under a blanket watching documentaries about science fraud and science politics and the history of fungi and whatnot.
For Christmas, my parents got Z a box full of Filipino snacks. It was so cute watching him go through them and spot childhood favorites we don't have in our local Asian grocery :D I found him about the only tableya chocolate you can find in this country, and I also replaced his broken phone case with a new one... after painting a little orange cat on it 😊 I received some flower seeds for the shady part of the garden, and Z got me custom-printed merch featuring my D&D character with the art I've made :D (I was wondering why he was asking for those pictures....) And there were many other things to eat and drink going around.
Unfortunately, there wasn't time to meet up with my friend S, but we did have lunch with B before we hit the road back home - which featured zero rain, snow, ice, windstorms, or salt pellets, just traffic. There was one car that drove by us that had a giant menorah fastened to the roof, and we passed a shipping truck where all the reflectors had a dog emblem on them.
I was back to work today, although so many people are out at various times for the next couple of weeks that it's very quiet. Will probably spend a lot of time working on a paper and going through training. I did find out that I may be visiting in person in March or so to help present our work at a local university, which I'm looking forward to.
