This and that

This fall, I decided I had too much food stored in the house, a gave myself a challenge to buy no more than $10 per week in groceries. This worked, in so far as I spent about $6/week for new food. And I ate up half my pantry, but the freezer was still packed. The problem being, of course, that I am only one, somewhat small, person, and I can't eat that much. I took a break during Thanksgiving and Christmas, but now it's back on the budget bandwagon for me. I'll report back in March, or whenever I give up.
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The bathroom installation proceeds slowly but steadily. My father is an amazing general contractor. He's always thinking ahead four steps. At first, this drove me a bit crazy, because I thought, "We don't have to worry about that part yet!" but now I realize that he talks through the process repeatedly, and thereby improves his plans each time. This trip alone we changed several decisions, and I had the opportunity to learn that Home Depot will, in fact, accept a returned toilet even if its packaging has been opened. I forsee that I'll be standing in return lines throughout the year, and have now organized my many receipts into a project binder. It's kind of fun to go old school - I haven't used a three-hole punch in about a decade.
The picture shows my father cutting out my stack pipe. This vents the air in your drains into the great outdoors so that your drains whisk away the liquids quietly. When my house was built, 70 years ago, these pipes were made of cast iron, so cutting it up (twice, because it was too heavy and long to remove in one piece) was a huge ordeal. But it's gone and replaced with PVC, with a location to hook in the new bathroom drain now.
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I signed up for a MOOC Spanish course. Not only is this useful for my language skills, but I also have a professional interest in MOOCs. They are all the rage in academia right now - will they destroy universities as we know them? Will they every make a dime in profit? It'll be interesting to experience it from the student perspective, and I'll do my best to make sure that I'm not part of the average 85% of enrollees that drop out before finishing.

Holidays

Merry Christmas from a DC suburb! Due to the usual multiple-family tetris that the holidays are, my extended family celebrated a few days ago. I spent the days leading up to the festivities touring DC (pro tip: the holiday lights at the zoo are free, but you will not actually see any animals when it is night), taking the kids to the playground, and talking plumbing with my Dad.

     My brother and his family left this morning, and my parents are staying for a few more days. I absolutely love my family, but hanging out with seven people almost every day was a lot for little ole introverted me. I am looking forward to some quiet at the end of the week. Since I'm still exhausted from all this socializing, some photos:

 Ada looking dashing in her Christmas bow.

 For Christmas dinner, we had homemade fettuccine (which the kids helped make), Italian sausage meatballs and paneer/nut meatballs, a red sauce, green beans, and cheesecake. This had something for everyone but meant I didn't spend all day in the kitchen.

Molly the cat is fourteen years old, but this was her first Christmas. She also received her first ever toy. You might think that a ball in a tray would not measure up to the real live mice she used to catch, but she went crazy for it. I will have to hide this every night because the sound of the ball rolling in its tray at two am will make me bonkers.

I managed to create a separate scavenger hunt for each kid, so that the gift under the tree was just the first clue to the hunt. Surely I must be nominated for an Aunt of the Year award for this.

Winter

     It has finally started to feel like winter, and there is even the chance of snow this weekend. I'm not quite ready for fall to be over, because I haven't raked up all my leaves and if I admit winter has arrived then I'm a delinquent home owner.
     My winter wardrobe is complete, though. I keep trying to maintain a minimalist wardrobe, which for me means about seven work outfits and two DIY (i.e. blue jeans and paint-splattered shirts) outfits, with everything else packed away in the basement. I made a wool skirt last year and I was so pleased with it that I made another one this year. I'm modeling it in this picture, which I can thank my Spanish tutor for. (When he's not helping me with his Spanish, he's working on his photography business.)
     The other sign of the season is my Christmas party. As usual, I'm throwing a big, formal, dress-up party. This has involved two weeks of decorating and cooking, and it all culminates on Saturday. This time the wow-the-attendees menu item is samosas. I'm planning to fry them all in the morning and reheat right before serving. I might be a semi-professional hostess, but I draw the line at trying to deep-fry in a silk evening gown.

Español

I took three years of Spanish in college and got good enough to read newspaper articles. Then twenty years passed and I forgot nearly everything. Since my house is in a Spanish-speaking neighborhood, I started thinking about brushing up on those language skills when I moved in. But it wasn't until June, when I met my now-Spanish tutor that I actually started practicing.
      I got the push I needed when I went to a meetup and met someone who wasn't completely fluent in English. In Germany this is a thing: you find a "Tandem Partner" and meet to spend half the time working on their foreign language and half the time working on yours. I love this model, because you only need to feel stupid half the time. Luckily, when I proposed this to the person I had just met, he didn't think it was crazy.
     Meeting weekly to work on a language is just enough to remind you how much you have to learn. But I've been newly inspired by an old college friend who reminded me what I good language student I had been. And I thought, "That's right, I'm someone who studies hard!" Index card flashcards and writing vocabulary words ten times each is now passe, but I'm loving all the language apps out there. I still feel like all I do is remember how much I have to learn, but I have high hopes of moving into the intermediate level during the coming year.